The A. examines the changing course and effects of direct intervention, by the central state, in local spatial change. The New Town started as a response to the local labour movement's demands for better living conditions and secure employment
. Central government replaced local government and saw Peterlee as a way of ensuring the maintenance and reproduction of a labour force for mining coal. When coal mining collapsed, Peterlee became a spatial concentration of cheap peripheral labour to be used
-based mechanized production on greenfield sites, using semi-skilled labour and producing in different sectors from those previously dominant. This restructuring had important consequent effects on the development of the urban built form
, and on the social and political behaviour of the local labour force.
The A. looks at one particular aspect of uneven development: the relations in the workplace between management and workforces. In wing various strategies to sectonalize and control labour, managements effectively help create social deprivation
. In treating certain workers as Peripheral labour, managers compound preexisting deprivation and create it anew.
broken up by socio-economic changes, both at home and in the factory, and the economic power and organizational base of the labour movement was weakened. This chapter analyses the relationship between changing political geographies and industrial
labour in a period of economic boom| at the racism black immigrants and their children faced| and at state policies intended to control racial conflict, including low and order or physical force.