ABSTRACT
Our book has been written at a time of tremendous economic and political uncertainty. In Chapter 7 we saw that during the late 1970s and early 1980s in the capitalist economies of the global north, the golden age of post-1945 economic growth – known as Fordism – faltered. For many local and regional economies, such as the steel towns of the industrial Midwest of the US, this was experienced as deindustrialization. Once thriving industrial cities saw plants shuttered as the ‘Rustbelt’ emerged. Yet while much of the US Northeast and Midwest was marked by economic decline, the 1980s saw the growth of a series of new industrial spaces characterized by innovation and prosperity. Silicon Valley serves as the classic example. The period provides an illustration of the thoroughly dynamic nature of economic geographies. Such changes gave rise to new ways of seeking to describe and account for them. It is likely that the current conjuncture will similarly serve to prompt fresh analyses.
