Declining Suburbs in Europe and Latin America

Declining Suburbs in Europeand Latin America

IVONNE AUDIRAC, EMMANUÈLE CUNNINGHAM-SABOT,SYLVIE FOL and SERGIO TORRES MORAES

Abstractijur_1093 226..244

Suburban shrinkage, understood as a degenerative urban process stemming fromthe demise of the Fordist mode of urbanism, is generally manifested in a declinein population, industry and employment. It is also intimately linked to the globalrestructuring of industrial organization associated with the rise of the post-Fordist modeof urbanism and, more recently, the thrust of Asian industrialization. Framed in thediscourse of industrial urbanism, this article examines the first ring of industrial suburbsthat developed around large cities in their most rapid Fordist urbanization phase. Theseindustrial suburbs, although they were formed at different times, are today experiencingspecific mutations and undergoing profound restructuring on account of their particularspatial position between the central area and the expanding peripheries of the post-Fordist metropolis. This article describes and compares suburban decline in twoEuropean cities (Glasgow and Paris) and two Latin American Cities (São Paulo,Brazil and Guadalajara, Mexico), as different instances of places asymmetrically andfragmentarily integrated into the geography of globalization.

IntroductionAlthough the history of European and Latin American suburbanization is very different,postwar metropolitan change in both regions has become increasingly susceptible toeconomic restructuring associated with the global industrial and commercial shift fromthe North Atlantic Seaboard to the Western Pacific Rim (Dicken, 2003). This globalshift, which has privileged some regions, has had profound consequences in bothindustrialized and newly industrialized countries (NICs). Intra-metropolitan regionsconnected to the global circuitry of economic flows (i.e. foreign direct investment andfinance, high-tech industries, and advanced producer services) have generally prospered,while those with high concentrations of blue-collar industries have stagnated anddeclined (Sassen, 1994; 2001; Castells, 1996; Lo and Marcotullio, 2000; Harvey, 2005).The ascent of neoliberalism and trading blocs, widespread deindustrialization,international and domestic immigration, postwar demographic transitions and newrounds of technological restructuring have had dramatic implications for European andLatin American suburbs usually embedded in expanding metropolitan regions. Suburbanshrinkage, which we define as a combined process of population loss, economicdownturn, employment decline and social crisis, is today intimately linked to local andregional economic growth processes brought on by global investment and trade, and byglobal restructuring of industrial organization (Gereffi et al., 2005).

The European part of the work was supported by ANR (National Research Agency, France) under a‘young researcher grant project’, Shrinking Cities, ANR-06-JCJC-0058.

Volume 36.2 March 2012 226–44 International Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchDOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01093.x

© 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX42DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA

Framed within the discourse of industrial urbanism (Soja, 2000), this article analysesand compares suburban decline in two European cities (Glasgow and Paris) and two LatinAmerican cities (São Paulo, Brazil and Guadalajara, Mexico), as different instances ofplaces asymmetrically and fragmentarily integrated in the geography of globalization. InParis, the article examines the ‘red-belt’suburbs; in Glasgow, the Govan area. The Parisiancase traces the suburban evolution from thriving industrial periphery in the 1960s tocurrent inner suburban cités (tower block ensembles), well known for the 2005 riots. TheGovan case1 tracks the area’s evolution from a world-leading shipbuilding centre in thenineteenth and early twentieth century to the postwar demise of its main industry, togetherwith today’s regeneration efforts. In Mexico we focus on Guadalajara’s shrinking ‘SiliconValley’, and in Brazil on São Paulo’s São Caetano suburb in the ABC region (the threeoriginal constitutive towns of Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo and São Caetanodo Sul). The Latin American cases exemplify the role of transnational corporations(TNCs) and the real estate industry in linking and delinking places from the geography ofglobalization and their concomitant effect on the growth and decline of suburban areas. Inthese different contexts the article analyses the common process of deindustrialization andrestructuring brought on by post-Fordist urban transformations.

Industrial urban peripheries underthree modes of industrial urbanismAccording to economic geographers, the distinctive feature of the current phase ofglobalization is the expansion, diffusion and networking of industrial urbanism andcapital on a global scale (Soja, 2000). Fundamental changes in the technology andorganization of industrial production, from the nineteenth-century factory system to thecurrent post-Fordist era, have been the drivers and shapers of cities and their peripheries(suburbs, exurbs and urban regions). Rather than viewing suburbanization as essentiallythe outcome of an expanding middle class moving beyond the city limits to consumemore space, as surmised by the Chicago School, geographers of industrial urbanism —some associated with the California School of Urban Geography (Storper, 1997; Scott,1998; Soja, 2000) — privilege the dynamics of industrial production of goods andservices, including information, entertainment and culture, as fundamental explanationsof urban restructuring. The sociospatial unravelling of these dynamics in specific urbancontexts is industrial urbanism’s focus of study.

Industrial urbanism seeks to understand the generative and degenerative urban forcesstemming from changes in capitalism, which are evident during historical moments ofcrisis-generated restructuring. Borrowing from Kondratieff and Schumpeter’s economiccycles, Scott (1995, cited in Soja, 2000) identifies three major global-restructuringcycles, each associated with different modes of industrial urbanism, which serve to framehistorically the three types of suburbs profiled in this article (see Figure 1).

The factories and mills of the first half of the nineteenth century correspond to the firstmode of industrial urbanism epitomized by industrial cities like Glasgow in Scotland andtheir peripheral industrial burghs like Govan, which thrived on dye works, silk mills andearly shipbuilding, and the Paris ‘red-industrial suburbs’ like Saint-Denis, whoseeconomies were dominated by the textile and chemicals industries.

The second mode of industrial urbanism dates to the 1920-to-1970 Fordist period ofmass production symbolized by Detroit and the automobile industry in the US. However,the period also includes the spread of this industry in Latin America via TNCs. In Brazil,as in most of Latin America, the Fordist period coincided with the take-off of

1 Govan is now included in the Glasgow city limits. The term suburb still applies to Govan if we use thedefinition given by Domingues (1994). Domingues defines the suburb first of all in terms of ‘social’rather than spatial or geometric distance from the city centre. The suburb is a territory that isviewed by the centre as being ‘subordinate’, hence ‘dependent’, within the complex urban space.

Declining suburbs in Europe and Latin America 227

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Note: Each era arises from crisis-generated industrial shifts and restructuring processesoperating at all scales of the capitalist economy from the local to the global

Figure 1 Contemporary effects in suburbs of the North and South in three eras of industrialurbanism (source: authors’ construct; data on eras derives from Soja, 2000)

228 Ivonne Audirac et al.


modernization under import substitution industrialization (ISI).2 American and Europeancar manufacturers agglomerated in the São Paulo industrial ABC suburban region.3

The Fordist metropolis is the urban form of the period, characterized by masssuburbanization impelled by new rounds of industrial and technological restructuringand facilitated by massive investment in roads, communications and public infrastructuresupporting car, truck and air transport in the US and Latin America, while in Europe agreater emphasis was given to rail transport.

The third industrial urban mode corresponds to the post-Fordist period from the1970s, characterized by the shift from large industrial complexes — organized for massproduction and consumption — to globally dispersed and deeply networked flexible andlean systems of production. Facilitated by new information and communicationtechnologies (ICTs) and the global ascent of neoliberal political and economic regimes(Gereffi, 2005; Harvey, 2005), these new industrial global complexes — spearheaded byTNCs — take advantage of a new international spatial division of labour and geographicarbitrage. The resultant geography of manufacturing, off-shoring and outsourcing,buttressed by flexible and lean production, materialized first in the emergence of rapidindustrializing regions in the global South, followed by deindustrialization of formerFordist industrial cities and regions in both the global North and South. However,China’s global rise in manufacturing and trade marks a new era of industrial restructuring(Henderson, 2008) with repercussions felt throughout the world. These effects wereparticularly severe among Latin American NICs such as Mexico, where suburbs andthe metropolitan peripheries of cities like Guadalajara, the 1990s’ recipients ofnew industrializing growth in electronics, saw their fortunes vanish as the industryglobally reorganized to capitalize on Asian global competitive advantages (Dussel,2005; Gallagher and Zarsky, 2007). In the current post-Fordist global era, the leadingindustries — be they high-technology, aerospace, electronics or financials — are globallyorganized and selectively localized depending on the relative global and regionalcompetitive advantage that each place offers. This glocalization of production hasbrought about an unprecedented expansion in the scale and scope of metropolitanregions, which renders increasingly anachronistic Fordist monocentric models of cityand suburbs not only in the US but also in Western Europe and Latin America (Aguilarand Ward, 2003; Pacione, 2009).

The multifarious naming of the post-Fordist metropolis (from post-suburbia to post-metropolis) continues to this day and emphasizes the regional scale of a polynuclearindustrial urbanism in which the binary metropolis of central city and suburbs explodesinto ‘a regional carpet of fragmented communities, zones and spaces’ (Graham andMarvin, 2001: 115). Glocal growth of new industrial production — typically in wealthyor amenity-endowed ‘premium networked’ spaces — coexists with declining Fordistindustrial districts, ports and suburbs as well as with new crisis-generated restructuringof peripheral places (Soja, 2000; Pacione, 2009). These declining places are increasinglyrendered redundant by virtue of their exclusion from glocal networks of production andconsumption (Castells, 1996; Graham and Marvin, 2001). In cities of the global North,declining places — dubbed ‘shrinking cities’ — concentrate the very poor and homeless,often immigrant and elderly populations, and characteristically contain crumblinginfrastructures, vacant deteriorating housing and heavily polluted environmental

2 ISI is an economic policy devised to increase a country’s economic self-sufficiency through thegrowth of domestic industries. The development theory behind ISI, formulated by Latin AmericansRaúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado, was influenced by Keynesian ideas of state-inducedindustrialization via large public spending. The policy was adopted in Latin America from the 1930suntil the 1980s. During the 1980s, induced by Latin America’s debt crisis and IMF structuraladjustment policies, ISI was abandoned for free trade, export-driven development, deregulation offoreign investment and privatization.

3 The ABC region is a powerful industrial agglomeration whose strong labour unions fought againstthe military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s.



wastelands; in the global South, deindustrializing Fordist places may be undergoingindustrial reconversion, remaining idle and dilapidating, or are being absorbed intosprawling squatter settlements.

In this glocal context, the three types of industrial suburbs examined here, whichdeveloped around large cities in their phase of most rapid urbanization, are todayexperiencing specific mutations. Although they formed during different time periods,these territories are today undergoing profound restructuring on account of theaforementioned urban transformations. The four European and Latin American casesoffer specific instances of ‘shrinkage’. ‘Shrinking cities’ is an umbrella term used here todenote the scope of the negative externalities inherent in new growth processesassociated with post-Fordist modes of industrial urbanism in the global North and South.

European and Latin American suburbanizationFrom one continent to another, the process of suburbanization has been very differentand has resulted in different characteristics. In Europe, the expansion of industrialsuburbs began before the turn of the twentieth century, and was linked to the processand rapid pace of industrialization. Faced by growing pressure for development onlimited land, industries were forced to move to peripheral areas where land wasavailable at more competitive rates and better served by the expanding rail network. Atthe same time that factories, especially those of the most heavily polluting and land–hungry kind, were established in the suburbs, a growing working-class populationpredominantly from city centres moved into these areas (Faure, 1986; Magriand Topalov, 1989). Compared to the American model of car-based, postwar white-middle-class residential suburbs, Fordist industrial European suburbs are working-class areas of which the Parisian ‘Red Belt’ is an archetype. Since the 1970s, industrialand working-class areas in inner ring suburbs have undergone marked restructuring(Malézieux, 1991; Beckouche et al., 2001).

First, the restructuring of the Fordist metropolis led to new patterns of socialsegregation and increasing sociospatial polarization between affluent and poorneighbourhoods, while the post-Fordist conversion of local production systems intoregional production poles accentuated these territorial imbalances (Soja, 1996; 2000;Pacione, 2009). Today, some privileged areas are regrowing at a fast pace, while othersare still sites of unemployment and increasing poverty (Bacqué and Fol, 2000).

In Latin America, the process of suburbanization ran close to the European one, butthe unequal socioeconomic context of Latin American urban development through thefirst part of the twentieth century and, later, the impact of globalization imprinted a quitedifferent morphology onto the suburbs. During the period of import substitutionindustrialization (ISI), Latin American suburbs grew due to the establishment ofindustries in areas relatively distant from the metropolitan centre, along railways.However, along with these formal industrial and residential suburbs, a spontaneousgrowth occurred in the metropolitan peripheries, characterized by illegal occupation andrapid expansion of an enormous informal economic sector, which to this day defies NorthAmerican and European suburban growth models (Domingues, 1994). In Brazil, theexplosion of sprawling low-income settlements occurred due to intense urbanization andrural-to-urban migration during the 1960s and 1970s. Nowadays, many former industrialsuburbs in megacities like São Paulo have evolved into a metropolitan ring ofmunicipalities with their own suburbs and problems. These early suburbs have triedsomehow to overcome the decay and decline resulting from post-Fordist industrialdecentralization and dispersion occurring as a result of post-ISI economic restructuringand economic globalization (Campolina and Diniz, 2007).

While natural demographic increase and in-bound migration to Mexican primatecities (Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey) characterized the bulk of the ISI Fordistperiod (the 1950s to the 1970s), by the end of the 1980s central city populations had



declined as a result of urban demographic transition4 and industrial and commercialdecentralization.5

The ecology of Latin American suburbanization can be characterized by a series ofaffluent urban wedges whose income gradients increase toward the periphery. Thesewedges are embedded in a larger system of nucleated ring zones of poor and working-class areas whose income and population gradients decrease toward the periphery.Periurban expansion typically happens through informal settlement accretion (Chavez-Galindo and Savenberg, 1996; Ward, 2004).

Post-Fordist transformations in the industrialand working-class suburbs of Paris and GlasgowPlaying a significant role in the development of the Parisian urban region, themunicipalities that make up the inner suburban ring around Paris have afforded bothprivileged sites for the establishment of industry and residential areas for their workingpopulations. Among these nineteenth-century territorial patterns, the ‘red suburb’(Fourcault, 1986; Bacqué and Fol, 1997) is the most typical example. However, by the1960s, industry had begun to move progressively away from the capital city and the innersuburbs, further out into the Parisian urban region (Beaujeu-Garnier and Bastié, 1967;Savitch, 1988). The loss of industrial jobs was at first compensated by the creation of jobsin services.6 However, in working-class territories, an ever-increasing gap between theskills demanded by the new jobs and residents’ qualifications led to structuralunemployment, which greatly affected the towns in the former ‘red’ suburbs.

The town of Saint Denis, once a symbolic location in the royal history of France,7

developed as an industrial suburb at the end of the nineteenth century, with theestablishment of large enterprises from the metallurgic, textile and chemical industries.Saint-Denis is one of the most densely populated towns in the Parisian inner suburbanring. Situated on the northern border of Paris, its early industrialization resulted fromgood transport facilities along with ample land available in the border zone of Paris(known as the Plaine Saint-Denis). The population of Saint-Denis increased rapidly,approaching 100,000 towards 1950. In Saint-Denis the move of business away from thearea began earlier than in the rest of Paris, and it affected the dominant heavy industry,which was the town’s economic mainstay. However, not all local economic sectors wereaffected by this relocation, since new service-sector business set up in Saint Denis overthe same period, triggering a full-scale reshaping of the town’s economic landscape.8

Govan’s position, on the banks of the River Clyde four kilometres from Glasgow’scity centre, favoured a shift from a mere rural fishing village to the ‘shipbuildingest burghin the world’ (Macdonald, 1951). Rapid industrial development, at first based on textilesand coal mining, was dramatically boosted by the arrival of the first shipyards in the1840s. The population rose from 2000 inhabitants in 1836 to 60,000 in 1891 and grew to91,000 in 1901 (Brotchie, 1938). At the turn of the century, Glasgow finally annexed theburgh of Govan, then peaking in prosperity and population. As one of the cradles ofScottish labour militancy stemming from the shipyards’ earliest trade unions, Govan has

4 Latin America is going through the different stages of demographic transition. The urbanpopulations of countries such as Brazil and Mexico are in the second stage and moving into the thirdstage — characterized by lower fertility and mortality rates (Lustig, 2000).

5 Increased integration between the Mexican and US economies through the North American FreeTrade Agreement (NAFTA).

6 In Saint-Denis between 1968 and 1982 industrial employment fell from 44% to 30% whileemployment in services rose from 45% to 61%.

7 The Basilique de Saint-Denis was the royal necropolis where French kings were buried.8 Between 1958 and 1962, 22 firms moved from Saint-Denis, removing 6,700 jobs. In 1971, 6,000 jobs

had replaced these, mainly in services.



since maintained a particularly strong and militant local working-class identity.However, by the 1960s and within two decades (1965–1985), the world-renownedClydeside shipbuilding industry saw most of the shipyards closed down, followed by thedemise of many of their subcontractors. Govan, at the heart of the shipyard industry, thenexperienced massive unemployment, a drastic drop in population, and took on somethingof the appearance of a ghost town, with the multiplication of empty lots and shops.

Saint-Denis’ economic restructuring and shift towards services without offsetting thenumber of industrial-job loses9 became even more pronounced from the 1970s on.Between 1975 and 1992, the number of industrial workers decreased by about two thirds.Changes in the local job market exacerbated the problem of skill mismatch: in 1999,executive and managerial jobs represented 21% of local jobs but only 8% of these jobswere held by residents. Conversely, blue collar jobs and low-grade white collar jobsrepresented respectively 21% and 27% of the jobs on offer, while workers in thesecategories accounted for 30% and 37% of the working population. This mismatch resultedin a hike of more than 20% in the unemployment rate of the working population.Unemployment and precarious employment most frequently affected young peopleand immigrants. Changes in employment patterns were accompanied by profounddemographic changes and in the transformation of the town’s social structure. Between1968 and 1999, despite a high birth rate, the population fell from 99,000 inhabitants to lessthan 86,000. This change was linked to increasing numbers of residents moving away.10

From a high of 60% in the 1954 census, the blue-collar workforce fell to less than 30% in1999. The share of non-French populations, representing 12% of the total population in1954, rose to 26% (22,500 inhabitants; INSEE, 1999).

In Govan, the history of the demographic, economic and social effects of post-Fordistrestructuring is more difficult to decipher on account of recurrent redefinitions ofterritorial boundaries. Thus, statistically speaking, only the last 10 years can beaccurately estimated. However, given its mono-industrial status, decline in Govan wasundoubtedly more severe than in Saint-Denis. Over the last 30 years more than 60 Govanshops have closed and 70% of its tenements have been demolished for sanitary reasonswith replacement council housing built in distant large developments. This led toa sudden, unprecedented decline in population, school closures, loss of socialinfrastructures, and the break-up of the historical community. In the space of 10 years(1991–2001) the three wards of Govan, Ibrox and Drumoyne along the Clyde, making upthe former Greater Govan industrial quarter with 21,393 inhabitants, lost 18% of theirpopulation. The population remaining in Govan today is particularly poor, since 51% ofadults of working age are unemployed (twice the Glaswegian average), and among these40% have not worked in the last 5 years.

Adaptation of local policies in Saint-Denis and GovanIn the Paris area, as in the Glasgow area, local territories have entered into fiercecompetition for investment, which is characteristic of contemporary forms ofglobalization (Boland, 2007; MacLeod et al., 2003). Some of them have mutated fromdeclining industrial, working-class towns into shining examples of a dynamic mode oflocal development based on international investments and the promotion of leadingactivities such as high-tech and ITC industries or high-level producer services (Fol andSabot, 2003). In Glasgow, former industrial areas are the locus of considerableinvestment, via the conversion of abandoned industrial premises (where there are stillcommunities with high rates of unemployment) into recreational consumer spaces and

9 The town lost 17% of its jobs between 1970 and 1983.10 While nearly 10,000 inhabitants left Saint-Denis between 1968 and 1975, the number of out-migrants

reached more than 11,000 between 1975 and 1982, 9,000 between 1982 and 1990 and almost 14,000between 1990 and 1999.



luxury residential real estate (Sabot, 1999; Cunningham-Sabot, 2007a). In the former‘red’ suburbs of Paris, Saint-Denis and its neighbours have seen a much more ambivalentevolution: while investment and economic activity are progressing at a sustained rate inthe best locations (Halbert, 2007) accompanied by moderate levels of gentrification incertain quarters (Bacqué and Fol, 1997), parts of these territories, especially the citéslocated at the periphery of these suburban towns, are growing markedly poorer.

Unlike the situation that arose from Glasgow’s municipal policies towards Govan(demolition and dismantling of social/council housing, see Hall and Cunningham-Sabot,2007), Saint-Denis, initially a socialist and then a communist municipality, hasmaintained a social and political identity specific to the ‘red’ suburbs. In the immediatepostwar period, the red suburbs embarked on local housing policies centred on themass-production of public housing characteristic of the ‘red’ belt (Bacqué and Fol,1997). Between 1952 and 1975, 12,000 public housing units were built in Saint-Denis,70% of which were undertaken by municipal agencies. The town today comprises 43%public housing, a significant amount of which is in large projects, the (in)famous citésthat were the scene of riots in 2005.

Although policy implementation has been different in Govan and Saint-Denis, thesame processes of ‘out-migration’ and impoverishment of the remaining populations inthe surviving housing estates, has occurred. A study published by the Glasgow HousingAssociation (GHA) (2004) confirms that 81% of GHA tenants were on unemploymentbenefit or without work, a third of the tenants were classified as ‘permanently sick’ ordisabled, and 60% were one-person households. Likewise, Saint-Denis has been prone topauperization among tenants in its local public housing. This housing, initially designedfor a diverse population of workers and middle-class employees, was progressivelyabandoned by the better-off, who moved out to become homeowners on the periphery,while the less well-off, often immigrants and second-generation tenants, moved in.Although public housing policy in terms of household income limits did not change,increasing unemployment and economic difficulties rendered the occupants of thishousing more and more socially and economically vulnerable.

In this context, Saint-Denis municipal decision-makers were torn between twoobjectives: responding to the difficulties experienced by the least privileged households,or restoring and preserving the social mix. The latter objective was a response to fear ofthe social fragmentation of the city, and to the desire to market a new city image byappealing to other more affluent social groups. Saint-Denis’ large urban projects, such asthe renovation of the centre and the redevelopment of the Plaine Saint-Denis, weresituated in the most attractive urban sectors and targeted populations that were notablydifferent from those living in the rest of the town, particularly from residents of publichousing estates (Bacqué and Fol, 2005).

A far more radical policy of gentrification has been established by the Glasgowmunicipality (Cunningham-Sabot, 2007a). A series of high-rise luxury flats line the riveror the former docks converted into marinas. Property prices there are the highest in thecity. Some are already complete and lived in, others are still on the drawing-board, andthis is mobilizing the inhabitants of Govan who are proposing alternatives entailing amore mixed offer of housing, with building heights more in harmony with the rest of thequarter, and opposing the creation side by side of two worlds, the haves and have-nots,each in their own ghetto.

In the 1960s, the French municipalities in the ‘red’ suburbs adopted economic policiesaimed at protecting the industrial sector. However, by the 1980s these policies shifted topromoting and maintaining economic activity. The priority was to retain economicwealth and jobs by finding realistic and, if possible, prestige-generating developmentopportunities. Saint-Denis attempted to attract enterprises in the research anddevelopment sector. The former industrial site of la Plaine Saint-Denis, after a period ofdeep crisis due to deindustrialization, modernized and became more and more service-oriented. Today run-down areas, with widespread poverty, can still be seen near brandnew office buildings constructed during the last few years. Presently, this territory faces



development pressures on a regional scale11 on account of its high real-estate prices andeconomic potential related to its exceptional location on the fringes of Paris.

In Govan only one shipyard, under constant financial threat, remains today. Theshipyard employs highly qualified engineers and technicians, whose skills are far abovethose of the local population. Post-Fordist restructuring of the shipyards and heavyindustry’s allied economic activity has left in its wake huge areas with a shrinkingeconomy surrounded by a scattering of fragile islets of prosperity. These prosperous sitesstand out as exceptions conforming to Castells’ (1996; 2002) dual-space economy of theinformation society. Social gaps in access to global networks render those spacessidestepped by globalization ‘black holes’, while the future of those able to remainglobally connected is constantly uncertain. The evolution of the shipyards in Govan is aninstance of the local transitory nature of post-Fordist industrial urbanism, seeminglysusceptible to changes in the global organization of production.12

The other industrial wastelands, like the docklands left behind by the closure of theshipyards, have slowly been rehabilitated under the authority of the City of Glasgow andeconomic development agencies. Numerous prestige-industry zones have been createdclose to the city centre, but except for janitorial and security jobs they have not had muchto offer in terms of local employment. The Glasgow municipality, in conjunction with itseconomic development agency, in order to make the site as a whole more attractive,cleaned it up and built recreation infrastructure that was both impressive and costly(the Scottish Exhibition, the Conference Centre, the Science Centre, the MillenniumTower. Private enterprise invested only when the risk was nil, and guaranteed profits at amaximum (Cunningham-Sabot, 2007b). Urban planning and economic regeneration asconducted thus far have not solved the problem of unemployment at the micro-local level.Indeed, the Govan community is experiencing an inexorable population decline, and,above all, equally inexorable social and spatial imbalances that are setting in and beingreinforced by the policies now in place. With the departure of the middle and workingclasses, only the most underprivileged have remained in situ along with a trickle of thewell-off living in luxury high-rise flats and marinas by the River Clyde. In other words, onechallenge for Glasgow is to cease treating Govan as a jet-set ghetto, a renovated industrialsuburb, a declining suburb without a future, and even a waste-tip suburb all at the sametime,13 since these attitudes overall merely accentuate the tendency to increasingpolarization between the areas inhabited by the rich and those inhabited by the poor.

The growth and decline of Latin American peripheriesThe territorial dynamics of Latin American cities cannot be understood without bearingin mind their enormous socioeconomic inequality generated by longstanding, economicand political processes. The economic transformations in the last three decades and theadoption of neoliberal reforms in Brazil, Mexico and most of Latin America need to betaken into consideration in order to build a comprehensive framework for understandingindustrial and demographic shrinkage on the continent. The process of the liberalizationof the Brazilian economy in the 1980s played a significant role in the loss of theeconomic power of the São Paulo Metropolitan Region. Foreign direct investment (FDI)had impacts on other regions in the state and in the country with less skilled population

11 The outline plan for the Ile de France region sees it as a strategic element in the evolution of theParis urban area.

12 Such as the ‘vertical disintegration of trans-national corporations, which are redefining their corecompetencies to focus on innovation and product strategy’ (Gereffi et al., 2005: 79).

13 In 2003 a waste processing plant involved in the transportation, crushing, reprocessing, bulkstorage and redistribution of demolition waste and related materials, which would have created 30foot high mountains of rubble and brought around 700 daily convoys of heavy trucks onto thestreets of Govan, was successfully rejected by the local community.



in a process named ‘reverse polarization’14 (Rodríguez-Pose and Tomaney, 1999). Therelative economic stability reached in the late 1980s and the economic macro policies,which dismantled ISI and attracted FDI, favoured a relative dispersion of economicactivity from the metropolis outward into the hinterland and a migratory flow of capitaland jobs toward southeastern states (Perillo and Perdigão, 1998). The MetropolitanRegion of São Paulo is a striking example of this process as it had a negative migratorybalance caused by the dispersion of economic activity towards the hinterland of the state.The urban crisis, the lack of economic opportunities, social inequality and its territorialconsequences ended up pushing out the population from the central metropolitan areas(Brito, 2006). In spite of the urban crisis, the land market has always played an importantrole in establishing a pattern of occupancy and mobility in Brazilian cities. Manysub-centres in the metropolitan area of São Paulo, including the city of São Paulo itself,have watched their city centres decay since the 1970s. Meanwhile an active real estatemarket has shifted to the metropolitan periphery inducing relative outward mobility ofthe economic elite.

In developing countries like Brazil or Mexico, the complexity of thedeindustrialization phenomenon cannot be simplified by drawing direct parallels withdeveloped countries, such as the UK or France, where deindustrialization has beenaccompanied by a shift to services, and where the informal sector plays a negligible role.Campolina and Diniz (2007) analyse the evolution of territories such as the ABC regionas ‘productive restructuration’. The reduction of industrial activity was not accompaniedby a strong loss of productivity and the economy has been sustained by other sectors.However, other authors (Rodriguez-Pose and Tomaney, 1999) suggest that producerservices such as financial, real estate and, above all, business services and those servingindustries are clearly underdeveloped. They also notice that, between 1980 and 1983, themunicipalities hosting the largest industrial complexes in the ABC region of São Paulo’smetropolitan area have lost much of their gross value added (GVA) to the rest of the state(Rodriguez-Pose et al., 2001). For them, the tertiarization of the economy, much of itabsorbed by the informal sector, is not sufficient to compensate for the loss of well-paidindustrial jobs. The case of São Caetano do Sul, one of the ABC municipalities discussedlater, illustrates different industrial restructuring phases spearheaded by automobileTNCs during and after the ISI period.

Latin American metropolitan areas, such as São Paulo and Guadalajara, whichdeveloped strong industrial sectors during the ISI period, experienced acceleratedrestructuring processes with shrinking metropolitan cores and fast expanding peripheriesafter neoliberal macro-economic reforms took place in the 1980s (Aguilar and Ward,2003; Caravaca and Méndez, 2003; Roberts, 2005; Ramirez, 2006). Through the 1990s,newly industrializing metropolitan fringes and their hinterlands were the preferredrecipients of industrial FDI. The feared Latin American deindustrialization resultingfrom China’s global presence and the flooding of local markets with Chinesemanufactured goods is affecting countries like Mexico, which is losing manufacturingcompetitiveness to Chinese exports and facing diversion of US electronicsmanufacturing FDI to China (Dussel, 2005). Plant closures and job losses in exportproduction, due to relocation to Asia, are instances of suburban deindustrialization andeconomic shrinkage, as witnessed in the recent boom and bust of Guadalajara’selectronics industry. Located in the city’s outer suburbs, it earned Guadalajara itssobriquet of ‘Mexico’s Silicon Valley’ in the 1990s. However, between 2001 and 2003the city lost more than 45,000 jobs to Asia and particularly to China (Dussel, 2005;Jenkins et al., 2006).

14 In Latin America, ‘secondary cities and towns on the outskirts of large metropolitan regions havebeen more successful in attracting new investment than larger cities . . . Thus the region hasexperienced reverse polarization as high land and labor costs have created urban diseconomies inthe largest cities and forced manufacturing plants to relocate beyond the main metropolitanboundaries’ (Cohen, 2004: 41).



Post-Fordist restructuring in São Caetano do SulSão Paulo Metropolitan Area is Brazil’s strongest link to the globalized economy. Withinthe metropolitan area, the southeast sector, specifically the ABC region, hosts aconcentration of the automobile industry, mainly old plants built in the ISI period. Here,the city of São Caetano do Sul stands out as a prime example of the effects ofdeindustrialization in Brazil.

In the 1930s General Motors pioneered Fordist industry in Brazil, establishing its firstplant in São Caetano, adjacent to the railroad that led to the biggest Brazilian port,Santos. Later, mainly under the Juscelino Kubitsheck government (1956–61), the ABCregion attracted several international automobile enterprises, such as VW, Mercedes-Benz and Ford, and became the major Brazilian industrial centre. During this Fordistperiod, macro-economic policies expanded the national road system, which began todisplace railroads as the principal transportation mode in the country. Within this context,several important industries (General Motors among them) which originally chose tolocate in the city because of its proximity to the railroad moved away in the 1960s to becloser to newly developed highways (Klink, 2001). This first industrial relocation had asignificant impact on the urban areas along the old railroads, and may be considered thebeginning of the emptying and degradation of vast portions of the territory adjacent toformer railroad corridors.

Despite possessing the country’s most highly skilled workforce, the ABC regionwatched automobile TNCs relocate or start new plants in less expensive and less unionizedregions of Brazil (e.g. Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro). Large industrial complexes and thenetwork of small and medium-sized enterprises that developed around them in the ABCregion became less competitive as a result of high wages and the development of urbanstructural bottlenecks associated with congestion, lack of space, strong and conflict-pronetrade unions and an overall low quality of life (Rodríguez-Pose et al., 2001).

In the 1970 census, São Caetano’s demographic growth was already lower than othermunicipal districts in the area. Since 1980, the city has experienced an absolute andconstant decrease in population — from 163,282 inhabitants to 137,277 in the 2000census. In the 1980s, the growth of commerce, services and industrial diversity helpedthe municipal district achieve increases in high-income professionals, which in 2003resulted in the largest index of human development (IHD) being registered of all cities inthe country. Meanwhile the population between 1991 and 2000 recorded a negativeannual growth of almost 1%; there has also been a surge in apartment buildingconstruction, inaccessible to blue-collar residents. Given the costs of land and housing,São Caetano’s high level of quality of life is not affordable to the majority of residents.High housing costs and low birth rates are considered to be among the primary causes ofthe city’s population loss. The population is aging, becoming wealthier and having fewerchildren (Medice, 1993).

Adaptation of local policies in São Caetano do SulIn the present Brazilian context, city administrations have rebranded vacant industrialareas as new sites of opportunity with images of prosperity effacing past industrial crises.In this sense, the former industrial areas are symbolically being transformed into the newurban landscape of a dynamic globalized society. Concomitantly, the deregulation ofBrazilian land markets has attracted substantial foreign and domestic investment in realestate, which has flowed into the construction of new big commercial and residentialdevelopments in these locations.

Within this urban dynamic, São Caetano has succeeded in keeping its economy afloat,changing its economic base to commerce and services. Since 2005, the city has tried toattract new technology industries through public–private partnerships with the intentionof building a new technopole. Additionally, it has promoted high-income, gatedresidential condominiums on an old, unused industrial area. However, even though a



technopole might revive the city’s economy, it might also increase social inequalitythrough gentrification. Thus, it is important to highlight that São Caetano’s wealth hasnot reached everyone in the city. The poor continue to lack access to housing and,consequently, they continue to be expelled to the edge of the metropolis.

In many cities of the ABC region, including São Caetano, the Statute of the City15 hasfacilitated the creation of public–private partnerships in support of infill development ofvacant lands. Unfortunately, administrations have failed to take advantage of these newopportunities due to a resilient land oligopoly, the lack of public resources, and their owninadequate use of legal tools. Despite the Statute of the City legally requiring municipaladministrations to reserve land for low-income housing in areas served by publicinfrastructure, the City’s new master plan (Prefeitura Municipal de S. Caetano doSul, 2006) overlooks the requirement, revealing the clear intention of the city’sadministration to promote the gentrification process.

Guadalajara, Mexico’s shrinking Silicon ValleyDuring the ISI period (1940–80), Guadalajara, the capital city of the State of Jalisco andthe second largest city in Mexico, concentrated most of its heavy industry in severalindustrial parks located along railroad infrastructure in the municipio16 of Guadalajara,which is now the core of a metropolitan region, spanning more than six jurisdictionalentities. However, an electronics and IT industry that emerged in the mid-1960s,beginning with Motorola and Burroughs’ Mexican affiliates locating plants near middle-class residential neighbourhoods at the edge of the city, was followed in the 1970s and1980s by Kodak, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Wang and Tandem, all of which opened plantsfurther out in periurban locations to take advantage of easy road access to the airport,ports and major highways. By 1993, as Mexico joined NAFTA, liberalizing trade andderegulating ISI requirements on TNCs,17 IBM and Hewlett Packard began outsourcingtheir manufacturing functions and spearheading the creation of an industrial cluster ofdomestic suppliers and contractors.18 More than 40 firms made up this cluster, which,during its heyday at the end of the 1990s, reached 320 (Audirac, 2003). It generated closeto 100,000 jobs and more than two and a half billion dollars in exports (Dussel, 1999).During this period, a series of new industrial parks housing domestic and foreignelectronics firms populated Guadalajara’s exurban periphery along the metropolitan ringroad (Audirac, 2003).19 However, the global electronics industry was meanwhile beingreconfigured. All leading US-based TNCs were pulling out of manufacturing andoutsourcing it to a handful of giant global contract manufacturers (CMs)20 (Gereffi et al.,2005). Thus, by the end of the 1990s, practically all Mexican CMs and suppliers ofGuadalajara’s TNCs had been displaced by global CMs like US-based Solectron andFlextronics, Jabil Circuits and others. The accession of China to the WTO in 2001, with

15 The new federal law (#10257/2001) known as Statute of the City promotes land reform in urbanareas in order to change the elitist nature of previous policies and programs in Brazil. The lawincorporates constitutional provisions that have legitimized a broad array of new grassroots claimsfor social welfare policies and reinforced the principle of a ‘social right to the city’.

16 A municipio is similar to a county.17 Liberalization removed restrictions on TNCs over domestic market access and foreign ownership of

domestic firms, as well as the requirement under ISI for FDI that a percentage of TNC content inproduction be of domestic origin.

18 Mexican contract manufacturers of printed circuit boards (Encitel and Mextel), computers andperipherals (Unisys), hard drives (Compuworld) and suppliers of cables and harnesses (ElectronicaPantera).

19 In the municipios of Zapopan, Tlaquepaque and Tlajomulco.20 US-based global contract manufacturers control a significant share of the world’s electronics

manufacturing capacity by selling manufacturing services to lead TNCs like IBM, Hewlett Packardand Nortel.



its four-times-cheaper hourly wages and the size of its market, beckoned several ofGuadalajara’s US-based CMs. From 2002 to 2004, Guadalajara’s electronics industrycontracted by more than 50% (Palacios, 2006) reverting to assembly and subassemblyproduction. With little hope of recovering its former ‘Silicon Valley’ lustre,Guadalajara’s electronics industry is a vivid case of domestic industrial bust stronglyinfluenced by the US dot.com financial debacle in the early 2000s and by therestructuring of global production networks. As China’s world-wide manufacturingdominance grew, locating global CMs21 in Guadalajara was intended to take advantageof Asian industrial upgrading and world-wide economies of scale in ICT manufacturing.However, rather than helping the existing Silicon Valley grow, this neoliberal bid for aplace in the global ICT industry confined Guadalajara’s electronic manufacturingsuburbs to a struggling low-wage assembly enclave (Gallagher and Zarsky, 2007).

Industrial shrinkage and swollen growthGuadalajara’s urban core and inner suburbs have lost population while the periphery hasgrown rapidly since the 1980s. However, during the 1990s, the growth of the suburbanmunicipios (Zapopan and Tlaquepaque) that host the bulk of the suburban and periurbanelectronics industry slowed down, with the exception of the more exurban municipio of ElSalto — an ISI-period industrial corridor where decades later IBM, NEC and Hitachilocated their plants. This municipio is one of the poorest in the metropolitan region with apaucity of public services, infrastructure and schools and obsolete and dilapidatedindustrial facilities. During the 1990s it received the highest influx of low-incomepopulation in search of cheap housing and low-skilled jobs; yet in 2007, Hitachi, the latestelectronics TNC to leave Guadalajara for Asia, laid off 4,500 El Salto workers, increasingthe swollen unemployment numbers of this industrial sector (Rodríguez–Bautista andCota Yáñez, 2006). Whereas laid-off workers in industrialized countries may find atemporary — yet diminishing — welfare safety net during unemployment, their LatinAmerican counterparts have no other alternative than to temporarily or permanently seekrefuge in informal sector jobs.22 Despite the slowdown in population growth in the oldestGuadalajara municipios, federal housing programs, which in the 1990s restructured toprovide mortgages to qualified workers leaving homebuilding and development to theprivate sector, contributed to the production of low-income housing in the periphery ofthese suburbs. Informal settlements — a major path to homeownership — are typicallyfound interspersed among tracts of elite residential development and affluent gatedcommunities as well as large swathes of working class, low-income housing. Theexpansion of this ‘social-interest’ housing sector corresponded with the boom ofGuadalajara’s electronics industry. However, in spite of an increase in homeownershipduring this period, as in the case of São Paulo’s suburbs, the resulting suburban landscapeis highly fragmented, segregated according to income and social characteristics, poorlyserved by public infrastructure and lacking in amenities (Harner et al., 2009).

Despite the strong pronouncements and lofty sustainable development goals found instate and local planning documents, these remain wish lists of public administrationswhose policies are fundamentally oriented to attracting FDI. Hence, urban and regionalplanning activity at the state and the municipio levels is characteristically focused onmanaging the land use and infrastructure systems that help, on the one hand, secure localand international investment and, on the other, promote the city and the regioninternationally as a unique place. After Guadalajara’s Silicon Valley declined, the City

21 Contract manufacturers’ profit margins rely on low-labour-cost production sites, a flexible labourpolicy, short-term employment contracts, a high degree of standardization in process technologies,and a low-wage feminized labour force (Gereffi et al., 2005).

22 In Guadalajara, more than 50% of the workforce depends on the informal economy (Cota Yáñez andGuerrero Aviléz, 2006).



and State began promoting a new and more diversified industrial cluster intended toattract ICT, biotechnology, medical equipment and aerospace international companies. Ithas also embarked on intense global city marketing initiatives like the failed attempt athousing a new Guggenheim Museum and the successful bid for the 2011 Pan AmericanGames. Yet, all the while, local governments in the Guadalajara metro area, have beenineffective in managing the growing number of informal settlements, many in extremepoverty, that have proliferated since the 1980s along the metropolitan periphery(Mungía-Huato, 2006; Venegas-Herrera and Castañeda-Huizar, 2006).

ConclusionDrawing on Scott’s (1995) and Soja’s (2000) three modes of industrial urbanism, thisarticle uses the term ‘shrinking cities’ to denote the urban ravages associated with thedemise of the Fordist mode of urbanism in the evolving post-Fordist metropolis. TheEuropean and Latin American industrial suburbs and peripheries examined here providea glimpse of the global — North and South — scope of the current post-Fordist mode ofindustrial urbanism and an overview of the differences and similarities of its glocalrestructuring manifestations. Industrialized countries like the UK and France have had tocope with the negative effects of the growth of new industrial spaces — the hallmarkof restructuring economic space under post-Fordist urbanism. They have shedmanufacturing from Fordist industrial suburbs to NICs in the global South. Meanwhile,NICs like Brazil and Mexico have abandoned their Fordist-ISI industrial sites in favourof the urban peripheries and hinterlands receiving off-shored or outsourcedmanufacturing. Working-class suburbs on both sides of the Atlantic, from the Parisian‘red’ suburbs to São Paulo’s ABC region, despite originating in different time periods,were built under Fordist modern ideals of mass production and consumption supportedby some form of corporatist economic alliance between workers, capital andgovernment. However, with the rise of post-Fordist urbanism a radical reorganization ofthe modern Fordist city–suburb dichotomy has taken place. Today the four suburbancases in this article show that, from the earliest Parisian steel and textile suburb of SaintDenis and Glasgow’s shipyard burgh of Govan, to São Paulo’s São Caetano automobileindustrial suburb and El Salto, Guadalajara’s first industrial suburban corridor, one cansee many similarities: varying levels of shrinkage and growth spurred by competition forforeign investment; resultant gentrification and displacement from the pressure toredevelop the most profitable sites; unemployment from deindustrialization with adwindling public welfare safety net; declining support for public housing and provisionof affordable housing; and relatively large populations of poor immigrants attracted bycheap or dilapidated housing. In the Latin American case, accretion of informal andsquatter settlements often accompanies the urbanization of industrial suburbs. Theseblatant differences between affluent and growing and pauperized and shrinkingneighbourhoods, constitute new ‘metropolarities’ (Soja, 2000) of the post-Fordistmetropolis in the US and Western Europe. However, in Latin America, given entrenchedsocial and economic inequality, their incidence is ubiquitous and exacerbated by post-Fordist industrial restructuring. Lastly, both Govan’s shipyard decline and the recentboom and bust of Guadalajara’s Silicon Valley in the second phase of globalizationmarked by China’s role in global manufacturing points to the vulnerability of post-Fordist industrial urbanism to new restructuring crises.

In this new spatial, social and economic configuration, the future of the olderindustrial suburbs is as yet uncertain. Some may draw advantage from their proximity tourban centres that have remained dynamic or that are being revitalized, or fromconnections with new development ‘poles’. Others may find themselves caught up in adownward spiral of falling investments and decline. Thus, the territories of the formerindustrial and working-class towns are gradually breaking up into quarters that arecaught up in a process of growing pauperization, and quarters that are gaining value andgentrifying fast because of the economic and real-estate market pressures deriving from



their proximity to the city centres. Urban policies have a critical impact on the evolutionof inner suburban rings: in the context of globalization, these territories are probablymore sensitive to change and local policies may accentuate or mitigate the effects of realestate and private investment’s pressure.

In Brazil, the economic decline of the 1980s and 1990s, the rise of globalization, theretreat of social policies, and an elitist and incomplete welfare state contributed to morerecent increases in income inequality. Brazil’s territorial patterns have replicated thisdynamic of socioeconomic inequality. The long-term process of deindustrialization andthe strong speculative high-end land market combined with a lack of housing policies forlow-income populations contributed to urban shrinkage. As a result of these trends, citycores have been losing population and becoming more gentrified and expensive, whileblue-collar residents have migrated to the outskirts of the city, illegally occupying fragileenvironmental areas. Public–private partnerships’ efforts to revitalize declining areas —as in the case of Santo André and São Caetano — have set in motion patterns ofdevelopment that will continue to gentrify large urban areas by promoting theconstruction of gated residential communities and ‘big box’ development.

Although the lack of a long-term strategic Mexican industrial policy is often blamedfor the failure to anticipate global trends, the boom and bust of Guadalajara’s electronicsindustry suggest support for the contention about globalization’s immiserating growth(Kaplinsky, 2008). The kind of post-Fordist industrialization fomented by regional tradeagreements (e.g. NAFTA) has resulted in premature deindustrialization and shrinkage ofdomestic productive capacity (Csaba, 2001; Dasgupta and Singh, 2006; Sader, 2008) inindustrial sectors unable to compete with Chinese industrial might and global scale.

Post-Fordist urbanization in Europe has been associated with the weakening of thewelfare state and fiscal devolution to cities, and with decline of central cities and first tiersuburbs, coupled with the growth of footloose industries, edge cities and restivemetropolitan expansion. Latin America’s urban evolution parallels a similar pattern,although, as discussed, a pattern driven by a dissimilar yet related set of factors. One ofthese is Mexico’s institutional weakness vis-à-vis deepened reliance on TNCs and FDIin export-led development. Another factor is the change of the global system ofproduction in which nation states, such as those in Asia, have strategically leveraged theirindustries to take advantage of global value-chain restructuring (Mesquita Moreira,2007), while TNCs have taken advantage of their freedom to relocate activitiesregionally and internationally. Jessop and Sum (2000) contrast this glocalization processwith strategic ‘glurbanization’, a process whereby cities enhance their place-basedcompetitive advantage in the world economy to procure and retain FDI. In Europe aswell as in Latin America, the interplay of these two processes is occurring territorially atthe metropolitan fringe with high-end, elite development and new technopole schemes.However, as the four suburban cases suggest, the post-Fordist metropolis is being shapedby the industrial and commercial global shift from the North Atlantic to the Pacific Rim.The pervasive neoliberal reorganization of industrial activity across the world subsumedunder the notion of economic globalization (Harvey, 2005) continues to make redundantboth industrial space and large sectors of the labour force whose skills and numbers aremismatched with the new suburban service economies of the North and with thestreamlining and reconfiguring industrial economies of the South. This reorganization isas much economic as sociospatial and in its wake, as the case studies in this articlesuggest, old European industrial suburbs, which have undergone three eras of industrialtransformation, and newer Latin American industrial suburbs, which are transitioning tonew forms of global industrial subcontracting, are splintering into metropolarities: glocalpremium-network spaces (Graham and Marvin 2001) and zones of private consumption,exclusivity and wealth, juxtaposed to shrinking areas permanently or temporarilydisconnected from infrastructure or other flows of capital. These shrinking areas gatherthe urban poor and the redundant production space and workers — the global labourforce — who bear the brunt of the degenerative processes stemming from the latestrealignments in the global organization of industrial production.



Ivonne Audirac ([email protected]), Urban and Regional Planning Program, University ofTexas-Arlington, Arlington, Texas 76019-1588, USA, Emmanuèle Cunningham-Sabot([email protected]), University of Rennes 2, UMR 6590 CNRS ESO,Place du Recteur H. Le Moal CS 24307, 35043 Rennes Cedex, France, Sylvie Fol([email protected]), Université Paris 1 Panthéon — Sorbonne, UMR Géographie — Cités,Institut de Géographie, 191 Rue Saint-Jacques, 75005 Paris, France and Sergio TorresMoraes ([email protected]), Programa de Pós-Graduação em Urbanismo,Departamento de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, R.Venancia Rita da Conceiçao 100, Estaleirinho Balneário Camboriú, Santa Catarina CEP88334-530, Brasil.

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RésuméLa décroissance suburbaine, analysée comme un processus découlant de la disparitiondu mode fordiste de développement urbain, se manifeste généralement par une baissede la population, de l’activité économique et de l’emploi. Elle est aussi intimement liéeà la restructuration globale de l’organisation industrielle associée à la montée dumode post-fordiste de développement urbain et, plus récemment, à la poussée del’industrialisation en Asie. Fondé sur les approches de l’urbanisme industriel, cet articleexamine la première couronne de banlieues industrielles qui s’est développée autour desgrandes villes dans la phase la plus rapide de l’urbanisation fordiste. Ces banlieuesindustrielles, bien que formées à différentes périodes, connaissent aujourd’hui desmutations spécifiques et des restructurations profondes liées à leur position particulière:entre les villes centres et les périphéries en expansion de la métropole post-fordiste. Cetarticle décrit et compare la décroissance des banlieues dans deux villes européennes(Glasgow et Paris) et deux villes latino-américaines (São Paulo au Brésil et Guadalajaraau Mexique), comme différents exemples de territoires intégrés de manière asymétrique etfragmentée dans la géographie de la globalisation.



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Declining Suburbs in Europe and Latin America