The crisis of the plan and the post-Fordist city

The adoption of Ford’s assembly-line system in Western factories led, beginning in 1920s United States, to the destitution of Western cities, as it brought about the relocation of factories and skilled labourers from inner cities to suburbia – and consequently, to the ending of the city’s role as the locus of industrial production. In contrast, the aporia of the industrial city was hardly noticed in the Eastern bloc, as the tighter planning –of economy, of city, of society- prevented the obsolescence of the industrial city from becoming visible, delayed until the liberalisation and deregulation of the 1990s allowed the market forces to ravage the industrial cities of Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and other members of the former Eastern Bloc. In any case, the question facing cities’ authorities and residents alike both in the West and East was the same: how to reinvent the city, how to find a new role for the city. Via several experiments, failures, and errors, such a role was discovered, and the new post-Fordist city was brought into being, part-and-parcel of the new order of neoliberal economy and post-industrial society. The new city functioned as an international hub for global capital, and particularly for finance capital; its primary features included sparkling glass-tower central business districts modelled on mid-western American cities, the gentrification of inner-city neighbourhoods, the reuse of industrial buildings for culture and lifestyle, and landmark buildings necessary for the global competition for investment. The proposed paper will unfold the story of the creation of the post-Fordist city, without omitting the existence of those cities left behind – the cities which could not be ‘saved’ by the implementation of the new model – or the residents who have been overlooked throughout this transformation, often dislocated to undesirable areas outside city centres