The Rise of the Rustbelt: Revitalizing Older Industrial Regions

The Rise of the Rustbelt demonstrates the value of interchange and comparison of ideas and policies for industrial regeneration between three major regions: the Great Lakes of North America, the Ruhrgebiet of North-Rhine-Westphalia, and the industrial belt of South Wales. The top priority of these areas is to conserve and retain their status as industrial powerhouses by attracting investment to compensate for their dramatic structural decline over the past twenty years and more. They have much to learn from one another. Encompassing environmental and sociocultural issues, as well as those of industrial economics and human resource development, The Rise of the Rustbelt will interest students, researchers and professionals in geography, planning, public policy, and industrial and business studies. It offers a wide-ranging and fully detailed analysis of some of the key issues arising in the wake of unprecedented industrial restructuring in three world-leading regions. This book shows the possibilities and some of the limits of policy efforts made by business and government to bring about the renewal of badly hit regional economies, whose dependence on industries of the earlier phases of industrialization left them vulnerable to deindustrialization. A survey and analysis of major old industrial regions - the Ruhr, South Wales, the Great Lakes and Ontario - in terms of their economic regeneration and their re-emergence as centres of thriving industrial activity of the new kind.