Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on Ljubljana’s former factories which have turned into brownfields, urban heritage or the object of municipality’s revitalization plans. Its aim is to disclose contested contemporary significance of a socialist heritage and the possibility of workers to voice their memories.

Paper long abstract:

Since the democratization and the independence processes of the late 1980s and early 1990s, urban centers in former socialist European states have been facing a decentralization and disintegration, a continuous loss of central social functions, migration of population, disappearance or transformation of public spaces, and consequently diminishing of the city bustle. With orientation towards (neo)liberalism, political discourse on socialist past has been mostly negative, causing citizens to distance themselves from its own past, heritage, and identity. Only a few people still feel connected to and identify with industrial sites, mostly those who worked or lived there or/and those who feel that being part of the working class in socialism allowed them to be a respected citizen and have a decent (professional and personal) life. However, after the change of ideological-economic system, they have become marginalized, their memories excluded from the dominant memory, and their heritage left to oblivion.

The paper focuses on Ljubljana's former factories which have nowadays turned into brownfields, urban heritage or the object of municipality's revitalization plans. It draws on ethnographic research of various actors and the analysis of authorized heritage discourse to disclose contested contemporary significance of a socialist heritage and answer the following questions: Who appropriates such sites for his own agenda? How much are these former factories - abandoned, renewed as cultural heritage or used for the development of post socialist economic (creative) activities - still accessible to the industrial workers? Where can they talk about their memories and can/does anybody hear them?