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Post-Industrial Chimneys seen Through Urban Regeneration Imaginaries: toward a Networked GeoHumanities

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PICTURING (Post-Industrial Chimneys seen Through Urban Regeneration Imaginaries: toward a Networked GeoHumanities)

Reporting period: 2020-07-01 to 2023-06-30

The PICTURING project addresses the relationship between urban deindustrialization, postindustrial redevelopment, and memory politics. It does so through looking at the demolition and conservation of industrial chimneys, and how this has been enacted in different geographical contexts. Originally to be a comparative study between Lodz, Poland, Manchester, UK, and Barcelona, Spain, due to complications related to COVID-19, it predominantly focused on the case of Barcelona.

Cultural heritage has become an issue of key concern of the European Union, and shared industrial and postindustrial transition are a central element of shared European identity. Considering that the conservation, adaptive reuse, or demolition of industrial structures has played such a major role in cities throughout Europe, and that built heritage continues to play a complicated role at the intersection of culture, environmental sustainability, and economic development, the project focuses on the key challenges of industrial heritage conservation and its often tense relationship with urban redevelopment. The societal challenges of deindustrialization, and questions of how to best manage economic and physical transformation in formerly industrial cities, is one that spans complicated questions of culture, economy, and politics, driving difficult cross-disciplinary conversations across different geographies, driving conversations about collective memory, gentrification, landscape, and community development.

The overall objectives of the project have been to comparatively explore how these cities have approached the industrial built heritage and postindustrial redevelopment differently. In the end, the focus was on Manchester and Barcelona. While in the end, out of necessity, the project was less comparative in nature, it explores how the area of Greater Manchester took an approach toward the widespread demolition of industrial chimneys, while Barcelona took an idiosyncratic, design-driven approach were chimneys were often left as solitary monuments in newly-created public spaces on former industrial sites. The Manchester case study focused on the televised spectacle of chimney demolition in the 1970s and 1980s through the television figure Fred Dibnah, whose profession career was largely dedicated to the demolition of chimneys. In the case of Barcelona, the project focused on identifying, documenting, and mapping all of the city's industrial chimneys for the first time. These photographs and maps were then presented in a museum exhibition as part of a unique curatorial methodology, in which the images were used to elicit reactions from visitors to ascertain the cultural meaning of these chimney-monuments and broader attitudes toward the city's approach to industrial heritage conservation and urban redevelopment in the wake of deindustrialization and the transition to democracy in the late 1970s.

The conclusions of the project demonstrate that there is a clear connection among Barcelona residents that conserved industrial chimneys represent the working-class past of the city, as well as representing its post-industrial redevelopment, a process which is widely perceived to have left out or expelled working class businesses and residents in the name of urban reimaging. As an extension of this, there is widespread agreement among interviewees and participants that the city should make more effort to narrate the pasts of industrial sites dominated by the presence of industrial chimneys, which are perceived as valuable but unfortunately decontextualized. What I have found is that there is a desire, as well as a political imperative, to link past working class struggles in the city (around work, environmental issues, housing, etc.) and current challenges associated with gentrification and tourism in the postindustrial city.
The results of the project were the exhibition Industrial Obelisks at the Barcelona History Museum, two peer-reviewed articles, a forthcoming book, a forthcoming book chapter, a forthcoming conference proceedings, and three peer reviewed articles that are under revisions or preparation. They were presented in five international conferences, as an invited lecturer in two academic workshops, and through local an national press in Spain.
The progress beyond the state of the art occurred on three fronts. Firstly, in terms of methodology, the exhibition-as-method was innovative in its use of a museum exhibition as a way to generate public dialogue around pressing issues of urban redevelopment, and to ascertain public attitudes toward architectural heritage practices and urban redevelopment through the use of photo-elicitation and viewer questionnaires. In the academic sphere, the project contributed to understanding of the relationship between Barcelona's industrial past and deindustrializing present, with a great deal of applicability to other cities, as Barcelona has been a key city in shaping urban design and architectural trends worldwide since the 1980s. This has contributed not only to advancing urban studies scholarship within geography and the design fields, but also making key contributions to the emerging transdisciplinary fields of the geohumanities, deindustrialization studies, and memory studies.

The societal impacts of the project, particularly in Barcelona, are manifold. The project has rekindled public debate around the city's historical approach to redeveloping former industrial areas, while drawing attention to the conflicts between public memory in historically industrial, working-class industrial districts and the city's current wave of gentrification and real-estate driven growth. This is especially relevant to the particular case, but also closely related to the conflicts around the redevelopment of former industrial districts and cities throughout Europe, particularly those under intense redevelopment pressure and tourism-driven economic development strategies.
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