Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses landscapes of deindustrialization through two case studies of "reclamation" in Winnipeg, Canada. Analyzing these sites show how logics of urban renewal, neoliberal privatization, environmental remediation, and Indigenous sovereignty contrast and align into new landscapes.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses landscapes of deindustrialization through the lenses of neoliberalism, environmentalism, and Indigenization. Using case studies from Winnipeg, Canada, we investigate sites where brown and grey landscapes are targeted for redevelopment. Most proposed changes are coded through the language of “reclamation” where urban decay is presented as an opportunity to return places to their original purpose or natural state. In Winnipeg, two recent reclamation projects pair this discourse with the settler colonial logic of reconciliation and restitution of Indigenous sovereignty: the redevelopment of the Canadian Armed Forces base into Naadi-Oodena by Treaty One First Nations, and the $100 million revitalization of the iconic Hudson’s Bay Building in downtown Winnipeg by the Southern Chiefs Organization after a symbolic sale of one dollar. We analyze environmental reclamation / Indigenous reconciliation as a powerful tool to remake urban space, but also a powerful discursive framework that builds upon an insurgent neoliberalism joining disparate projects like wilderness parks, housing cooperatives, infill developments and parking lots, urban reserves, department stores, and shopping malls. Analyzing these sites show how logics of urban renewal, neoliberal privatization, environmental remediation, and Indigenous sovereignty contrast and align into new landscapes.

Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses "noxious deindustrialization" through a comparative study of the bays of Bizkaia (Spain) and Guanabara (Brazil). By analyzing oral history interviews, we establish the parameters to map out social-political conflicts, inequalities, and environmental violence from 1975 to 2020.

Paper long abstract:

Noxious deindustrialization, as proposed by Feltrin, Mah, and Brown (2022) affects local ecosystems and societies as a unique experience - and yet it is also a planetary experience, shared by workers and their networks of social and biophysical relationships around the world. Bay areas are particularly sensitive to these processes as they are gateways between their hinterland basins and the oceans – which have been at once the favored dump for industrial effluents and the waterways for global trade. By selecting the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro, which includes Guanabara Bay, and the metropolitan region of Bilbao, which extends to the Bay of Bizkaia, areas of peripheral industrialization and deindustrialization in the Age of Acceleration, we propose to understand deindustrialization from this dual perspective, local and global. We analyze oral history interviews with subjects involved in noxious deindustrialization in Guanabara and Bizkaia in the last 40 years, such as activists, workers, and public servants, and we suggest tentative parameters to map out social-political conflicts, inequalities, and environmental violence. To do so, we privilege the study of the voices of those individuals more directly involved and/or affected by these processes, in a contribution to the use of oral history for environmental history and for the study of deindustrialization worldwide.

Paper short abstract:

This paper delves into the profound impact of deindustrialization on Sounda, a once-thriving coal-based census town in Jharkhand, India. Using in-depth interviews and FGDs with key stakeholders, this paper examines the intricate relationship between deindustrialization and local life.

Paper long abstract:

This paper delves into the profound impact of deindustrialization on Sounda, a once-thriving coal-based census town in Jharkhand, India. Sounda's trajectory from a bustling economic hub, characterized by coal mining activity and vibrant local communities, to its current decline is a poignant example of the complex consequences of deindustrialization. The closure of all four coal mines in Sounda, driven by economic unviability and resource depletion, has caused a series of unprecedented challenges. The town, closely intertwined with the coal mining industry, now relies on the grim prospect of a single functioning coal siding. This study conducted 25 in-depth interviews and 03 focus group discussions involving diverse local stakeholders, including community members, political representatives, civil workers, and trade union leaders, to understand the complexities of deindustrialization in coal regions. The closures have led to mass migrations, unemployment, business closures, crumbling public infrastructure, and severed connectivity. The landscape is now a remnant of old industrial sites that stirs up memories of its vibrant past.

Nevertheless, communities are finding innovative ways to reconnect with the natural ecology amidst deindustrialization. Abandoned mining pits have become opportunities for fish culture, demonstrating some resilience in the face of industrial decline. This paper explores the multifaceted effects of deindustrialization in coal regions, unveiling the intricate relationship between industrial decline and local life. Additionally, it provides insights for future transitions away from coal, informing us on the impacts and navigating the challenges of deindustrialization.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the dynamics of 're-industrialisation' or more accurately the prospect of the return of mining to modern Cornwall, one of the world's first de-industrialised regions., and examines the relationship between memory, heritage, history and the prospects for a low-carbon 'transition'

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines recent proposals for a return to mining and the opening of large-scale Lithium extraction in contemporary Cornwall. Cornwall was traditionally the heart of deep level metal mining in the UK and a core region in early industrialisation. Its history is therefore closely entangled with the emergence of what Malm terms Fossil Capital. It was also one of the first places in the world to experience the catastrophic collapse of extractive industry. However, that collapse did not extinguish the importance of mining heritage in modern Cornish identity, and even the turn towards the extractive logics of tourist capitalism did not eliminate either extractive industries or rather romantic post-industrial memories and representations of a proud mining heritage. Today, modern speculative capital seeks to actively mobilise these memories and representations through the appropriation and remaking of historical mythologies of Cornwall and Cornishness as essentially a mining culture. Such stories wound into the boosterism of the effort to exploit local Lithium and copper resources for a ‘green transition’ poses a serious threat both to the possibility of meaningfully contesting the so-called ‘return’ of mining in a County where Cornish people suffer relatively impoverishment amidst the homes and cars of wealthy in-migrants and to the possibility of serious thinking transition as an opportunity to move beyond a bankrupt and unsustainable automobile society. Historical work needs to urgently challenge the myths of the Cornish past and show how a radical departure from it can lead the way to a liveable future.

Paper short abstract:

In the paper, we will show the changes in post-mining landscapes in Poland, which until recently were dominated by coal monuments, and recently the protection of the fourth nature has become dominant.

Paper long abstract:

In many post-mining places in Europe, you can find wagons with the last ton. They are located in the Ruhr area, Northumberland, and even Pyramiden. The tradition of commemorating a closed coal mine with a last-ton monument dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. Miners carried carts of coal to the surface and painted festive inscriptions on them, most often to boast about what is now a cause for dejection and shame, the number of tons of coal brought to the surface. Nowadays, the practice of the last ton can be interpreted completely differently, in the context of changes in the landscapes of deindustrialization. In the paper, we will show rich visual and narrative material collected in 2021-2023 during research conducted in the Upper Silesian Coal Basin. Based on conversations with former mine workers and members of post-mining associations, we will show how many new monuments of the last ton have been created in recent years, accompanied by the awareness of climate change and the need to protect the environment in places after extractivism. New activities of associations of former mine workers show not only a change in their awareness but also a change in the post-mining landscape itself. Nowadays, the landscape of the last ton in Poland is made up of deserted post-mining forests, overgrown heaps, and overgrown sinkholes. By resigning from placing carts in them, post-mining communities show respect for post-industrial nature, which allows them to preserve their memory in a non-invasive way.

Paper short abstract:

The concept ‘immersive landscape’ is brought to Germany’s former coal mining region the Ruhr, in the grip of a green transformation. Through ethnography and analysis of documentaries, I explore how working-class people conceive and perform ‘embodied immersion’ in a landscape under reconstruction.

Paper long abstract:

The emerging interdisciplinary concept of ‘immersive landscape’ calls attention to the fact that deindustrialization not only means socioeconomic change in particular geographical places, but also sociomaterial transformations that remake worlds. Moving away from older representational approaches, the immersive landscape is envisaged as a multidimensional process – a dynamic assemblage of people, matter, animals, weather, things, capital, labour and embodied experience (Jarramillo and Tomann 2021). Brought to the evolving landscape of Germany’s former coal mining region, the Ruhr, I am struck by the fact that ‘immersive experience’ is writ large in the utterly representational public discourses of the region’s green transformation and its industrial heritage. Drawing on my ethnographic research with working-class women and men along the restored Emscher river in the northern Ruhr, and on documentary films, I juxtapose such promotional narratives with people’s perceptions and practices of ‘embodied immersion’ in diverse environments – from toxic exposure at industrial sites, to aesthetic appreciation and fitness in landscape parks, Sunday swims in a canal, work in allotment gardens, and ‘forest bathing’. I ask: What do historical tropes of immersive landscapes (e.g., in German Romanticism) tell us about social relationships and conflict? Whence the moral good of immersive experience? Can and should the representation of people-environment relationships be overcome?

Paper short abstract:

Based on extensive fieldwork in Siberia and the Russian Far East, this project analyzes the connection between the former industrial sites in Kolyma and Magadan, which were originally maned by Gulag inmates in the 1930s and 1940s, and the emerging nature tourism and environmentalism in the region.

Paper long abstract:

Beginning in the 1930s, the Soviet government set on a course of turning the Kolyma and Magadan regions of the Russian Far East into major industrial-age mining centers. Lacking sufficient labor resources, the government relied on the Gulag penal system to provide manpower for the projects in the region. Despite significant obstacles, tin and other types of mining developed at a rapid pace, even if accompanied by such familiar attributes as suffocating shafts, endless grinding mills and crashers, and an enormous human and environmental toll. By the 1940s and ‘50s, industrialization seemed to have come full force to this remote part of the world.

Yet following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the process was reversed as quickly as it began. Abandoned for a while, these former Gulag sites are now nourishing a new fascination with nature tourism on an unforeseen level. Tourist advertisement campaigns praise the remoteness and the natural beauty of the camp settings and intentionally present these spaces of human suffering as new versions of Jack London’s Klondike and even Conan Doyle’s lost world, no longer mere Gulag structures or remnants of the industrialization but the sites of wild and exotic adventures. As such, my work demonstrates the process by which the former industrial complex and the tourism industry of today have come together to inspire fascination with wildlife sightings and the grandeur of the landscape and as a result have created a unique amalgam that feeds the emerging environmentalist movement in the Russian Far East.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the creation of Melbourne, Australia's Westgate Park, a 40 hectare open space on the site of a former aerodrome, in the 1980s and the landscape decisions made to reimagine the space as 'natural', notwithstanding its position in the shadow of a major river crossing.

Paper long abstract:

Westgate Park is a 40 hectare wetlands and bush reserve on the eastern approaches of the Westgate Freeway, a major thoroughfare connecting the eastern and western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia at the approaches to the city's largest river, the Yarra. Opened in 1985, the park is the subject of historical mythology (for instance, that it was a gift to citizens from the bridge authority management) and includes a host of mysterious built structures, including non-representational sculptures and a small section of the bridge itself as an information centre. It also features a lake which periodically turns pink as a result of naturally occurring algae.

This paper is an exploration of the original landscaping of the park, by innovative local planners, which sought to elide the site's previous use (since the Second World War) as an aerodrome and instead remake what was once flat and sandy ground in the form of hillocks and natural glades, attracting extensive wildlife. It then considers the likely fate of the park in the coming decades, as the overnight rezoning of the surrounding area by a renegade planning minister sees it move from industrial use to residential and educational purposes.

Using original reports, interviews with specialists and users, and historical documents this paper tracks the transition from open, 'empty' space, to wartime aerodrome, to passive recreation 'nature park'. It examines the contextualised phenomenon (and associated social stigma) of a park in a 'forgotten' part of the city, and the possibilities inherent in renewal.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to analyze the so-called lost cities in the Amazon from the twentieth century onwards assessing the perceptions of their abandonment against the background of developmentalist policies in contemporary Brazil.

Paper long abstract:

From the early-twentieth century onwards many industrial cities were funded in the Brazilian rainforest against the background of the Latin American developmentalist project. The imagery of an urban-industrial future was registered by public officials who documented the developmentalist zeitgeist, and it materialized in long-term plans based on policies to colonize the hinterland entwined with a belief that industrialization would be the sole means to fulfill the nation’s promise. However, by the mid-1980s, many newspapers and articles started to classify these cities as underdeveloped and abandoned places. Although the reasons were manifold and mostly had to do with poor governmental management, development agencies and the media mostly related this failure to the wilderness of the forest, mobilizing stereotypes such as the “green hell” as an impediment to the Western sense of progress in the region. This argument could historically be traced back to other processes, which merged Amazonian abandoned cities with an imaginary unconquerable nature in the Americas and worldwide.

Through an investigation centered on environmental memory, this paper aims to assess the socio-environmental resilience of these cities, which includes their plants, ruins, and ecosystems and which may counterbalance the idea of abandonment currently sustained. The lost cities of the Amazon are privileged spots for investigating the pitfalls in discourses on modernization and progress so prevalent in Latin America as well as the lingering and transformation of the legacy of big development projects which still impacts the imaginaries, expectation and life of people in the Amazon today.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation discusses the ways of reconnecting with the deindustrialized landscape in Kvartsitnyi, a former mining settlement. It focuses on the materiality of deserted industrial infrastructures, as well as the emotional responses or care and concern they provoke in the local community.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation discusses the ways of reconnecting with the deindustrialized landscape in a former mining settlement. It focuses on the materiality of deserted industrial infrastructures, as well as the complex emotional responses they provoke. As a case study, it analyzes the history of Kvartsitnyi, a settlement in Karelia, Northwestern Russia. Kvartsitnyi was built in the 1970s near the newly opened quartzitic sandstone quarry, adjacent to the Indigenous Veps village Shoksha. In the first decades after its construction, Kvartsitnyi was viewed as a modern progressive settlement attracting workers from different parts of the country. However, in the early 2000s, the sandstone quarry went bankrupt and closed, and today's residents of Kvartsitnyi live in a permanent state of uncertainty. The landscape of Kvartsitnyi is commonly viewed as empty and devoid of meaning before mining development started in the area. The quarry's closure resulted in returning to symbolic "nothingness," as Kvartsitnyi and its surroundings lost the mining industry as its core element. The residents of contemporary Kvartsitnyi attempt to reconnect with the settlement in new ways and to find reasons to stay in the area. Decaying construction sites in the center of Kvartsitnyi, have recently been turned into an ethnic theme park promoting the mining history of Indigenous Veps. The presentation discusses how care and concern for the post-industrial landscape are interconnected in contemporary Kvartsitnyi. The research is based on participant observation and interviews conducted in Karelia between 2015 and 2021.