Divergent cities in post-industrial Britain

Abstract

According to Moretti (2013), deindustrialisation has been responsible for a 'great divergence' between cities that have moved to become centres of innovation and ideas, and those that have continued to produce material goods. Other authors however, place more emphasis on trends in specialisation and differences in productive bases as the driving forces behind urban divergence. Somewhat similarly, Storper (2013) argues that recent divergence been fundamentally been driven by the fact that some cities have become more specialised in knowledge intensive sectors. While most of this interest in urban divergence has been based on US cities, recent European research also reports divergent processes. The aim of this article is to examine the degree of divergence across UK cities and to analyse how far this has been driven by differences among cities in industrial structure and specialisation, tradable bases and productivity.