The intersectional relationships between landscape, place identity, historical memory, and individual histories have informed much scholarship in recent decades. These concepts are layered; spaces are composed of more than physical landscapes or boundaries that can be visualised or represented on a map. They are, in essence, ‘relationally constructed’ (Massey 2005: 9). This is as true of small, personalised spaces as it is of streetscapes, neighbourhoods, or large cities – and memory is foundational in maintaining these conceptual constructions. Our place-memories correspond with sets of relationships, each of which give meaning to the landscapes with which we are most familiar.
Martha Norkunas provides an excellent anecdote to explain this concept in her ruminations on working-class place identity in Lowell, Massachusetts. She describes her return to the home of her deceased mother only to have experienced a profoundly alien sensation. Her connection to that place, mediated as it was through her memory of her mother and their relationship, was disrupted by her mother’s palpable absence (2002: 11). This sentiment, one of disruption and of being out-of-place, is one that speaks to many of us who have had the emotional experience of re-visiting an important landscape from our personal past. While this example is illustrative, if we re-direct our attention towards the places that we experience and construct collectively – neighbourhoods or workplaces – the socio-political aspects of memory and place identity are made clear.
In this chapter, the class dimensions of place identity are examined in the context of deindustrialised and regenerated work sites and communities in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Drawing upon several case studies, the transition of these spaces from places of work to working-class memoryscapes is compelling. Former industrial workers and displaced working-class community members perceive changes in the physical landscape as a corollary to a broader sense of powerlessness that emerges alongside deindustrialisation. Environmentalists or urban developers, often directly implicated in the remediation process, hold divergent and often conflicting perspectives. This focus corresponds with recent scholarship on urban change and gentrification, working-class erasure and displacement, and memory-as-resistance. It reveals the overarching power dynamics that inform class-based relationships through place, space, and environment and reflects the processes by which ‘some things are more ‘absorbed’ … or incorporated into the place than others’ (Massey 1995: 186).
Ruination accompanies the displacement of working-class men and women that has occurred in many former single-industry towns. In such landscapes the remnants of industry might exist, ruined, as visible markers of past relationships that have been torn away by the vicissitudes of global capitalism. Images of these places are familiar; abandoned cathedrals of industry, rusted machinery, and the empty shop floor are all hallmarks of the middle-class ruin porn aesthetic. These places, aesthetised or commodified as they may be, are produced by the rank materialism of capital mobility and the never-ending corporate search for higher rates of profit, lower rates of unionisation, and greater efficiencies (Mah 2012: 10). The politics surrounding these sites have been debated extensively (High 2007, 2013; Edensor 2005; DeSilvey & Edensor 2013), but it remains important to recognise them as temporal representations that retain great meaning among those who have been displaced.
The strength of these connections is made clear in Steven High’s work on Sturgeon Falls, Ontario. High traces mill workers’ experiences of the decline and closure of the town’s major employer – a paper mill (High 2010, 2017, 2018). Ruination in this rural resource frontier became starkly visible on 2 December 2002, when Weyerhauser closed the mill after its two-month notice to employees ended. For its displaced workers, this announcement represented an immediate threat to their sense of place – one that did not go unchallenged. As High describes:
The demolition of on-site structures is one of the final and most insurmountable hurdles faced by displaced workers in retaining place identity. For workers in basic manufacturing, among many of whom constant fears of downsising and closure have taken hold since the 1970s, the physical remains of the mill are imbued with some sense of hope for the return of industrial employment. In Sturgeon Falls, employees created a ‘mill history binder’ – a portable record of the history of their workplace – that could continue to be used as a memory aid even after the destruction of the mill’s physical structures.
Cultural practices like the mill history binder reveal how displaced peoples attempt to connect themselves, through memory, to the landscapes of the past. Popular interest in how such processes unfold has only increased in the years and decades after industrial crisis in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, as High et al. discuss, many of us who work in this field have either experienced industrial collapse first-hand or came of age in the shadow of defunct industry (2017).
Meanwhile, changes in post-industrial landscapes have provoked questions not only about ruination, but also about multiple forms of erasure (Clarke 2011). Changes in the present-day landscape are often accompanied by a set of explanations that rely upon popular – if circumscribed – ideas about the market, business cycle, environment, and economic or social development. Too often, the popularisation of these narratives serves to write-off working-class concerns about the end result of deindustrialisation as misguided or backward looking. How can positive memories of the industrial past co-exist, for instance, with development language that re-frames deindustrialised landscapes in terms of ‘remediation’ or ‘reclamation?’ And what about the men and women who retain connections to the un-reconstructed memory-landscapes of their own class experiences? In deindustrialised places, the memories of the displaced raise uncomfortable questions about the inevitability of industrial closure and the changing class boundaries of the present day. Working-class memories and bodies are not as neatly ‘remediated’ as their neighbourhoods or workplaces, after all.
Geography matters. The experiences of displaced workers in Pittsburgh, Montreal, or London differ from those in single-industry, rural resource frontiers – though they respond to the same general stimuli. In North America, post-industrial urban transformation has been explored as ‘an act perpetrated’ (Stoler 2008) – in the cases of Hamilton, Ontario, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as the direct result of policies pursued by middle-class growth coalitions (Neumann 2016). Perhaps nowhere are the tensions between memory and the post-industrial city more visible than in Detroit, Michigan. Detroit has been simultaneously framed as the emblematic example of industrial collapse and – increasingly – as a space for middle-class regeneration or re-development. Aesthetic representations of ruined Detroit have certainly been, in the words of Dora Apel, positively post-apocalyptic, but the city has also been positioned as a supposed success story of neoliberal governance and middle-class re-development (2015: 132).
In 2015, the Detroit Historical Museum began transcribing and conducting interviews as part of the Detroit 1967 Oral and Written History Project. The intention of this project was to collect the memories of Metro Detroiters, unpack changing perceptions over the past half-century, and reflect upon how these memories relate to the infamous 1967 Detroit riot. The riot erupted in late July, following several arrests made by police during a raid of an unlicensed drinking establishment. Racial enmity within the city erupted as African American residents protested over five days, which included a series of confrontations with the Detroit Police Department, the National Guard, and army paratroopers. There were 44 recorded deaths, millions of dollars in property damage, and hundreds of injuries as the result, with the majority of these affecting black residents of the city.
While many of the project’s interviews include recollections of 1967, several also reflect explicitly upon the changing borders of class, racial, and ethnic geographies in Detroit alongside deindustrialisation and economic collapse. Lucille Schaffer, a daughter of German immigrants who was interviewed as part of this project, describes growing up in low-income, working-class neighbourhoods of Detroit. She remembers a sense of shared class identity, but also a city that was deeply divided along racial lines. As she recalls:
Her memories of the industrial city are conflicted. While basic manufacturing and the blue-collar middle class that it sustained helped to produce a sense of community, these circumstances were also rooted in deeply entrenched racial boundaries that were constantly policed not only by the state, but also by white, working-class ‘neighbourhood organisations.’
Despite the divisions, Lucille’s recollections imbue the city’s past with an air of nostalgia not afforded to the deindustrialised present. She reflects:
Joyce Ross expressed similar concerns in 2017. For Joyce, the city has changed significantly since the 1960s and 1970s – but emerging changes may signal something positive on the horizon. She states, ‘I think we’re on the right track. I just hope that with the [Trump] administration in Washington, I hope it doesn’t set us back… . If I were younger, I would move down here.’ (Ross 2017).
The complex themes that inform these and other memories of the twentieth-century city – race and class chief among them – are central to dozens of interviews from the Detroit 1967 project. White and black residents of the city, spanning from working-class autoworkers and labour organisers to police officers and white-collar workers, recall an urban locale predicated upon the economic benefits of industrial production. While these memories are oriented towards a particular historical moment – the 1967 rebellion – they reveal a city of contradictions. Racial animus exacerbated by the great wave of black migration from the American South existed within an historical moment where the blue-collar middle class remained economically ascendant. While Detroit had lost thousands of manufacturing jobs prior to 1967, the years afterwards witnessed a surge in deindustrialisation, white flight to the suburbs, and periodic foreclosure crises. Each of these proved especially devastating to the city’s black residents (Sugrue 2005: 5). As a result of these multiple and protracted forms of disinvestment, the city’s population has declined from approximately two million in 1950 to just below 700,000 residents in 2017 (Herstad 2017: 85).
Urban developers have been quick to reorient working-class landscapes towards entirely new configurations of capital and social relationships as the result of the disintegration of the city’s industrial base. Billionaires like Quickens Loan founder Dan Gilbert have been snapping up real estate in a small, waterfront-adjacent part of the downtown (Peck & Whiteside 2016: 236). While such acquisitions have opened spaces for small-business incubation and rentier capital, they have also deepened forms of geographical and class-based exclusion. Moreover, they have hardened the dividing lines between those within the class and racial boundaries of such spaces and those who remain on the outside. This occurs not only in Detroit, but also in deindustrialised urban centres throughout the United States (Slater 2009; Zukin et al. 2009: 47; Walley 2013).
The gentrification of downtown Detroit and the concurrent emptying out of working-class ‘blighted’ neighbourhoods provokes a sort of cognitive dissonance between the post-industrial landscape and the relational memories of current and former residents. While gentrification and urban regeneration is predicated upon imagining such spaces as blank slates, displaced workers, racialised peoples, and other marginalised groups have historically acted in resistance to this tendency. As Stefan Berger and Christian Wicke argue in a recent special edition of The Public Historian, heritage and memory activism have frequently been marshalled to assert the continued relevancy of these forms of identity in the face of peripheralisation (Berger & Wicke 2017: 10).
These processes, too, are often deeply contested. Companies have attempted to ‘reclaim’ Detroit’s former working-class identity through various schemes – including one that re-uses material from demolished structures to produce $200 sunglasses for sale to the city’s nascent urban elite. These approaches are fundamentally flawed in that they do not engage with either the trauma of deindustrialisation or the enduring forms of racial exclusion that continue to shape Detroit in its modern renaissance. On the other hand, as Kaeleigh Herstad notes, projects like Detroit ’67 help to commemorate and foster discussion about Detroit’s painful decline and history of racial exclusion – connecting past to present through oral history and ethnography. Such projects allow for residents of deindustrialised urban spaces to work through their contested pasts without appealing to the language of regeneration, which too-often obscures lived experiences of urban change and displacement (2017: 113). They provide a radical memoryscape of the city using the voices of working-class residents and challenge the pervasive idea that any positive recollection of the working-class city must, by definition, be nostalgic.
In Canada, where we have sometimes been content to see ourselves as an international resource hinterland in our own right, we have resisted the impulse to explore urban transformation in our largest cities as a function of deindustrialisation. This, as has been noted elsewhere, is perhaps because financialisation and the transition to service and knowledge industries obscures the disparity that erupts in the aftermath of workplace closures (High et al. 2017). In other words, post-industrialism within urban centres also relies upon the physical displacement of working-class men and women – not only from their workplaces, but also from their communities.
As we see in Griffintown, the Irish-Canadian working-class neighbourhood that long existed adjacent to Montreal’s downtown core, there are similar incongruities. For urban developers, Griffintown was a poverty-ridden slum that was best ‘regenerated’ into a bedroom community for the downtown core. For its working-class residents, it was home. As condo-isation and urban growth encroached upon the area, residents launched a concerted effort to underpin their sense of place through oral history storytelling and various other lieux de mémoires (Barlow 2017: 16; Nora 1989). Similar forms of contestation continue to unfold in other threatened working-class areas of Montreal. These efforts rely upon the vibrant, living memory of residents and demand a careful re-calculation of the impact of gentrification as a function of deindustrialisation (Vickers 2013; Chatterjee & High 2017).
The tensions that arise from large-scale real estate investments or other efforts to reimagine working-class spaces as ‘postindustrial’ occupy a significant place within the literature on deindustrialised urban landscapes, but these are not the only vectors of displacement. Commercial and retail spaces can also become sites of class struggle over the right of residents to stay put in the face of smallholder capital. In their study of Mount Dennis in Toronto, a former manufacturing hub and working-class neighbourhood, Katharine Rankin and Heather McLean examine how attempts to court incoming affluent residents may be more palatable to the liberal middle class than high-rise luxury apartments, but are no less damaging in the long term for the working-class residents that they come to displace. They write that such efforts constitute ‘a new urbanist resistance favouring “green” and “creative” economic development’ (2015: 217). These processes bring cultural pressures to bear on existing residents even before economic pressures begin to mount. As Starbucks and chain fitness studios begin to replace diners and local taverns, blue-collar residents feel their sense of place start to slip even prior to the first inklings of a rent hike or increased police presence (Lehrer & Wieditz 2009: 140; Harvey 2012).
Local memory in these areas consistently reveals one significant reality: deindustrialisation and class displacement are not natural processes. Nor are they neutral. They unfold with purpose, corresponding to both market forces and state policy. That workplace and neighbourhood landscapes are vessels for occupational and collective identity is clear, and the creation of memoryscapes is but one of the ways that these have been rigorously defended from within. As historians, our role in the production of such sites is political; this is inescapable. In foregrounding the memory of life before disruption, we necessarily question and challenge the structures that have emerged in the aftermath. This is especially important in urban areas, where skyscrapers and condos fit – too frequently – within uncritical, exclusionary assessments of the changing landscape.
Unlike in Montreal or Detroit, where displacement is obscured by the citywide turn to other economic sectors, rural areas faced with deindustrialisation find themselves continuously defined in terms of the defunct industries that came before. This creates challenges for working-class public history initiatives or memoryscapes. While gentrification in urban locales pushes working-class residents to other neighbourhoods or suburbs, the absence of new orientations of capital in rural areas mean that residents are only infrequently directly displaced. Rather, the shape and sense of community changes around its residents. Some men and women choose to leave for economic opportunities elsewhere, which often requires moving away from an area entirely instead of simply relocating nearby. This results in a significant number of remaining residents who continue to recall the benefits of living in a community based around industrial production, the jobs it provided, and the relationships that it sustained (MacKinnon 2016; Donatelli et al. 2017). Such memories are re-produced in museums, theatre performances, documentary films, and monuments.
There are three general tendencies that must be navigated in the creation of working-class memoryscapes in such places. The first is the tendency towards nostophobia; or, representations of the industrial past that are uncritical or wholly celebratory, that distance the past from the present, or that ignore conflicting memories (Smith & Campbell 2011: 88). The second is the tendency to adopt development language that highlights the ‘successes’ of post-industrial initiatives, however constrained or ineffectual, in contrast to the dangerous, dirty work of the past. Finally, the recognition that industrial production has resulted in a host of negative bodily and environmental aftermaths is incredibly important and remains necessary in both scholarship and public history. But this also risks producing heritage efforts that focus wholly on such outcomes and read them backwards into history, colouring past experiences and imbuing narratives with a sense of impending, inevitable doom.
In the United Kingdom, Scotland has been the staging ground for a number of studies on rural deindustrialisation (Perchard 2012; Phillips 2012). Ewan Gibbs and Andy Clark devastatingly critique what they have termed the ‘New Scotland thesis’: that the decline of ‘dinosaur’ heavy industries has prompted the rise of a ‘brain-intensive economy’ based upon service and knowledge that is now poised to launch rural Scotland to hitherto unknown heights of prosperity (2017: 6). Gibbs and Clark are quick to note that such proposed benefits are not to be accrued by deindustrialised locales themselves, but by nearby urban centres to which rural residents will apparently be content to commute for work. At their most insidious, such narratives hold up those who remain outside of the new, ‘brain-intensive’ economy as being worthy of ridicule for their out-of-place working-class habits and cultures (Jones 2011).
The same holds true in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, where workers on the rural island of Cape Breton produced both coal and steel before these industries were shuttered in 2000. The poverty and depopulation that have since plagued Cape Breton are not mentioned in a 2014 report to the provincial government, which instead praises the growth of the province’s urban centre, Halifax. ‘Economies grow around cities,’ the report assures readers:
The message is for residents of deindustrialised Cape Breton Island to tighten their belts in the face of austerity in the hope that some of the newly generated wealth of distant cities will make its way back in one form or another.
Memoryscapes help to challenge these exclusionary narratives by drawing upon and presenting the experiences of those who have been directly affected. The Scottish Oral History Centre and the Paisley People’s Archive, for example, collaborated in the development of a Paisley Thread Mills Memoryscape. The hour-long documentary-style video, available online and through each partner organisation, draws upon oral history testimony of former employees, family members, and other residents to illustrate the deep sense of community that emerged from work at the mill. This is not a nostalgic representation; indeed, the difficulties of working-class life, strict regiments of gendered behaviour and sexuality, and the necessity of labour organising are all foregrounded. Nor does it conform to the New Scotland thesis; rather, the Paisley Memoryscape belies the idea that the movement away from blue-collar work can be framed entirely in progressive terms. As one female respondent recalls:
Memoryscapes are a form of resistance. They complicate narratives that assign very particular, uncomplicated roles to working-class men and women who have been displaced or marginalised by deindustrialisation. They are not simply a response to a shift in economy, but to a threatened disconnect between place and identity. As Pierre Nora describes, ‘Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present’ (1989: 8). Such bonds have taken many forms, from local collections of documents and records to public history commemorations, audio walks, and digital projects (Dabakis 1999: 35–36; Heron 2000; Bradley 2016). Whether on the site of former workplaces or in working-class neighbourhoods under threat of gentrification or depopulation, these efforts frequently harken back to the sensory landscapes of the industrial past through the spoken word, ambient noise, or background textures (Butler 2007).
For labour historians, the reliance upon public history and memoryscapes as a form of resistance is perhaps jarring. Indeed, the very argument presumes that existing methods of combatting deindustrialisation have fallen short. They are frequently, after all, ways of maintaining a connection between place and identity in an environment where industrial production has already ceased. Organised labour has responded in a variety of ways, from the Crafted with Pride campaign of the 1980s to the UNITE effort against sweatshop labour in the 1990s, but none have achieved the type of sustained, systemic success that would be required to truly challenge deindustrialisation (Minchin 2012: 2; Johns & Veral 2000: 1193). While debates continue, we should not downplay the role of heritage and memory in maintaining a sense of power for affected communities.
Deindustrialisation has created contested spaces throughout urban and rural areas around the world. Whether at former workplaces or in working-class neighbourhoods facing erasure, residents of deindustrialised spaces find themselves at the forefront of a struggle for power over the shape of their future. Memory becomes a mechanism for resistance in urban and rural areas alike and helps to challenge essentialist notions about the positive nature of industrial decline. Such notions emerge – as we have seen – from within prevailing neoliberal conceptions of economic development, but so, too, can they arise out of an increasing awareness of ecology and the environment. In both urban and rural deindustrialised areas, eco-friendly re-purposing of industrial spaces have been discursively positioned in opposition to the concerns of existing working-class communities. On such occasions, it is worthwhile to consider rhetoric about greening or cleaning up such spaces as a corollary to the gentrification process (Dooling 2009).
Rural environmental remediation efforts have frequently been necessary. In Anaconda, Montana, for instance, the operations of the Washoe Smelter produced pollutants that affected the health of workers and residents and damaged the local environment. (Bryson & Wyckoff 2010: 66) Love Canal, New York, and the Sydney Tar Ponds in Nova Scotia are two other examples; in each, working-class communities came together, in the face of deindustrialisation, to challenge both their economic dispossession and fight for appropriate forms of environmental remediation (Newman 2016). Challenges emerge, however, when the language of remediation is used to underscore and support deindustrialisation and class displacement. As Bryson and Wyckoff describe, a proposed tramway to the top of Mt. Haggin in Montana was halted after urban planners and city leaders cautioned that ‘the tramway’s spectacular views might alarm some visitors ‘critical of such things as logging, mining, smelting … that may not be pleasant to some tender eyes … who think that the natural beauty is spoiled’ (67).
The class dimensions of ‘greening’ rhetoric are even more visible in urban or inner-city working-class neighbourhoods. In Brightmoor – a post-industrial area of Detroit – Theodore Pride describes how incoming middle-class residents sought to proselytise green sustainability in the face of perceived industrial blight. He writes:
In Brightmoor, the middle-class perceptions of the neighbourhood – if not the reality – was that it desperately required environmental remediation to become ‘sustainable.’ The same impulse is visible in other eco-gentrifying neighbourhoods, where the class relationships and cultures found within are rhetorically framed as component parts of the brownfield landscape that requires regeneration.
As public historians, the environmental dimension of deindustrialisation is difficult to represent. On its face, industrial work and the landscapes that it produces have clearly had a significant negative impact on both human health and the environment. In addition to the lives lost through industrial accidents, the environmental ‘externalities’ of centuries of industrial production has almost certainly cost millions of lives. This aspect of industrial work, the communities that it has sustained, and the contours of life in post-industrial areas must be included in our narratives – whichever form our interventions may take. But this requires a deft touch; after all, memories and meanings are not fixed in place. Environment and ecology are necessary for understanding working-class experiences of deindustrialisation, though we must be sure that concerns over these issues are not used to justify other forms of marginalisation or displacement.
Ultimately, deindustrialisation is a spatial process as much as an economic or cultural one. Recognising and representing how it has differentially impacted working-class residents in urban and rural areas is necessary work, and – as the memoryscapes described herein attest – scholars in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom are already taking up the challenge. Working-class communities have fought against their disruption through direct action, economic resistance, protests, strikes, and demands for political accountability. Cultural work, including commemoration, the development of memoryscapes, public history, community-based engagements, and public art are all, likewise, important methods of resisting these forms of displacement.
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