ABSTRACT
Over the 1970s and 1980s, long-established models of urban development and spatial structure derived from the concept of the industrial city articulated by the Chicago School’s practitioners were comprehensively subverted by far-reaching industrial restructuring processes. The spatial configuration of the postindustrial city incorporated a markedly asymmetrical core, comprising a high-growth central business district (CBD) corporate office complex, and terrains of disinvestment and deindustrialization within the CBD fringe and inner city.1 The collapse of Fordist production and related employment, and the rise of an urban postindustrial social class (Bell 1973), constituted essential preconditions for gentrification and its dislocations within inner city communities. While industrial restructuring was not confined to the central city, the core served as the defining locus of fundamental change in the metropolis, giving rise to an extended urban policy crisis and a trilogy of influential theories: postindustrialism, post-Fordism, and postmodernism. These theories have been vigorously contested on polemical, theoretical and empirical grounds, but each served to influence a generation of urban scholars and principal lines of urban research and policy studies.2
