The Mediterranean City in Transition

As industrial capital becomes more mobile, the 1970s have been a period of radical transformation of cities and regions. Powerful trends in the direction of decomposition of the production process of many once vertically integrated industries, tend to reverse the trend towards integration which characterized the first decades of the twentieth century in the fordist drive for mass production and consumption (Scott and Storper 1986: 11). The consequent restructuring toward flexible accumulation creates new core/periphery hierarchies, which have much affected the NICs. In Southern Europe, restructuring involves both the formal sector, in which certain industry groups decline while others emerge, and the informal sector. Researchers have focused heavily on the latter. Informal activities have always been growing in the Mediterranean, but recently flexible accumulation revitalized small industry and articulated it in the capitalist economy.

Analysis up to this point has illustrated the transformation of Greater Athens and Salonica into the principal productive centres of Greece during the 1960s and the rise of the working class in urban society and urban growth processes.