Manufacturing in the New Urban Economy


Book Description

In large cities in developed countries, the share of manufacotruing has declined drastically in the last decades and the share of service has grown as many manufacturing firms have closed or moved to lower-cost locations. The process of deindustrialization is often seen as part of the inevitable shift towards a knowledge based economy and urban economies come to rely on research and development, financial services, tourism and the creative industries. This book looks at the changing link between manufacturing and knowledge-based activities in urban regions. The authors develop a new framework drawing on insights from organization studies and regional economic literature looking at various international case studies in Western and Eastern Europe, South America and Asia.




Foundries of the Future


Book Description

Since the 1970s, cities world-wide have been witness to radical de-industrialisation. Manufacturing was considered incompatible with urban life and was actively pushed out. As economies have grown, public officials and developers have instinctively shifted their priorities to short-term, high-yielding land uses such as offices, retail space and housing. Inner-city growth from New York to London and even Seoul have generally come at the expense of land uses such as manufacturing or logistics. Despite the odds, manufacturing is not in terminal decay in western cities. On the contrary, it is at the opening of a new chapter. Urban manufacturing can help cities to be more innovative, circular, inclusive and resilient. Recently, with increasing interest in the circular economy, with cleaner and more compact technology, with more progressive building codes for mixed use, with increasing awareness of the impacts of social inequality and with a clearer understanding of the value chains between the trade of material and immaterial goods, cities across the world are realising that manufacturing has an important place in the 21st century urban economy. While both enthusiasm for making is increasing and the value of manufacturing is becoming increasingly evident in cities, the topic remains extremely complex and challenging to manage. This book attempts to shed light on the ways manufacturing can address urban challenges, it exposes constraints for the manufacturing sector and provides fifty patterns for working with urban manufacturing. This book has been written as a manual to help politicians, public authorities, planners, designers and community organisations to be able to plan, discuss and collaborate by developing more productive urban manufacturing. The book is split into two parts. "




The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies


Book Description

Today, the Bay Area is home to the most successful knowledge economy in America, while Los Angeles has fallen progressively further behind its neighbor to the north and a number of other American metropolises. Yet, in 1970, experts would have predicted that L.A. would outpace San Francisco in population, income, economic power, and influence. The usual factors used to explain urban growth—luck, immigration, local economic policies, and the pool of skilled labor—do not account for the contrast between the two cities and their fates. So what does? The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies challenges many of the conventional notions about economic development and sheds new light on its workings. The authors argue that it is essential to understand the interactions of three major components—economic specialization, human capital formation, and institutional factors—to determine how well a regional economy will cope with new opportunities and challenges. Drawing on economics, sociology, political science, and geography, they argue that the economic development of metropolitan regions hinges on previously underexplored capacities for organizational change in firms, networks of people, and networks of leaders. By studying San Francisco and Los Angeles in unprecedented levels of depth, this book extracts lessons for the field of economic development studies and urban regions around the world.




The New Economy of the Inner City


Book Description

Following the restructuring process which swept away the traditional manufacturing economy of the inner city 25 years ago, new industries are transforming these former post-industrial landscapes. These creative, technology-intensive industries include Internet services, computer graphics and imaging, and video game production. The development dynamics of these new sectors are volatile in comparison with those of the classic ‘Industrial City’. But these new industries highlight the unique role of the inner city in facilitating creative processes, innovation and social change. Further, they reflect the intensity of interaction between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ in the metropolis, and represent key agencies of urban place-making and re-imaging. This book addresses the critical intersections between process and place which underpin the formation of creative enterprises in the emergent industrial districts of the ‘new inner city’. It contains intensive case studies of industrial restructuring within exemplary sites in prominent world cities such as London, Singapore, San Francisco and Vancouver. The studies demonstrate the global reach of development and innovation across these cities and sites, marked by clustering, rapid firm turnover, and interdependency between production and consumption activity. The evocative case studies, brought to life by interviews, sequential mapping exercises, media narratives, and photography, also disclose the importance of local factors (including urban scale, built form, property markets and policy) which shape both the specific industrial structures and socio-economic impacts. The New Economy of the Inner City places inner city new industry formation within the development history of the city, and underscores its role in larger processes of urban transformation. The findings inform a critique and synthesis of urban theory which frame the evolving conditions of the 21st century metropolis. This book would be useful to researchers and students of Geography, Urban Studies, Economics and Planning.




Handbook of Manufacturing Industries in the World Economy


Book Description

This interdisciplinary volume provides a critical and multi-disciplinary review of current manufacturing processes, practices, and policies, and broadens our understanding of production and innovation in the world economy. Chapters highlight how firms




Masters of Craft


Book Description

In today’s new economy—in which “good” jobs are typically knowledge or technology based—many well-educated and culturally savvy young people are instead choosing to pursue traditionally low-status manual labor occupations as careers. Masters of Craft looks at the renaissance of four such trades: bartending, distilling, barbering, and butchering. In this engaging book, Richard Ocejo takes you into the lives and workplaces of these people to examine how they are transforming once-undesirable jobs into “cool” and highly specialized upscale occupations. He shows how they find meaning in these jobs by enacting a set of “cultural repertoires,” resulting in a new form of elite taste-making. Focusing on cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole-animal butcher shop workers in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and upstate New York, Masters of Craft provides new insights into the stratification of taste, the spread of gentrification, and the evolving labor market in today’s postindustrial city.




The Factory-free Economy


Book Description

An economic analysis of de-industrialization that considers the ongoing transformation of the industrial economies and the consequences for economic policy.




The Cultural Economy of Cities


Book Description

Culture is big business. It is at the root of many urban regeneration schemes throughout the world, yet the economy of culture is under-theorized and under-developed. In this wide-ranging and penetrating volume, the economic logic and structure of the modern cultural industries is explained. The connection between cultural production and urban-industrial concentration is demonstrated and the book shows why global cities are the homelands of the modern cultural industries. This book covers many sectors of cultural economy, from craft industries such as clothing and furniture, to modern media industries such as cinema and music recording. The role of the global city as a source of creative and innovative energy is examined in detail, with particular attention paid to Paris and Los Angeles.




Recast Your City


Book Description

Community development expert Ilana Preuss explains how local leaders can revitalize their downtowns or neighborhood main streets by bringing in and supporting small-scale manufacturing. Small-scale manufacturing businesses help create thriving places, with local business ownership opportunities and well-paying jobs that other business types can't fulfill.




The Warhol Economy


Book Description

Which is more important to New York City's economy, the gleaming corporate office--or the grungy rock club that launches the best new bands? If you said "office," think again. In The Warhol Economy, Elizabeth Currid argues that creative industries like fashion, art, and music drive the economy of New York as much as--if not more than--finance, real estate, and law. And these creative industries are fueled by the social life that whirls around the clubs, galleries, music venues, and fashion shows where creative people meet, network, exchange ideas, pass judgments, and set the trends that shape popular culture. The implications of Currid's argument are far-reaching, and not just for New York. Urban policymakers, she suggests, have not only seriously underestimated the importance of the cultural economy, but they have failed to recognize that it depends on a vibrant creative social scene. They haven't understood, in other words, the social, cultural, and economic mix that Currid calls the Warhol economy. With vivid first-person reporting about New York's creative scene, Currid takes the reader into the city spaces where the social and economic lives of creativity merge. The book has fascinating original interviews with many of New York's important creative figures, including fashion designers Zac Posen and Diane von Furstenberg, artists Ryan McGinness and Futura, and members of the band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. The economics of art and culture in New York and other cities has been greatly misunderstood and underrated. The Warhol Economy explains how the cultural economy works-and why it is vital to all great cities.