The Uncertain Future of the Urban Core by Christopher M. Law

Author:Christopher M. Law [Law, Christopher M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138051027
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

SERVICE EMPLOYMENT CHANGE IN THE CORE

The service sector has always been important in the core, and with the decline of manufacturing has come to dominate the economy. However since it includes such a heterogeneous collection of activities it is often difficult to generalise about trends in this sector. There are several cleavages in services: public versus private; office versus non-office; and producer versus consumer, all of which can be used to characterise locational attributes and trends but still fail to capture every aspect (Daniels 1985). Services can also be divided into higher and lower orders, the former catering for a regional, national and even international market whilst the latter meets the needs of the local population. Lower-order services could be expected to expand rapidly in the suburbs with the decentralisation of the population and contract in the core following depopulation. Higher-order services are strongly attracted to the city centre because of its centrality and might be expected to be amongst the last to resist the forces of dispersal. Owing to the cost of land in the city centre many service activities, including hospitals, universities and sporting facilities, were forced out during the industrial period into what is now the inner city where they often provide significant and durable centres of employment. Many service activities, but by no means all, have been experiencing job increases in recent years so giving the core a favourable structure for growth, although given the forces of decentralisation this may not be realised in practice. The figures for our case study cities are shown in Table 5.9 where it can be seen that only in Pittsburgh and the French cities was there service employment growth. Further evidence for the vitality of the city core in continental Western Europe is provided by Blotevogel and Schickhoff (1986) who demonstrate that several West German central cities experienced employment increases in the period 1977– 82. However nearly all cores had a declining share of employment in the metropolitan region. Given the diverse nature of services it is only possible to interpret these trends in terms of individual functions. The two principal activities, retailing and offices, will be considered in later chapters. The former has generally been shedding jobs whilst the latter has frequently been expanding, although its performance varies considerably between cities. In the rest of this section we shall comment on employment trends in the other activities.

The decline of employment in transport and communications has chiefly been caused by the loss of jobs in railways and port activities. Employment in postal activities and other transport services has been stable and even increased in some cases. The contraction of the traditional railway freight business has resulted in the closure of goods yards, often sited on the fringe of the city centre. There has often also been a reduced demand for passenger services creating surplus station space. In addition job losses have arisen from increased productivity and rationalisation of the system, which in the case of Britain and North America was often built by competing companies.

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