ABSTRACT
We noted in the first two chapters how western urban economies are being radically altered by current processes of economic and spatial restructuring. No longer can we understand cities primarily as centres for the manufacturing and the exchange and production of physical goods and commodities-as most were during the last hundred years. Similarly, the notion that cities are shaped by their positions within single, functional urban hierarchies oriented towards nation states ceases now to have much credence. Unlike the classic Fordist city of the post-war boom, the modern city can no longer be considered as an internally integrated ‘locus of mass production, mass consumption, social interaction and institutional representation’, as Amin and Thrift (1995; 91) describe. Instead, structural economic change, socalled deindustrialisation and the globalisation of capitalism is transforming the ways in which urban economies function.
