Cities in Transition

The local industry mix provides the conventional framework within which a city's economic position and prospects are evaluated and its redevelopment is planned. The industrial approach has been complemented here with an occupational-functional approach that measures the comparative advantage—competitive position—of a given urban area along five broad paths of economic development: entrepreneurship, central management, research and development, precision operations, and routine operations. Looking beyond the products a city makes to the roles it plays and the skills it performs shifts the emphasis from the immediate fortunes of a given industry and the direct flow of current income to the long-run power and potential of local resources, especially human resources. This new perspective is also more sensitive to state and local public policy, and illustrations are provided of the ways in which educational and other strategies have been used implicitly and could be planned more explicitly to guide cities through these most difficult years of industrial transition.