The topic of deindustrialization encourages students to apply their understanding of place to economic change. For example, industrial activity is unevenly located through space because of the ways that innovation diffuses and the high fixed costs that stick or embed certain activities, technologies, and industries to place. The term time-space compression is applied to the new relationships among time, space, and the material world. The social impacts of industrialization can be illustrated by how the New International Division of Labor has tended to create particular clusters of jobs in particular places. Industrialization changes human health and thus affects the quality of life, morbidity, mortality, and broader population dynamics.
Many industrial processes have the effect of concentrating harmful materials near human settlements.
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