1st Edition

Geographies of Post-Industrial Place, Memory, and Heritage

Edited By Mark Alan Rhodes II, William R. Price, Amy Walker Copyright 2021
    216 Pages
    by Routledge

    216 Pages
    by Routledge

    All industrialization is deeply rooted within the specific geographies in which it took place, and echoes of previous industrialization continue to reverberate in these places through to the modern day. This book investigates the overlap of memory and the impacts of industrialization within today’s communities and the senses of place and heritage that grew alongside and in reaction to the growth of mines, mills, and factories. 

    The economic and social change that accompanied the unchecked accumulation of wealth and exploitation of labor as the industrial revolution spread throughout the world has numerous lasting impacts on the socioeconomics of today. Likewise, the planet itself is now reeling. The memory and heritage of these processes reach into the communities that owe the industrial revolution their existence, but these populations also often suffered adverse impacts to their health and environment through the large-scale and rapid extraction of natural resources and production of goods. Through the themes of memory, community, and place; working post-industrial landscapes; and the de-romanticization of industrial pasts, this book examines the endurance and decline of these communities, the spatial processes of industrial byproducts, and the memory and heritage of industrialization and its legacies.

    While based in the traditions of geography, this collection also draws upon and will be of great interest to students and scholars of cultural anthropology, archaeology, sociology, history, architecture, civil engineering, and heritage, memory, museum, and tourism studies. Using global examples, the authors provide a uniquely geographic understanding to industrial heritage across the spaces, places, and memories of industrial development.

    1. Introduction: Geographies of Post-Industrial Place, Memory, and Heritage - Mark Alan Rhodes II, William R. Price and Amy Walker  Part 1: Constructing Post-Industrial Communities: Place, Memory, and Practice  2. Notes from a shrinking market: ‘Anticipatory nostalgia’ and place-making in the midst of change - Pablo Arboleda and Hayden Lorimer  3. Asansol: Unfinished biography of a Raj Era railway town: Explorations in heritage practice in post industrial India - Santanu Banerjee, Suvojit Chatterjee, Edward Hollis and Hemonta Mondal  4. Everyday resonances of industrial pasts: Considering lived and affective memories in ex-coal mining landscapes in a South Wales valley - Amy Walker  Part 2: Post-Industrial Working Landscapes  5. Unearthing community identities at the National Coal Mining Museums of Great Britain - William R. Price  6. Contamination as artifact: Waste and the presence of absence at the Trout Lake Concentrator, Coleraine, Minnesota - John Baeten   7. Geocreativity: Place rooted social engagement in industrial ruins - the case of Konvent, Spain - Rosa Cerarols and Antonio Luna  8. Dramatising deindustrialisation: Experiential authority, temporality and embodiment in a play about nuclear decommissioning - Leila Dawney  Part 3: De-Romanticizing Industrial Heritage  9. Agrarian ruins of the Khmer Rouge: The post-industrial landscapes of a rural economy - James A. Tyner, Kent State University and Stian Rice  10. The cultural necrotechnologies of capital and the production of (post) industrial capital punishment - Alex R. Colucci   11. Industrial heritage in an era of climate catastrophe: Contamination as heritage - Carolyn F. Thompson  12. Amgueddfa’r Gogledd: Slate, slavery, and transatlantic labor in the National Slate Museum - Mark Alan Rhodes II

    Biography

    Mark Alan Rhodes II is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences, Michigan Technological University, USA.

    William Price is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Ball State University, USA.

    Amy Walker is a PhD candidate in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University, UK.  

    "While the economic, technological, and political changes that caused deindustrialization are global, their effects play out locally, as each community draws on its history, its cultural memories, and its social networks to respond to industrial decline and large-scale layoffs. A realistic, complex sense of place, rooted in particular experiences of work and community, can help a town or region respond to the loss of its major industry and even find resilience in the face of such losses. Yet those who study deindustrialization must also recognize how the particularity of place co-exists with global commonalities. This book takes us on a world tour of the costs of economic restructuring and approaches to industrial heritage. As Geographies of Post-Industrial Place, Memory, and Heritage reminds us, deindustrialized communities everywhere face similar challenges."Sherry Linkon, Professor of English, Georgetown University, USA

    "Geographies of Post-Industrial Place, Memory, and Heritage hits the nail on the head - more care and attention is needed to advance our understanding of memory, community, place. All three editors grew up in, and now study dusty, smoky, oily, rusty, scarred places and Rhodes, Price, Walker have curated an excellent volume with passion, sensitivity and critical insights that avoid pit-falls of romanticisation. Chapters focus on a fascinating range of case studies, such as; slate mining in North and coal mining in South Wales; railway towns in India; gentrification of working-class markets in Scotland; industrialized killing/capital punishment in USA prison towns; decommissioned nuclear power plants in Lithuania; and industrial farming in Cambodia. Contributors provide fascinating empirical evidence enlivened through theoretical engagements with class; postcolonialism; slavery; emotions/affect; community; identity; contamination; waste; climate change etc. Offering rich and detailed thinking with regard to the endurance and decline of communities, the lasting effects of social relations, lifestyles, materialities and multitude legacies and memories of industrialization this book is a must read for anyone interested the ways in which geographical imaginations are generating new and exciting avenues for interdisciplinary work on memory and heritage." - Mark Jayne, Professor of Human Geography, Sun Yat-Sen University, China

    "Aside some important works that inform this collection, Geography’s contribution to understanding post-industrialism, a fundamentally spatial process, is latent. Responding, Geographies of Post-Industrial Place, Memory, and Heritage greatly advances geographical enquiry of post-industrialism by demonstrating its salience to major disciplinary concerns. The volume is distinguished in attending to international contexts and subjects largely absent in post-industrial studies – (post-)colonialism, environmentalism, carcerality – uniquely exploring their complex spatiotemporal relations with deindustrialisation. The contributions by both well-established and emerging scholars expand our conceptions of the spatial legacies, heritages and resonances of industrial transformations, documenting fresh empirical insights and developing novel theoretical directions."Jay Emery, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, The University of Sheffield

    "Rhodes, Price, and Walker have curated a set of eye-opening essays that map the complex transformations and tensions facing communities as they remember, forget, and live with the legacies of industrialization. By embracing the heterogeneous and emergent nature of place, contributors problematize not just what we have come to regard as the politics of industrial heritage but also where we expect to find those consequential struggles. This edited volume reflects the best in memory studies by connecting the heritage making process to the totality of everyday life and recognizing the many faces of post-industrial memory within society—from source of community identity, storytelling and tourism development to unreconciled reminders of capitalistic and colonial exploitation and the slow violence of environmental degradation." - Derek H. Alderman, Professor of Geography, University of Tennessee

     "I’ve been on the lookout for a book like this on post-industrial memory, place and heritage, especially one that I can recommend to my students. What I especially love about this book is the jargon free text, the research rich case studies and the contributors’ creative methods and approaches. It’s a book that feels fresh and lively, led by a group of researchers passionate about the legacy of (de)industrialisation for communities."Katy Bennett, Associate Professor in Human Geography, University of Leicester, UK