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In this chapter, the authors offer a critical appraisal of predictions of a jobless future due do rapid technological change, as well as provide evidence on whether the rate of occupational change has been increasing. The authors critique the “task replacement” methodology that underlies the most powerful and specific predictions about the impact of technology on employment in particular occupations. There are a number of reasons why assuming a correspondence between task replacement and employment declines is not warranted. The authors also raise questions about how rapidly the development, acceptance, and diffiusion of labor-displacing technologies is likely to occur. In the empirical portion of the chapter, the authors compare the current rate of employment disruption with those observed in earlier periods. This analysis is based on an analysis of occupation data in the US covering the period 1870–2015. Using an index of dissimilarity as the metric, the authors find that the rate of occupational change from 1870 to 2015 does not provide evidence of a sharp uptick in the rate of occupational shifts in the information age. Instead, the rate of occupation shifts has been declining slowly throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Thus, the issues and results discussed here suggest that imminent massive employment displacement is not a foregone conclusion.

Globalisation accompanied by the rapid development of the information and communication technology (ICT) has largely boosted international trade in services over the past decade or so. Because services account for a higher proportion of production costs, firms are taking every opportunity to go for lower-cost solutions for the provision of business process services. International sourcing of business support services has, therefore, been a preferred solution to the ongoing cost pressures and related skill shortages experienced in many developed countries.

This chapter examines megaproject design and planning in two “shrinking cities” – Philadelphia, PA and Detroit, MI – and concludes that megaproject “metastasis,” or repeated expansions into surrounding urban fabrics, is promoting the reduction of downtown into a series of self-contained enclaves. While political coalitions are constructing megaprojects, or large public works and/or single buildings, in cities around the world, in the United States, single-building megaprojects motivated by “growth coalitions” of public and private development actors have proliferated in downtowns since 1990. The urban design impacts of these megaprojects on the surrounding urban fabric have been little studied. Data on the institutional history, physical expansion, and relationship of the megaprojects to the urban fabric is combined with a qualitative analysis of megaproject theory and its application to the American condition, as well as to the political economy of development in American shrinking cities. The chapter concludes that megaprojects such as convention centers and casinos tend to expand inexorably once they are introduced into the American downtown. This metastasis results in the destruction of existing older buildings and street networks, the consolidation of street blocks into ever-larger superblocks, and the eventual physical restructuring of downtowns into enclaves of older fabric amidst clusters of megaproject superblocks. Applying Jacobs’ (1992) theory of “moral hybrids” between “commerce and politics” to megaproject metastasis, the chapter argues that while megaprojects may be inevitable in American downtowns, they should be sited away from active, small-scale urban fabrics to reduce the negative impacts of future metastases. The chapter takes a design-oriented perspective on a phenomenon that is almost always understood from a political economy perspective alone. Megaprojects are significant physical entities, and the chapter clarifies their physical impacts on the urban fabric while indicating urban design policy directions to reduce these impacts in future.