The position of old industrial regions (OIRs) has been neglected in recent regional
development research, partly as a result of dominant discourses concerned with concepts
such as the knowledge economy, learning regions and the new regionalism. One outcome
of this conceptual overload is that empirical research has typically been confined to all
too familiar case studies of regional success that tell a rather partial story. Yet the
extension of the European integration project eastwards alongside growing competition
from the urban and regional ‘hotspots’ of the global south prompts a series of largely
unconsidered questions about the ability of OIRs to achieve sustainable economic
development and social cohesion in the years ahead. Lacking the capital, technological
and labour assets of more dynamic cities and regions, and with the historic legacy of
deindustrialisation and the decline of traditional sectors, OIRs face some important
dilemmas of adjustment and adaptation.
In this paper our purpose is to engage with these issues through some preliminary
empirical research into the recent fortunes of OIRs in Western Europe’s largest
economies: France, Germany, Spain and the UK. Drawing upon material from the
Eurostat database, our results hint at interesting patterns of divergence in the performance
of OIRs in terms of processes of economic restructuring, employment change and social
cohesion. In particular some important variations emerge in the trajectory of regions
within different national contexts. Drawing upon recent thinking relating to commodity
chains and global production networks, our results lead us to pose a series of questions
that relate to the way regions are being repositioned within broader political and
economic networks as part of unfolding processes of uneven development and changing
spatial divisions of labour