ABSTRACT
One of the key arguments of this book has been that London, like other global cities, has experienced a shift from an industrial to a post-industrial economy since the mid-1960s. This has had major consequences for the nature of work and the structure of occupations as manual jobs in manufacturing have been replaced by non-manual jobs in financial and business services and the cultural industries. This shift has also been associated with a change in production requirements and type of workplace. Factories are no longer needed, whereas modern office space is (Coupland, 1992a). In addition, changes in transport and communications technology have rendered rail goods yards, canals, wharves and docks redundant. Large parts of the older physical infrastructure of cities which were crucial for production and distribution in the industrial era are no longer needed in the post-industrial era and have fallen into decay and dereliction (Savitch,
1988). Conversely, the growth of London’s role as a financial and business centre has seen the rapid expansion of the City of London and the emergence of new ‘landscapes of financial power’, such as Canary Wharf (Zukin, 1992), as finance capital has overtaken industrial capital in importance and the requirements for space and built form have changed. As Ball (1994) points out: ‘Buildings are the spaces within which much of all economic activity takes place so alterations in those basic economic characteristics fundamentally influence the demand for buildings’ (p. 672).
