In 1998, both astrophysicists and urban planners were startled by parallel discoveries that challenged the conventional wisdom of their respective fields. In space, the Hubble Telescope revealed that, contrary to expectations, the expansion of the universe is not slowing down, but accelerating. Like the universe, great cities seem to keep on expanding forever. More importantly, recent data show that, like the center of the universe, the hearts of great cities do not die, even after shedding huge amounts of wealth and value-adding enterprise to their suburbs.
Cities can and do reinvent themselves in a free market.
And the industrial cities of Britain and North America, after 40 years of stagnation and decline, appear to be doing just that. The point was not without merit. While the particular local dynamics of urban decline vary from city to city, the fact of urban decline has been very nearly universal in North America and Great Britain during much of the last half of the 20th Century. This downward trend in urban prosperity was manifested in most mature industrial economies, but produced its most extreme consequences in the U.S. and U.K., where many major cities lost 40 percent to 65 percent of their middle-income jobs between 1950 and 1990. Indeed, the worldwide collapse of urban real estate prices at the end of the 1980s is now widely interpreted by economic historians as a benchmark indicator that we had reached the end of the Industrial Era.