Deindustrialization expands in European cities, yet they become more productive

Thanks to the advent of new technologies in the manufacturing sector

The loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector has become ever more pronounced in the past decades. Yet, according to a recent analysis by the MISTA (Metropolitan Industrial Strategies and Economic Sprawl) project, this trend has actually been caused by increased productivity, rather than by deindustrialization.

These trends have been most pronounced in major European cities, especially those that have turned their attention to the development of new technologies in the production sector. All the urban areas in the study registered economic growth between 1995 and 2017, the researchers observed, while manual labour intensity has concurrently decreased in almost all.

The new Industrial Revolution is having an increasingly automated face

A quarter of the main metropolitan regions of Europe were characterized by industrial growth in the 1995-2017 period, as the main result of an increase in productivity. In other metropolitan regions observed, including Rome, Milan, Naples and Turin, the deindustrialization phenomenon formed a significant component, but a lesser one, in the transformation of industrial employment rates.

Half of these regions benefited from a strong metropolitan environment that held back the loss of jobs in the sector: this is the case of Rome and Milan, as well as Paris, Brussels, Warsaw and Budapest, to name some.

In the remaining urban areas, deindustrialization took place in weak metropolitan environments. This group, which includes Turin and Naples, as well as Berlin, Vienna, Dublin and Barcelona, is mainly comprised of cities in countries that joined the European Union before 2004, with medium and high-income levels and frequently with a mixed economic structure or one based on services.

"New technologies have had a fundamental role in the transformation of industrial employment," explained Valeria Fedeli, a lecturer in urban planning and policy at the Politecnico di Milano University, as quoted by ANSA news agency. "On the one hand, they reduced the number of jobs, but, on the other, they also caused the quality of employment in the sector to grow.”

She concluded: "This trend can help local administrations not to think of the cities as just fields of competition between residential and tertiary functions, but also as complex subjects in which powerful new interactions between manufacturing, services, culture and residence exist".