Ina Valkanova
2020
Full text
Production and manufacturing have shaped nations, cities, and urban environments worldwide. The rise of China as the leading global industrial power, the phenomenon of radical automation or the new cutting-edge developments in Silicon Valley, California, have for some time attracted the focus of academic study. Contrastingly, the form of industrial devel-opment occurring in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is taking place without much discussion, although it constitutes a major transformation. Europe’s industrial heartland, once depicted as a “Blue Banana” stretching from Manchester to Milan, has now moved East. Since the first eastward expansion of the European Union in 2004, a whole new territory of production has emerged literally in the European backyard, with numerous industrial and special economic zones (SEZs) having been built in Eastern Europe in the past 20 years.
