Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 12.16
Liverpool, England, United Kingdom.
With the
deindustrialization of the Liverpool region, the city
has lost thousands of jobs and the city's population
has decreased by one-third. Abandoned streets, such
as this one, are a refl ection of the city's industrial
decline.
© Philip Wolmuth/Panos Pictures.
Geographical Dimensions of the
Service Economy
Deindustrialization and the growth of the service economy
unfolded in the context of a world-economy that was
already characterized by wide socioeconomic disparities.
Only areas that had industry could deindustrialize, of
course, and at the global scale the wealthier industrial
regions were the most successful in establishing a posti
industrial base in the same time period, with steel manufac-
turing jobs moving to areas of the world with lower wages.
This region of the United States, which used to be called
the Manufacturing Belt, is now commonly called the
Rust
Belt
, evoking the image of long-abandoned, rusted-out
steel factories (Fig. 12.17). More recently, the global eco-
nomic downturn that began in 2008 has resulted in devas-
tating job losses in communities dependent on both sec-
ondary and tertiary industries. These examples serve to
remind us that not all deindustrialized regions fi nd their
niche easily in the new service economy and that a tertiary
economy, once established, does not necessarily buffer
places from recessionary trends.
Nonetheless, some secondary industrial regions
have made the transition to a viable service economy
fairly successfully. The
Sun Belt
is the southern region
of the United States, stretching through the Southeast
to the Southwest. Both the population and economy of
this region have grown over the last few decades, as ser-
vice sector businesses have chosen to locate in areas
such as Atlanta and Dallas where the climate is warm
and the local laws welcome their presence. The eastern
part of the Sun Belt served as an early industrial region,
with Birmingham developing an iron and steel econ-
omy and Atlanta an industrial economy around cotton,
tobacco, and furniture. In recent decades, high-tech
and fi nancial industries changed the economy and land-
scape of the Sun Belt, as can be seen in the toponyms of
stadiums in the region, such as Alltel Stadium in
Jacksonville, Florida; Bank of America Stadium in
Charlotte, North Carolina; and American Airlines
Center in Dallas, Texs.
n-
dustrial service economy. Deindustrialization did little to
change the basic di
sparities between core and periphery
that have long characterized the global economy. Even in
the manufacturing realm, the availability of capital, mech-
anization, and innovative production strategies allowed
the core industrial regions to retain their dominance. In
the fi rst decade of the twenty-fi rst century, eastern Asia,
western Russia and Ukraine, western Europe, and North
America still account for well over 75 percent of the world's
total output of manufactured goods.
Despite its continued dominance in the manufactur-
ing arena, the core has experienced some wrenching
changes associated with the economic shifts of the past
four decades. Anyone who has ever spent time in northern
Indiana, the British Midlands, or Silesia (southern Poland
and northeastern Czech Republic) knows that there are
pockets of signifi cant hardship in relatively prosperous
countries (Fig. 12.16). These are the result of large-scale
deindustrialization. In the United Kingdom, the major
industrial zones of Newcastle, Liverpool, and Manchester
lost much of their industrial bases during the 1960s and
1970s. Similarly, the industrial zone of the northeastern
United States (around the Great Lakes) lost much of its
