Urban Restructuring in Former Industrial Cities: Urban Planning Strategies

• Main Author: Beatriz Fernández Agueda
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université Lille 1 2014-11-01
• Series: Territoire en Mouvement
• Subjects: decline; urban planning; industrial city; shrinking city; Europe
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/tem/2527

Global dynamics such as economic transformations and reorganizations of production led to the crisis of many former industrial cities in Europe and the U.S in the last decades of the 20th century. Most of them have suffered or are still suffering from urban decay and shrinkage. The severity and persistence of some of these processes have called into question both the future of these cities and the ability of urban planning to deal with decline. The trajectory of some industrial cities, whose crisis has persisted despite local efforts to confront it, could lead to regard decline as an irreversible process and to accept the impossibility of urban planning to intervene in it. Nevertheless, the gradual restructuring of some European industrial cities in recent years, seem to point toward the relevance of local response to global dynamics. Different paths of development may only be explained from the distinctiveness of each territory, specific local decisions and successive strategies to tackle decay. These processes of revitalization seem to reveal the importance of local action and the possibility of guiding and easing decline. Even more, they point out to the crucial role of planning.These experiences show different ways to tackle decay. This paper aims to explore the role of certain planning strategies on guiding the futures of industrial regions.