Restructuring

Restructuring is a process that describes broad underlying shifts in prominent economic, social, and cultural systems. The term is invoked most frequently to summarize the periodic changes in the capitalist economy at the global, national, and regional scales. There were restructurings during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, and restructuring is ongoing. Restructuring has a geographic dimension in that the process often leads to a spatial redistribution of human activity. Economic factors, such as the shift by transnational corporations away from Fordist production systems toward flexible production systems, have caused profound spatial adjustments in economic activity. The nature of capitalism itself, with its ceaseless change and expansion, provokes restructurings. David Harvey cited the movement of capital from the primary circuit of production to the secondary circuit of the built environment as an example of a restructuring that resulted in the redevelopment of urban cores along with gentrification that displaced the poor away from the center. Demographic change is also a stimulant for restructurings, with additional spatial dimensions including the change in migratory flow patterns of people. Technological innovations often drive restructurings, with consequent spatial change in the distribution of growth and development of urban systems.

Economic restructurings are correlated with 50-year Kondratiev waves or long waves of economic growth. Each wave is divided into four phases: prosperity, recession, depression, and recovery. Brian Berry observed that Kondratiev waves are characterized by accelerating rates of price increase from deflationary depressions (the 1840s and 1890s) to inflationary peaks (1815, 1865, 1920, and 1980–1981), followed by decade-long plunges from the peaks to primary troughs (1825, 1873, 1929, and 1991), by weak recoveries, and then by sags into the next deflationary depressions. When economic growth declines, firms become reluctant to invest and unemployment rises. Eventually, the trough of the wave will be reached and economic activity will be stirred up again on the basis of key technologies.

John Borchert noted spatial variation in the intensity of American urban development during key economic restructurings and associated them with innovations in transport and energy technologies that produced well-marked epochs. Each restructuring characterized by new technologies gave unique shape to the character of the urban landscape during that particular time. Cities put down physical infrastructure indicative of the state-of-the-art technology of the time. During periods of economic growth, urban[Page 412] transport and infrastructure were laid down and city building increased. Thus, the infrastructure of the present-day built environment is an accumulation derived from these transport technology epochs marked by technology innovations in water power, steam engines, steel rails, automobiles, and jet engines. Borchert's classification scheme, therefore, provides an excellent way in which to demonstrate the spatial aspects of restructuring as each epoch resulted in a different spatial configuration of the American urban hierarchy.

The first epoch, the sail wagon (1790–1830), was characterized by a compact urban system that was economically oriented toward Europe. The 1790 census recognized only 24 urban places, and most were large port cities on the Atlantic coast or river towns that were linked to the Atlantic coast (Figure 1a). No one city dominated at this point in time, as observed by the nearly equal populations of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. The smaller inland river towns, such as New Haven, Richmond, Hartford, and Albany, all were navigationally linked to the larger coastal cities; thus, their growth depended on that relationship. Many factories and mills of the time used water power for economic production.

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