ABSTRACT
The decline of the city as a concentration of population has been accompanied by a corresponding decrease in the importance of the metropolitan areas of Britain as centres of economic activity. Until little more than a decade ago, the view enshrined in most theories of urban change was that cities were the central pivots of the space economy. They acted as development poles, points of invention and innovation from which growth pulses ‘trickled down’ the urban hierarchy and diffused spatially to smaller and peripheral centres. Cities prospered because gains through innovation were greater than downward and outward losses. In consequence, urban space could be partitioned into a dynamic urban heartland dominated by the nation’s major cities, and a dependent rural hinterland characterized by stagnation or slow growth. Today, these economic roles and spatial relationships are the reverse. Cities have lost much of their capacity for regeneration. New investment and economic growth are taking place in the periphery and it is the traditional heartland cities, and especially their central areas, that are in decline.
