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Paper short abstract

The paper examines the agency of deindustrialised ruins and their potential to catalyse community engagement. It focuses on citizens’ initiatives aimed at activating the former meat-processing factory site in Zagreb. The authors explore how postindustrial communities emerge through these processes.

Paper long abstract

How can inclusive place-making occur within a deindustrialised complex marked by decay, neglect, and the accumulation of waste? This paper addresses that question by analysing the current efforts of citizens’ initiatives and civil society organisations to activate the derelict site of the former Sljeme meat-processing factory in Sesvete, on Zagreb’s eastern periphery. Our analysis is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with actors involved in envisioning and activating Sljeme’s futures, and our own engagement in activities aimed at making Sljeme a place for everyone. Theoretically, the paper is informed by research approaches that conceptualise ruination as a process that challenges linear logics of economic functionality (e.g. Mah, 2012) and that foreground future-making in the aftermath of modernist expectations (e.g. Ahmann, 2024). Our focus is on the agency of postindustrial ruins, which we understand as relational, due to their potential to catalyse community engagement. In this case, ruins have stimulated collective integration, neighbourhood care, and solidarity, producing an entanglement in which ruins mobilise people to act, while people, in turn, strive to activate the ruins. We explore which communities emerge through these processes. Our research shows that postindustrial communities do not organically arise from embeddedness in place, but are actively formed through collective engagement with ruinous industrial spaces. Moving beyond an understanding of communities as entities that merely reflect social and economic tensions, we ask in which ways bringing together diverse – and sometimes opposing – agents around shared goals can shape collective futures in a polarised world.