Whereas some cities are experiencing a worsening of economic inequalities and failures, others have managed to reinvent themselves by growing new sectors – electronics, pharmaceuticals, finance, business support services
- Ron Martin
Arguably, everything about Milton Keynes is deliberate: its site, its transport, its housing, its business sectors, its jobs. From the moment of its ‘birth’ in 1967 as one of the country’s ‘new towns’, Milton Keynes was planned as a whole. Over the past three decades, it has out-smarted every other city in the UK in terms of its annual average growth rate of output and employment.
Meanwhile, most of Britain’s old industrial cities – Newcastle, Sheffield, Birmingham, Glasgow and Liverpool among them – underwent a dramatic slippage in growth from the beginning of the 1980s to the late 1990s. Although their decline has slowed, they still lag behind the national average in terms of economic growth.
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Image credit: Rhino Neal
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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