'Manufacturing Mid Wales'

The decentralization of manufacturing production from urban zones to rural regions was one of the key economic changes in Europe in the latter half of the twentieth. From the 1970s it came to characterise a structural shift in urban-rural economic relations across Europe -sometimes referred to as the ‘ruralisation of industry’.
We look in this paper at one such site – Mid Wales, in the UK – which from one perspective is presented as the ‘heartland’ of rural Wales, from others as a peripheral and marginal region in decline and in need of modernization. We historicise accounts of rural change in this region to highlight the spatial specificity of rural regional development by considering the role of institutions, spatial theories, key actors and rural places themselves in processes of ongoing socio-economic transformation. We explore how regional development policies in a specific rural regional setting have both shaped its economic path, and served to sediment particular ways of imagining rural towns across the broader ‘region’. These in turn limit and lock-in development along narrow path-dependent trajectories framed as policy and political solutions to the problems of rural areas.