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.