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- Convenors:
-
Nevena Škrbić Alempijević
(University of Zagreb)
Johannes Moser (LMU Munich)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Urban Studies
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 23 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This panel addresses issues of power, trangression and participation in the production and transformation of postindustrial cities. It examines the politics and practices of space-making, construction of postindustrial communities, challenges of working and living in a postindustrial urban context.
Long Abstract:
The panel focuses on setting, bending and breaking the rules of/in postindustrial cities. Different social orders, political and economic hierarchies and a number of social agents come into play in the remaking of the former industrial localities. Rules become visible in the numerous spheres of postindustrial urban life. They are present in the redefinition and use of spaces that get neglected, devastated, abandoned, but also revitalised and repurposed after deindustrialisation. They regulate work strategies and tactics through which people find new strongholds in changed socio-economic conditions. They also affect the development and transformations of postindustrial communities, as well as the ways of life in the former industrial areas and neighbourhoods. Finally, rules direct the production of industrial heritage, as well as mechanisms of branding the city as postindustrial.
The aim of this panel is to discuss ways in which the rules of postindustrial city-making are made, affirmed, negotiated, questioned or transgressed. We focus on various forms of agency and participation that address environmental and health problems, quality of life, gentrification tendencies and the question of how to repurpose industrial spaces to meet the needs of diverse social groups and individuals. Those include responses of industrial neighbourhoods to transformation trends and imply their active role in urban regeneration. We are especially interested in urban sustainability and strategies through which people can attain visions of a better urban future in the postindustrial context. We invite ethnographically grounded and theoretical papers that discuss those processes.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 23 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on sustainability of post-industrial cities, on how sustainability and the post-industrial are both mobilized and put to work as strategies of urban governance. I invite you to find out how they shape and are shaped by politics and practices of and in three European cities.
Paper long abstract:
During my fieldwork in Almada (PRT), Essen (GER) and Malmö (SWE), I encountered different ways industrial pasts and current sustainability efforts are intertwined. Once and again I heard the story of rising like the bird phoenix to old glory and prosperity through sustainability. I came across claims of special transformation competencies gained through massive structural changes of de-industrialization and how they were marketed. But I also found out about the volatility and limited durability of relations to industrial pasts due to political rivalry, changing governments and financial crisis.
So, how are industrial pasts put to work in current sustainability effort? How are post-industrial cities made, unmade and transformed?
I will introduce different answers to these questions for three post-industrial cities with histories in shipbuilding, steel production and coal mining that all were faced with massive job, tax and (self-) image losses. I will address how the rules of post-industrial city making are influenced and changed, and present different roles industrial pasts play in shaping and imagining the future and making the current governable.
Paper short abstract:
From the 1980s to the present day, regulation and imagination of green spaces within the urban-industrial fabric of Zurich changed from static relicts to dynamic matrixes, thus similarly reflecting capitalist valorization of space as well as conceptual shifts towards a non-essentialistic nature.
Paper long abstract:
I focus the transformation of specific urban green spaces in Swiss postindustrial cities: former industrial sites, wastelands and other spaces not fully integrated in processes of valorization around 1980. Historic source material reveals a then popular perception of the respective spaces as «islands» or «oases», imagined as refuges for natural and human inhabitants somehow endangered. Obviously, this metaphoric framing as relicts/reservations was echoing traditional concepts of nature conservation.
First steps towards a transformation of this dichotomous spatial imaginations occurred throughout the 80s and 90s: In the realm of alternative culture, it was the cultural revaluation of marginalized (semi-)public spaces, in planning it was a shift towards user-orientated design stressing spatial modifiability, while in ecology it was a reformulation of conservation strategies like the dismissal of nature-city-dualism and the reconceptualization of urban nature’s spatiality as network of lineaments.
In the light of Zurich’s economic boom after the year 2000, the new millennia witnessed further dynamizations in the designs of urban green spaces: institutionalization of interim uses, conservation strategies like wasteland-rotation, «pixelation» of green spaces («pocket parks», temporary «mobile gardens») etc.
It remains an open question whether this rule of spatial mobilization – which is notably reflected by social sciences’ recent conceptualizations of (urban) natures as dynamic assemblages and fields of becoming – should be interpreted as the capitalist manufacturing of a «liquid nature» (Bonneuil 2015) or just as a neoliberal take-over of intrinsically emancipatory conceptualizations of post-essentialist natures (Braun 2015), designing a path for «conviviality in a living city» (Hinchliffe/Whatmore 2006).
Paper short abstract:
In Lithuania postindustrial cities such as Alytus face the challenge to become a desirable place to live. This paper analyzes how the environmental accident transgress the vision of urban future produced through green environment and how participation of citizens negotiates the quality of life.
Paper long abstract:
Deindustrialization process of post-Soviet industrial cities such as Alytus in Lithuania is experienced as an “abandonment of local community” (Newman 1985). This resulted in population decline, a low employment rate, changes in industrial areas and stagnation of urban development. To make the urban setting an attractive place to live in is a challenge for postindustrial cities in Lithuania. The paper analyses the interrelation between economic and political “production” of urban setting and “construction” of the city through the actions of citizens and experiences in the postindustrial city-making. This includes the aspects of how a city municipality produce a vision of urban future and quality of life through improving green infrastructure and public spaces, how it is challenged by industrial companies, and how city dwellers negotiate and understand the quality of life in Alytus city. This is analyzed in the context of the fire at the tire recycling factory which occurred on October 2019 in Alytus. The paper discusses the environmental accident as the rupture which questions the project of postindustrial city-making. This paper shows how the environmental accident threatened the Alytus city dwellers’ understanding of what is a desirable place to live in, what kind of impact the environmental accident has made, and how city dwellers try to maintain the idea of a green and safe city. It analyzes the ways in which the fire at the industrial company reveals the forms of agency and roles of participants in the economic and social city-making.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses about urban environmental and anthropological features of post-industrial residential areas in Russian cities and compares the lifestyles of their inhabitants in different areas: historical, industrial, mass buildings (contemporary) and traditional in the cities. This paper includes results of a case of Arkhangelsk.
Paper long abstract:
Field research of the past worked-houses (or post-industrial residential) areas describes different types of districts, features of urban environmental conditions, and lifestyles of local people Goal of the survey explains what is closer to Russian individual housing areas: American suburbia, Russian traditional villages or it is a special form of the urban environment. Furthermore, which patterns show resemblance with other neighboring areas? How is this aspect link with a location in the city’s structure? As a result, the following patterns were obtained. The study is based on field research in Arkhangelsk (January 2021) and comparative analysis. The results show the outcomes of slow rethinking and the transformation process [Ringel, 2018]. For instance, there are different areas and formed local stratification.
1. Local investors and households run expand new building in non-used land make unconstrained and abruptly high-density development of this area. The areas, which predominate single-family houses, become like American suburbia and develop nowadays.
2. Likewise, the individual residential building develops on the non-used land and wasteland near the last working-areas.
3. The absence of formal rules and the chaotic privatization cause of living significant part of people in destroying houses. The 26 thousand citizens live in barracks and mass wooden houses, which are intended approximately for 4-8 families. This type of building saves traditional aspects of the environment. For example, lifestyle, decorations, using improvised means [Baum & co, 1988]. It looks like a traditional Russian village.
Finally, this research is significant for post-Soviet urban studies, because the paper illustrates the continuity of postindustrial areas and adaptational process to the contemporary city [Kearns, Whistley, 2017].