Uneven spatial development as a logic to understand the deindustrialization and urban regeneration of European post-industrial cities

Abstract

In the late 1960s and for the next twenty years, a process of deindustrialization took place in many large European cities that would completely change their future direction. After this period of economic decline, some of these cities were again able to attract capital and return to cycles of accumulation. Thus, we intend to understand this process of deindustrialization within a framework of the logic of uneven development and its resulting consequences for urban space. We will try to understand how ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ acts within the parameters of creation and destruction, to make urban space a productive element. The objec-tive is to analyze how capital flows install their spatio-temporal productivity to revive and reha-bilitate post-industrial European cities, and reposition them in the world market system. We also identify the manifestation of uneven spatial development (USD) in different socio-spatial dimensions in order to understand the practical complexity by which USD itself is structured.