ABSTRACT
The contemporary US space economy is characterized by decentralization and dominance of service industries. During the 1950s and 1960s, due to technological advances, a newly developing highway system and increased airport travel, businesses in the US could ‘decentralize their manufacturing operations yet maintain central control’ (Agnew, 1987, p119). This decentralization took place in terms of business activities moving to more peripheral locations in the US as well as overseas. Thus, starting from the 1950s, in the US, cities outside the historic industrial core started to challenge the primacy of the manufacturing belt cities (Agnew, 1987). Deindustrialization in the late 1960s and the energy crisis in the 1970s led to economic decline in manufacturing belt cities, and traditional centres such as New York and Chicago were hit especially severely (Abu-Lughod, 1999). Many firms shifted their production facilities to cities of the Sunbelt states, located in the south and southwest of the United States, that offered more favourable business and living conditions, resulting in a significant economic and population growth in these cities (Rice and Bernard, 1983; Clark and Roche, 1984; Macionis and Parrillo, 2004).
