A World of Rust Belts?: Deindustrialisation and its Impacts in Cities in the Global South

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The election of Donald Trump and Brexit signal a demand among voters in the North Atlantic for the reversal of three decades of economic, cultural and political integration. Discontent with globalisation is fuelled by the deeply-rooted popular narrative that the "new international division of labour" - as outlined by Folker Fröbel and colleagues in 1980 - has resulted in the offshoring of well-paying factory jobs from the industrial heartlands of the OECD to developing countries. This research project seeks to enrich our understanding of the economic and urban geography of contemporary globalization by troubling this narrative of the rise of BRICS and other 'emerging' countries at the expense of jobs and industry in the global North. It will document deindustrialisation in South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, and inform a nuanced understanding of the new international geography of deindustrialisation.The 'alter-globalization' movement reached its zenith at the 'battle of Seattle' at the 1999 World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference. The movement's participants were diverse, but one common refrain was that in a liberalised global economy producers in developing countries would struggle to compete against lead-firms in the OECD. However, a consequence of trade liberalization that activists failed to anticipate was the rapid expansion of South-South trade. A 2015 report published by UNCTAD entitled 'Global Value Chains and South-South Trade' shows that from 1990-2010 South-South trade increased ~15% annually and the majority of intra-South trade originates in East Asia. As a result of exposure to competition from East Asia, local industry in many cities in South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America has been in severe decline (Rodrik 2016). Economist Dani Rodrik terms deindustrialisation in developing countries 'premature' because in contrast to the pattern observed in the OECD, it has taken place prior to a shift from manufacturing to service-sector led growth, and he shows it has been more severe than deindustrialisation in advanced-industrialised countries such as the US and UK. This proposed research is the first comparative research project on deindustrialisation in the global South situated at the urban scale. It will focus on three cities where deindustrialisation has manifest itself differently - Kanpur, India; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and Buenos Aires, Argentina - and it will focus on three themes in each city.1. Urban/regional planning and development - This will focus on the ways in which policy makers problematised deindustrialisation, and whether/how they sought to address it. In some cases they may have tried to protect domestic industry/labourers, while in other cases they may have simply sought to mitigate its impacts. This will be informed by policy documents and interviews with past and present government officials.2. Business strategy, industrial policy and innovation - Strategies that allowed certain industries/firms to remain operational in each city will be identified. Possibilities include reducing labour costs, investing in technology and enhancing productivity, entering a joint venture with a more powerful firm, and/or subcontracting to informal sector producers. It will also evaluate whether policies that sought to assist domestic firms were successful. This will be informed by interviews with representatives of companies and industry groups.3. Social welfare - This segment of the research determines the impact of deindustrialisation on labourers and documents their responses. It focuses on the ways labourers have adapted to changing labour markets (eg retraining or shifting to informal-sector activity), and it pays particular attention to the ways women and men have been affected differently (eg women's participation in the informal economy may have increased as the factory jobs available to men have disappeared).