Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
urbanization, people fleeing the negative aspects of the modern urban
environment. This holds much truth, since both light industry and business
services are relatively footloose, and can choose locations where people are also
happy to be living. Industry follows people, rather than people following
industry.
Outside Britain, a similar pattern may be seen in France (Gaudemar &
Prud'homme 1991). These writers divide France into three regions: the
northeast, leaving out Alsace but with the Paris region, all of which have had
heavy industrial decline; the east centre, a region including the Massif Central
and the Alps, with average losses of industry; and the south and west, with only
slight loss of industrial employment. In these regions, industrial change has
correlated positively with service change; those areas with good industrial
employment have attracted more of the service employment. In the northeast, it
is thought that the large firms there brought down services with them, since these
latter were ancillary services, intimately dependent on the big industries (coal,
steel, heavy engineering, chemicals). In the south and west, the industries were
smaller, often agro-industry, and the services were not closely related to any
specific firm. Such services as tourism grew rapidly. In the south there has also
been a “Sunbelt” phenomenon, with the more attractive environment bringing in
small industries and services that were footloose, and depended on attracting
highly trained and professional staff.
Policy issues: decentralized policy-making
and city
marketing
From the point of view of those planning regional policy, the stories just told are
not particularly happy. As in the discussion of flexible industry patterns, most of
the growth of the service sector, especially that part (business services)
connected with high-tech industry, has been unaided, and not a function of
regional policies. In general, neither the activities (services and high-tech
industry) nor the regions concerned have been the object of policies to help
them. An exception given, the Strathclyde area, has indeed been a regional
development area since the 1960s, and has received monies to encourage all
kinds of economic growth. But its results should not be overestimated. Rather
than endogenous growth, most of the firms are incomers (Turok 1993), and the
inward investment has remained controlled by outside firms.
Does all this mean that there is no place for policies to help regions in the new
service economy? Hall's conclusion (1991) was that regional policy is dead, and
that the remnant policies, such as enterprise zones, are points on the map, rather
than extensive regions, so that policy-makers have given up on the idea that a
whole region could be turned around. But there is a new kind of regional policy
emerging, organized from below rather than from above. Decline of formal
central government policy means a decentralization of policy to the cities and
regions themselves. Their activity centres not on financial aids to industry, but on
