ABSTRACT

This chapter examines changes in manufacturing industry, the rise of service and creative economies in cities and growth in informal economic activities, highlighting the implications of these changes for the internal geographies of different cities, particularly their form and labour markets. The visitor economy was not viewed as a distinct area of activity in most city economies, except within recognized resort towns, and little attempt was made to manage this provision separately from other urban management functions. Processes of economic globalization and associated processes of deindustrialization undermined many of the assumptions of previous neo-classical work and presented new problems for cities and issues for analysis. Drawing on a range of post-modern approaches, more recent research in urban geography has adopted a pluralistic analytical perspective to examining restructuring, questioning the economic determinism of earlier structuralist perspectives. For many cities there has been a shift in their economic core from one based on manufacturing to one based on banking and service activities.