After Deindustrialization: Uneven Growth and Economic Inequality in “Postindustrial” Chicago

Abstract

abstract This article presents a critical commentary on the development, through restructuring, of the Chicago economy in the period since the onset of deindustrialization in the early 1980s. Adapting an innovative methodology for the measurement of labor‐market inequalities over time at the metropolitan scale, the article provides an empirical analysis of the city's new mode of growth. A notable feature is an entrenched and deepening pattern of wage inequality in Chicago, which is distinctive from that evident at the national level. Closer attention should be paid to what have proved to be extended processes of economic transformation at the urban scale, the social and geographic contours of which have yet to be adequately mapped.