Seth Schindler awarded ESRC grant for new research project

GDI Senior Lecturer and MUI member Seth Schindler has been awarded an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant for a project that will look at deindustrialisation in the Global South.

Deindustrialisation is associated with economic decline in the former industrial heartlands of the OECD, but economists have recently demonstrated that deindustrialisation has been more severe in the global South. However, deindustrialisation has gone largely unnoticed by urban scholars focused on cities in the Global South.

This project will address this gap by comparing the diverse manifestations of deindustrialisation and its impacts in three cities in the Global South. The research will focus on how deindustrialisation has impacted industry and labourers in cities and will chart the ways public officials, key stakeholders in civil society, firms and labourers have responded to deindustrialisation.

Economist Dani Rodrik is a member of this project’s advisory board, as well as Ron Martin, Ray Hudson, Gordon MacLeod, Kevin Ward, Simon Marvin and Martin Jones - some of Britain’s most renowned urban scholars. GDI’s managing director, Diana Mitlin, will mentor Dr Schindler on the project.

The project will focus on Kanpur, India, which has suffered wholesale industrial decline; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where deindustrialisation has been accompanied by urban expansion and population growth; and Buenos Aires, Argentina, where deindustrialisation is highly concentrated in certain labour-intensive industries and associated neighbourhoods.

Dr Schindler has also been awarded a Newton Advanced Fellowship in collaboration with Mustafa Kemal Bayırbağ at the Middle East Technical University. The Fellowship will look at Turkey's urbanisation-led development strategy in Ankara.