Restructuring and Decentralization in a World City

World cities face the twin challenges of metropolitan socioeconomic restructuring and spatial decentralization. New York's global financial and managerial roles, coupled with deindustrialization and corporate relocation, have polarized social areas. Census data from 1970 and 1990 for the New York metropolitan area indicate demographic and employment shifts, social and ethnic divisions, concentration of wealth and poverty, and exurban growth pressures. The evolution of greater New York from a monocentric to a polycentric metropolis, divided into semiautonomous and competing realms, suggests a reordering of urban space that may become a pattern in other world cities.