ABSTRACT
This essay is concerned with the changing geography of intra-urban industrial activity, that is with the changing locations secured by industrial establishments in cities and the different spatial patterns their aggregate behaviour creates. Despite the dominance and increasing importance of the service sector in cities-accounting for almost 68 per cent of employment in the UK conurbations in 1976 (Danson et al., 1980)—the emphasis here will be on manufacturing activity simply because with a few notable exceptions such as Daniels (1977, 1982 and 1983), Damesick (1979), Gad (1979), Schwartz (1979), Damesick et al. (1982), and Ley and Hutton (1984), there has been very little published research on the geography of service employment in cities or its role in urban centre economies (Elias and Keogh, 1982). However, over the last ten years a large amount of research has been undertaken and published on the changing geography of intra-urban manufacturing activity, much of which has been concerned with describing in detail locational change at the establishment level. Most of this descriptive work has already been reviewed elsewhere (Bull, 1983; Lever, 1982a; Scott, 1982a; Thrift, 1979), and therefore only a brief contextural introductory statement is required here. What is far more important is the development of different approaches to the subject and different theoretical frameworks within which the changing geography of intra-urban industrial activity may be understood. It is on these aspects of recently published work that this essay will concentrate.
