With this project I aimed to understand how practices of political and social engagement changed under pressure of socio-economic change that hit many deindustrializing Western cities during the 1970s and 1980s. We can easily imagine that commitment and participation faded when individuals lost their jobs, families were confronted with changing occupation patterns, neighborhoods went through demographic shifts and experienced mass migration, industrial plants closed down and cities in fiscal crisis dismantled their social infrastructure. Presumably, the erosion of industrial communities came with disengagement and social polarization, which seem to have preconfigured many current urban problems. However, the actual impact of the socio-economic setback on commitment and participation is not quite clear. In fact, there is also evidence that the challenges of deindustrialization might have strengthened local communities and created new forms of political and social engagement.
In Antwerp, the contestation of environmental risks was one of the key issues of deindustrialization. Thus, I focused on practices through which residents of deindustrializing neighborhoods addressed and tried to mitigate environmental hazards and pollution. This focus ties in with recent scholarship on environmental justice, which has controversially discussed the ability and likelihood of disadvantaged communities to confront hazards and nuisances. In this debate, the relation between social inequalities and environmental justice is widely understood as a socio-spatial issue and many scholars have employed Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to analyze this nexus. However, while most researchers have used GIS to show how disadvantaged communities were disproportionally affected by the location of polluting facilities and environmental hazards, I employed this methodology to understand where and how opposition formed around such sites. In this way, I was able to map the emergence of practices of political and social engagement directed against the environmental risks which deindustrializing neighborhoods were exposed to.
