The De-industrializing City

The deindustrializing city is only a city where the majority no longer works in manufacturing jobs and lives in nineteenth century tenements or modernist high-rises. It is above all a city of information exchange rather than one that is based on the exchange of goods. It is a city whose most conspicuous residents are well-educated professionals who work hard and play hard, rely on face-to-face communication to perform in their increasingly flexible jobs, think global and act local, cherish both multicultural life and place-specific character, and live in non-traditional family relations. It is a city of individual expression rather than mass culture, and of conspicuous difference rather than egalitarianism. It is nonetheless a city where, particularly in Europe, heterogeneity and economic disparities are still to a certain extent balanced and controlled by public institutions. It is a city where the privileged tend to live in the centre rather than on the periphery and cherish urban spaces for both work and leisure. And it is a city that positions itself against other cities and proudly communicates its specificities to a domestic and international audience. The genesis of this new tenement is closely connected with deindustrialization and with the big theme of twenty-first-century urbanism: the rebuilding of large former industrial areas in the city centre. Ports and Factories. The best-known example in Britain, and one of the first in Europe, were the London Docklands, but similar examples are the Copenhagen Harbour, the Barcelona waterfront, the Amsterdam Eastern Harbour, Norra Älvstrand in Gothenburg, the Merchant City in Glasgow, the Eastern Spree banks in Berlin, Kop van Zuid in Rotterdam, and thousands of larger and smaller factories and port facilities. I propose to focus on the direct relations that deindustrialization had with the emergence of the post-functionalist city