The Sectoral City and the Post-Sectoral City

This working paper develops a comparative conceptual framework for distinguishing the sectoral city from the post-sectoral city. It argues that the modern sectoral city was organized around relatively stable economic and social functions that could be spatially allocated, materialized and reproduced through urban form. Under post-sectoral conditions, this functional grammar becomes less reliable. Functions do not disappear, but their spatial, economic and institutional stability weakens. They increasingly appear as temporary stabilizations of relational fields rather than as durable points of departure for planning. The paper proposes a shift from functional urbanism to relational stabilization. It argues that functions increasingly depend on prior relational configurations, including flows of information, labour, value, mobility and energy, as well as institutional control, attention and resilience capacity. The crisis of the sectoral city is therefore not only a crisis of industrial decline or service-sector expansion. It is a crisis of parallelism: employment intensity, economic value, institutional control and spatial use no longer move together in the way functional urbanism presupposed. The paper engages with relational and process-oriented approaches in urban studies while making a more specific post-sectoral claim. The post-sectoral city is not only relational in a general sense. It is marked by the decoupling of functions, value, work, control and spatial use. Brownfields, underused transport infrastructures, peripheral energy sites and formerly monocentric administrative districts are treated as sites where this order becomes visible because their functional instability has already surfaced. The contribution of the paper is conceptual. It does not present a finalized empirical model or planning recommendation. Its purpose is to clarify a distinction that may support further work on post-sectoral divergence, adaptive brownfield systems and urban transformation under conditions of functional instability.