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Memory, Nostalgia, Landscape and Ruination

How do communities experience and remember loss? How is deindustrialization inhabited and interpreted through individual and collective memory, and as it is experienced through the remnant industrial landscapes? And ultimately, what happens to workers and the neighbouring communities when first, factories are shuttered and then, in time, as the lands are redeveloped and gentrification takes hold?

Although industrialism had a profound influence on the organization of working-class lives and spaces, it was ultimately as fleeting and temporary as Marx envisioned the precarity of capitalism itself, in retrospect, but a moment in the long arc of human experience:

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face…

the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.

Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Literature exploring the relationship between deindustrialization and gentrification in the modern, post-industrial world contains a deep sense of loss from the inevitable consequences of capitalism’s forward march in its constant quest for the new, and of the creative destruction that results from economic principles based on growth, innovation and selective renewal. Workers displaced by deindustrialization seek to understand and control the past and present narratives in order to shape a future that ensures they remain as active contributors to the economy, the political realm and to social life.

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Industrial Ruination and Industrial Ruins As Living Landscapes

What are the cultural meanings of post-industrial landscapes? In what ways are they contested terrain, their presence serving as a contemporary reminder of seismic economic transformation and who was, and was not, included in that transformation?

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Thinking of work cultures and their traditions as only existing in the past speaks to nostalgia and of things that cannot be recovered. Yet as cultural geographer Dorreen Massey (1995) reminds us, “the identity of a place is not to be seen as inevitably destroyed by new importations … identity is always and always has been, in the process of formation: it is in a

sense forever unachieved”. 

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Industrial ruination is an approach that moves us to think beyond industrial ruins as static artifacts locked in the past, and rather as places that continue to influence and exert pressure on the present. Sociologist Irene Mah identifies industrial ruination as an active, lived process that combines both landscapes and legacies, the interrelated relationships between people and places, as well as historical and socio-economic processes and their long-term psychological implications.

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Landscapes act as “storehouses for social memories” both personally (where does one come from) and collectively (what are the histories of our social relationships in that place)?

Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscape as Public History

Nostalgia And The Struggle For Memory

What is the role of memory and memorializing post-industrial landscapes? Whose stories are told, and by whom?

Memory and cultural practices of industrialization and deindustrialization have contributed to disembodied memories of work cultures.

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[Industrial ruins] are sites which have not been exorcized, where the supposedly over-and-done-with remains. Haunted by disruptive ghosts, they seethe with memories, but these wispy forms can rarely be confined.

Tim Edensor, The Ghosts of Industrial Ruins:

Ordering and Disordering Memory in Excessive Space.

I think it’s quite natural to feel awe when looking at industrial ruins, conjuring a sense of the tremendous power and force of the machinery and the roaring sounds they would have made, and to attempt to imagine what the working conditions would have been like.

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However, I’m also mindful to not fall prey to “smokestack nostalgia” with its risk of romanticizing and sentimentalizing the past, nor to engage in “ruin porn” by aestheticizing and commodifying these often haunting landscapes, “privileging

the ruined object while neglecting the socio-political structure behind its imposing nature” (Pohl 2018). 

How might we think about industrial landscapes as places whose stories and rough edges offer meanings capable of bridging the past and present?

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Industrial heritage may be constructively understood as a generative domain rather than as just contested terrain…a domain that provides a publicly useful space within which we may work to confront our collective implication in a complex past and an as yet undetermined future.

Michael Frisch,  De-, Re-, and Post-Industrialization: Industrial Heritage as Contested Memorial Terrain

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All of the photographs, text and other content on this website, as well as its overall design are copyright © Seana Irvine, except for any material provided by 3rd parties in which case the originator retains the copyright and the item is credited. All rights reserved.

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