“Thus the broad middle of urban societies may be shrinking, while the income gap between the well paid and the working poor widens. The post-industrial city, then, is also likely to be a dual city,
in which rich and poor draw further away from each other spatially within the urban region, as well as in terms of differential access to economic resources. While the extent of this dichotomy and its meaning is a subject of continuing scholarly debate, few observers deny that troubling social consequences are to a greater or lesser extent a constituent accompaniment of the post-industrial urban order (Davis, 1992b; Marcuse, 1997; White,”
“The present global economy,they hold, constitutes a disordered interregnum that possesses neither adequate regulation nor the basis for a new coherence. Renewed stability can only come from ‘a new institutionalfix … at the global scale’”
Will Malmö be another Philadelphia?
“To encourage service-based economic growth, successive Philadelphia administrations after 1950 supported large-scale urban renewal that demolished numerous businesses on the margins of downtown and several neighbourhoods of mostly poor residents. In their place rose the glimmering office towers of the post-industrial service economy, along with upscale retail establishments and luxury housing targeted for the affluent professionals who would inhabit those steel-and-glass skyscrapers by day. As so often in the course of urban renewal in the United States, the poor and the marginal, who dared to live in the path of someone else’s definition of progress, were summarily bulldozed out of the way (Kantor, 1988: 256–8; see also Beauregard, 1989; Guinther, 1996: 204–35).
“The ancient world lasted for 3,000 years, the medieval age for less than 1,000 years,
and the industrial era for about 100 years. Our post-industrial revolution has
occurred in just 25 years, and its pace is quickening. In one great blow, the new
revolution has remade the industrial fabric of society, radically altered the behavior of
capital, broken down national boundaries and is remodeling government. (Savitch,
1998:249)”
The Post-Industrial City
Douglas V. Shaw
Editorial matter and selection © Ronan Paddison 2001
Ingvor Sabina Le John 