Paper short abstract:

The case study of the Andalusian dehesa shows that certain types of industries have succeeded in providing alternative presents for rural landscapes and inhabitants. A second case from Extremadura demonstrates that this development may also be sought with a strong concern for social participation.

Paper long abstract:

The Spanish dehesa is mainly known for being the dwelling site of the Iberian pig. The marketing of Iberian pork such as jamón ibérico has been key to the rural development in the Andalusian Sierra de Aracena Natural Park. The dehesa-pig unity is emblematic of a caring relationship between humans and their natural environment and provides an alternative to the extractivist exhaustion of the local landscape through mining activities. This heritage has given rise to local meat industries and an infrastructure of eco-friendly and high-quality culinary tourism. Employment in slaughterhouses and meat-processing factories allows young families to stay in their home region.

In another village which is embedded in the dehesa landscape of eastern Extremadura, many people call for better perspectives for their small-scale sheep farming. Siruela had to witness depopulation and the closing down of numerous local butcheries and other small businesses whose activities have consolidated in the greater areas of the industrial centres. The villagers lament that added value is no longer created locally and they are confined to being suppliers of live animals. They seek opportunities to promote their rural heritage by creating local industries for the production of meat and wool.

The two cases demonstrate that to rural villages, certain types of industry can provide a sound alternative capable of contributing to the conservation of traditional environments with ecologically valuable landscapes. In the case of Siruela, the mutual reinforcement of local industry and cultural heritage could serve to revindicate common rights of use and social participation.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on life histories with older residents in a deprived seaside location in England, this paper explores how memories of a once flourishing fishing industry play a central role in the encounter with more recent landscapes whose transformative effects in the life of residents are still unknown.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on life histories conducted with older residents in Great Yarmouth – one of the 20% most deprived districts in England – in the early 2000s, this paper explores how memories of the once flourishing fishing industry are a way to make sense of a present characterised by uncertain transformations that bring a sense of decline and abandonment in this seaside location. Adopting a spatial and material approach to memory and heritage, I look at how these memories constitute the promise in the midst of ruin, the mushroom that emerges in devastated landscapes (Tsing 2015). In these oral accounts, residents speak of the herring season as “vibrant”, “magnificent” and “a sight worth seeing”. The lively imagery of the quay is accompanied by a description of drift netting as a precise and rhythmic activity and of herring itself as a beautiful fish, “gentle in the way it didn’t damage the net with its soft gills” and exported all over the world before the 1960s. Now, instead, there is a sense of abandonment, and local government initiatives are seen as “swimming against the tide”. Great Yarmouth’s former fishers witness themselves as heroes in a town that they consider to “have missed the boat”. I argue that, rather than being part of the past, their spatial memories are placed at the centre of the indeterminate encounters that constitute place, transcending other landscapes – from gas to, more recently, offshore wind industry – whose transformative effects in the life of residents are still unknown.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is about how different types of places are constructed as emblematic of a city’s decline and shrinkage, based on class and place-based temporal framings of change, and how these representations inform competing place-making strategies, in the context of deindustrialisation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is about how different types of places are constructed as emblematic of a city’s decline and shrinkage, based on class and place-based temporal framings of urban change, and how these representations inform competing place-making strategies, in the context of economic and demographic decline caused by deindustrialisation. It explores which of these emblematic places are considered worth destroying, transforming or rehabilitating, for being (or not) considered as heritage. It draws on an extensive body of scholarship on post-industrial communities, which investigates how the economic, social and spatial changes caused by deindustrialisation have led to an in-depth restructuration of the working-class. Arguing for a broader scope for the analysis of deindustrialisation, I recontextualise it in the more comprehensive conceptual framework of urban shrinkage, taking the analysis to different places, urban experiences and social classes. The analysis draws on ethnographic material collected in two French medium-sized shrinking cities, Dieppe and Nevers, where industrial sites are neither considered as part of heritage nor meaningless, and subjected to different strategies and aspirations than places considered worth rehabilitating for touristic purposes. While both working and middle class residents share a common narrative of the “lost grandeur” of Dieppe, the places emphasised in this narrative differ depending on class, eventually leading to different understandings of processes of decline. Then, I analyse how these class and place based temporal framings influence competing place-making practices and diverging aspirations for the future development of place.

Paper short abstract:

The paper analyses the textile district of Biella, whose industrial ruins show signs of decline and dislocation as well as the social difficulties of its community. Experiences of environmental patronage reveal the need for a negotiation of the territory's identity, between textiles and eco-tourism.

Paper long abstract:

The arrival in the Biella area, a non-transit territory that opens up to the amphitheatre of the Alps, with 'obligatory' road access from the plain, sees a 'welcome' roundabout on the “Trossi road” consisting of an artwork with the words 'Biella Turismo' written on it. There are no roundabouts presenting the area in its connotation as 'Italian Manchester', a well-known textile district.

The most striking sign of the long process of industrialisation, that has seen the Biella area become one of Italy's most renowned wool centres, is the presence of large industrial sheds dotting the provincial roads, particularly the one up the Strona valley. Since 2005, the façade of one of the valley's main textile factories has had the words 'Change is inevitable' reproduced in large letters. Continuing up the mountain, we reach a natural park called 'Oasi Zegna', a sign of the environmental patronage of a local business family (salvage capitalism?) (Tsing 2015).

Driving along that road, I wonder what impact the industrial ruins have on the tourist who comes here to enjoy the alpine landscape. During the first decade of the 2000s, local residents witnessed plant closures, lay-offs and early retirements, and a significant decrease in the number of residents. Understanding the deindustrialisation process also means relating the elements of the social and cultural context to the geometry of the abandoned spaces (Strangleman, High 2013), reading them not as a static landscape of desolate smokestacks, but as a cultural drama of communities in transition (Dudley 1994).

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the coevolution of industrialization and ecotourism in the Russian Far East. It argues that the massive decline of manufacturing in the region since the 1990s has given rise to a peculiar ecological imagination that fuses critiques of extraction with hopes for industrial revival.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on the case of Komsomolsk-na-Amure, a planned city built in the 1930s, to explore interwoven moral imaginaries of industrialization and nature in Russia’s Far East. Widely celebrated in the Soviet press as ‘the City of Youth’ built by communist volunteers who traveled from all over the USSR to construct an urban socialist utopia in the taiga, Komsomolsk’s mythos has historically been defined by the trope of triumphant subjugation of unruly wilderness. During the 1960s, when love of one’s region and its natural splendor became central to Soviet patriotic visions, Komsomolsk’s hinterland witnessed a rapid development of ecotourism meant to provide residents with local recreational alternatives to far-away resorts in the Western part of the USSR. The city’s enterprises, including shipbuilding and aviation plants played key roles in financing and maintaining ex-urban summer camps, sanatoria, and skiing resorts. Dramatic economic decline and massive depopulation since the 1990s, however, have left the city’s (peri-urban) infrastructures in ruins. Consequently, local activists often cast industrial production as a precondition for ecological conservation, arguing that an expansion of manufacturing can preserve existing infrastructures and replace environmentally hazardous timber and coal extraction. I argue that these visions of nature represent a shift from late Soviet anti-modernization discourses to modernist nostalgia that retains a moral critique of extraction, while holding out hope for industrial revival in a new socio-ecological balance. This example of entangled municipal and grassroots environmental activism in Russia thus invites us to rethink the antinomy of ecotourism and industrial development.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the practices of incorporating decorative stone extraction as an element of cultural heritage among Indigenous Veps in Karelia, Northwest Russia. It discusses how Indigenous and local visions of industry and sustainability contest dominant state narratives.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the practices of incorporating decorative stone extraction as a traditional economic activity and an element of cultural heritage. It discusses the case study of Veps Indigenous minority in the Republic of Karelia, Northwest Russia. Since the 18th – 19th centuries, Karelian Veps have been extracting rare ornamental stones – gabbro-diabase and raspberry quartzite. In the Soviet period, large state-operated stone quarries opened in the Veps region, and local stone was widely use for decorative and industrial purposes. Currently, most residents of Veps villages are still employed in privatized stone quarries, but the industry is in decline. Stone mining is promoted as an element of Veps cultural heritage through state institutions, such as Veps ethnographic museum, as well as local state-funded initiatives, such as Veps ethnic theme parks. Many residents of Veps villages refer to stoneworking as a tradition with a rich history and the possibility of a long future. At the same time, current practices of stone extraction and the environmental impact of mining are a common source of worries and disappointment as Veps feel alienated from the declining mining industry. Through the analysis of the Veps example, the paper discusses the importance of Indigenous and local visions of industry and sustainability that often question dominant state narratives. The research is based on participant observation and interviews conducted in Veps villages of Karelia in 2015 – 2021.