The Political Salience of Urban Decline: Why and how the State Responds to Urban Change

Abstract

In Chapter 2 we pointed out some implications of urban decline, fiscal stress and increased local reliance on national grants for the autonomy of the local state. This chapter is concerned with the entire range of responses to urban decline by all levels of government and what they imply about the net effects of the national, regional and local state on urban life. As we argued in Chapter 1, the vitality of cities in advanced industrial democracies is increasingly determined by the allocative decisions of national, regional and local governments. The evidence developed in this chapter shows that dependence on the public sector is particularly great in post-industrial cities, those which lost private-sector jobs, population and tax revenues because of the process of industrial relocation and disinvestment which began in parts of north-western Europe and the north-eastern United States during the 1960s. In some of these cities economic decline has been stabilised and reversed through the development of new administrative and service activities, many of them in the public sector; in other cities decline continues.