ABSTRACT
This chapter examines landscape transformations in the post-industrial city. It attempts to portray, classify and understand the emerging landscapes in terms of land-use patterns, urban morphology and density. It is argued that the locational trends of flourishing post-industrial economic activities, along with the development of new urban governance strategies, tend to rearrange the landscapes of the postmodern city. The inner city is dominated by an eclectic clustering of economic activities: high-level financial services, technology-intensive firms and knowledge-based institutions, and ‘creative’ urban islands and edges. Such creative islands and edges constitute ‘signifying epicentres’ which usually introduce a ‘glocalized’ landscape of built heritage and innovative design of buildings and public open spaces. Compact and dense landscapes in the inner city are combined with new landscapes of ‘diffused urbanity’ in urban fringes.*
In the last decade or so, a large number of studies (see, for instance, Sachar, 1990; Sassen, 1994, 2001; Amin and Thrift, 1995; Savitch, 1996; Short et al., 1999; Lever, 2001; Shaw, 2001) have documented the strong effects of the late twentieth century economic globalization on cities and urban networks. Traditional factors (e.g. geographical location, physical infrastructure) that once channelled the location of new business to a specific place appear to matter less. Due to the capacity of capital to switch locations, all cities – with perhaps the exception of ‘global cities’ (Sassen, 2001) that have sufficient power to counteract the volatility of capital – have become interchangeable entities, to be played off one against another, forced to compete from positions of comparative weakness for capital
investment (Kantor, 1987). In the new milieu of intercity competition (see Brotchie et al., 1995; Duffy, 1995; Jensen-Butler, 1997; Jensen-Butler et al., 1997), cities have, more than ever, to offer inducements to capital either by refashioning their economic attractiveness (e.g. tax abatements, property, transport facilities) or by amendments in their soft infrastructure (Boyle and Rogerson, 2001). Improvements in the latter mainly involve the development of creative cultural and leisure amenities and the enhancement of the city’s image through landscape transformations (see Gospodini, 2002; Beriatos and Gospodini, 2004).
