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.
