Metamorfosi occidentali. La deindustrializzazione della città contemporanea

This article questions the category of the «de-industrializing city» as a useful concept for understanding urbanization in the Western world, from the last decades of the twentieth century to the present. It considers recent works on the de-industrialization of American, British and German cities to reflect on the importance of this topic for historical studies and reformulate interpretations of the «urban crisis» of the 1960’s and 70’s and its long-lasting consequences. New research perspectives emerge from the analysis of public policies and the transformation of landscapes, which are connected to factory dislocation, working-class displacement, and the evolving conceptualisation of the «inner city». A re-evaluation of economic approaches stands out as a promising strategy to better contextualise urban transformations within the «cumulative structural break» that characterised Western industrialised countries at the end of the twentieth century.