Paper short abstract:

By discussing two examples of postindustrial cities in Croatia, the authors aim at analysing the ways in which postindustrial communities narrate their industrial pasts, address the industrial fallouts and imagine the potentials of postindustrial urban life.

Paper long abstract:

The paper examines the ruptures of postindustrial cities that are a result of industrial decline. It has two goals. At one hand, it aims to outline common challenges of postindustrial transformations and point out their shared features. On the other hand, it wishes to address the exceptions from commonalities established in the studies of postindustrial cities and thus determine the significance of context-based interpretations of postindustrial space and life.

The paper urges the discussion at a more general level on how postindustrial cities tackle social challenges primarily related to ecological fallouts, unemployment, public health issues and quality of life in deindustrialised or semi-industrialised surroundings. It examines the role of industrial nostalgia in the remaking of postindustrial present. The focus is on the everyday life of postindustrial communities, but also on the envisaging and reimagining of communal urban futures.

The authors analyse how the communities narrate the effects of deindustrialisation and engage in imagining the postindustrial urban futures. They tackle the people’s affective relation towards the legacies of industrial modernisation, practices through which they make sense of their postindustrial setting, as well as their perceptions of the risks and potentials related to the dead ends of the industrial past.

The authors draw their insights from the two urban case studies in Croatia: the town of Sisak and the town of Bakar. By juxtaposing two different postindustrial urban contexts, the paper will challenge the concepts of industrial identity and industrial nostalgia as discussed in recent studies of postindustrial state.

Paper short abstract:

Using the "Deep Cities" approach, this paper offers a trans-European analysis of transformation as cultural and social value as well as its dissonant nature. It does so in three post-industrial areas of Barcelona, London and Oslo.

Paper long abstract:

Cities are complex systems in constant change. The multiple changes to which cities are subject to form a palimpsest in which some structures are preserved and others perish in which part of their history is staged, narrated and revealed to a wider audience, while other parts remain hidden. Using the Deep Cities approach adopted by the JPI-CH Curbatheri/Deep Cities project (www.deepcities.eu), we argue that these historical transformations can in themselves offer new ways of approaching the conservation of urban heritage. We support this contention through the use of participatory, ethnographic and digital methods in three post-industrial cities. Critical reflections on how to accommodate different ways of applying the concepts of time, temporality and survival can be made, thus laying the foundations for a multi-layered sustainable and social conservation, a “conservation of care”. Our case studies relate to development of post-industrial cities including: Barcelona metropolitan area in Sant Andreu de Palomar (Barcelona), the Royal Arsenal conservation area in Woolwich (London) and The Tukthus Prison Quarter (Oslo). Some of the questions under exploration are: “Should we protect cities as images frozen in time, without taking into account the events that take place in them?”, “Which “heritages” should we conserve?” and “Wouldn’t it be more sustainable to focus on the conservation of a site if we already know about its historical uses and transformations?”. These and more transformation related questions are explored through the lenses of a deep cities approach that regards change as a cultural and social value in itself.

Paper short abstract:

By tracing the shift from industrial to post-industrial working conditions in the representation of figures and spaces of labour, this paper is dealing with the rules of cultural representations of post-industrial urbanity in the German Ruhr Area.

Paper long abstract:

The structural change in the Ruhr Area was thought to address the difficulties of the economic crisis and fill the gap left by the decline of heavy industry with the expansion of the knowledge and service sector. These new forms of labour play an essential role for the new "economic imaginary" (Jessop 1997) of the Ruhr Area. However, forms of labour in the service and knowledge sector are characterised by a multiple blurring of boundaries. In the post-industrial city this blurring is materialised spatially: while industrial labour meant physical labour in the factories, immaterial labour is not necessarily bound to a specific place.

At the same time, the representation of labour is in an "imaginative crisis" (Denning 2003). The figure of the white, male hero of industrial labour is no longer able to represent the precarious labour situation of the “multitude” (Hardt/Negri 2004). In the depiction of a new regional imaginary, labour opportunities as a fundamental precondition for a good life can therefore be represented neither by industrial spaces nor by working people. Instead, I argue, people rely on the representation of urbanity and leisure spaces when they visualize the Ruhr Area. In my paper I show that these representations work twofolds: 1) as counter-narratives to the industrial past of the Ruhr Area to open up the perspective towards the future and 2) as codes for the "promise of the city" (Färber 2019) of a good life to enable a new reading of the Ruhr region as a post-industrial metropolis.

Paper short abstract:

Reykjavik Harbor is a hybrid and changing place, with layers of cultural manifestations deriving from different user groups. Perspectives on the role of the harbor reveal systems of exclusion; different practices in turn transgress boundaries changing the material configuration of spaces.

Paper long abstract:

Reykjavik Harbor is a complex hybrid material reality, constantly changing with new practices and conditions. With ships and boats, landfills, piers, slipways, combined with weather and sea conditions, comes fishing, tourists, commerce, entertainment and innovation. This reality is being reshaped by various forces, man-made and natural, and different groups of actors, ranging from the contractor working on a 2,000 square metre apartment building on the pier, to the algae that slowly cover its base. In particular, in the past 20 years there has been a marked change in how the harbor is conceived; with growth in the sectors of construction, commerce and tourism, prompting defensive reactions from other user groups and those to whom the harbor is important as a place of memory. In this talk I will describe the material reality of Reykjavík Harbor using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of agencement, or assemblage, and look at the shifting meaning of what is “harborly”, i.e. what is immediately perceived as belonging in the harbor; how this creates physical and conceptual boundaries defended by certain users, and how transgressing these boundaries changes their configuration. I examine the ways in which reactions to development reveal systems of inclusion/exclusion, especially with regard to gendered harbor spaces and roles, and human vs. non-human use of these spaces. I want to describe how these changes manifest themselves in the material arrangement of the harbor.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation will analyse several aspects and overall importance of the workers strike at the Uljanik shipyard in Pula (Croatia) during late August 2018. This strike was the last organized attempt to preserve industrial production on the Pula slipways.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation will analyse several aspects and overall importance of the workers strike at the Uljanik shipyard in Pula (Croatia) during late August 2018. This strike was the last one to take place in city’s urban tissue and last organized attempt to preserve industrial production on the Pula slipways, as rather soon this 163 years old shipyard went into definitive bankruptcy and complete closure. Although shipyard had serious financial issues during its last decade, massive strike that lasted for ten days and took place outside the shipyard’s spatial limits, also involved many Pula’s residents and associations. In a region where tourism with its idiosyncrasies, e.g. deregulation of working hours, workers contracts and rights or blurring of work and leisure - is promoted as dominant industry, this strike was also understood as a resistance to such “inevitabilities”. Although strike had huge national and local media coverage, I will primarily touch upon creation of content that was community-oriented: Radio Rojc turned out to be an irreplaceable station in that process. Through a series of recordings from the field during the strike, radio shows, interviews, but also radio drama, that community radio became a place of advocating preservation of production in a specific language that was mostly avoided in other media.