Abstract
Luger and Schwarze's critical unsettling of postindustrial is a presciently welcome one. For some years now, I—and others—have become increasingly uncomfortable with referring to and describing the locations of our research as “postindustrial.” The main focus of this commentary is on the facets of Luger and Schwarze's (2024) arguments as they relate to nonmetropolitan deindustrializing urbanisms in the North Atlantic in an attempt to develop how we better conceptualize, understand and do justice to and with such spaces. The main thrust of the contribution is for the affective intensities and traumas of deindustrialization to be brought into closer analytical dialog with the profusion of processes associated with, in particular, “organized abandonment” and “neoliberal urbanism.” If classed experiences and knowledge shape these dialogs, there remains hope for urban studies to contribute to an emergent multiethnic class politics around commonalities of contemporary as well as historical class violence.
In their paper, Luger and Schwarze (2024: 204) make a compelling case for leaving behind the postindustrial “as a denominator and classificatory concept.” For them, “postindustrial” as a concept or descriptor of certain urbanities is overly Western-centric and does not effectively capture the diversity and processes of present (de-)industrial production either beyond or within North Atlantic economies. Further, more than mere scholarly semantical naval gazing, “postindustrial” as a term in everyday public discourse has become—or, arguably, has always been—imbued with essentialized, stigmatized and gendered meanings, precluding a more pluralistic class politics to emerge.
In calling for its relegation, the authors encourage researchers to critique how we use “postindustrial,” inviting us to consider whether the reality confronted is perhaps more complex, multifaceted, and the result of a specific spatiotemporal process not characterizable by a singular concep. The authors further warn against terminological expediency in allusion to “postindustrial” in the absence of alternatives, instead urging us to develop better conceptualizations to avoid complexity becoming “lost in conceptual ambiguity” and “uncertainty over what constitutes urban everyday life” (Ibid. 205). This, the authors claim, is crucial for shaping the future politics of change.
Luger and Schwarze's critical unsettling of postindustrial is a presciently welcome one. For some years now, I—and others—have become increasingly uncomfortable with referring to and describing the locations of our research as “postindustrial” (Clark, 2023; Emery, 2023). At the risk of validating the authors’ critiques of Western-centrism, the main focus of this commentary is on the facets of Luger and Schwarze's (2024) arguments as they relate to nonmetropolitan deindustrializing urbanisms in the North Atlantic in an attempt to develop how we better conceptualize, understand and do justice to and with such spaces.
Prior to this forum, I provisionally settled on “deindustrializing towns” as classificatory shorthand to refer to peripheralized urban spaces outside major metropolitan centers that I see as continuing to live with and be conditioned by, processes of deindustrialization (Emery, 2023). Discussed below, foregrounding deindustrialization as an ongoing process is considered critical as industrial closures have been formative of subsequent violent processes of what I prefer to conceptualize as, following Gilmore (2022), “organized abandonments.” Something about “deindustrializing towns” still does not feel quite right; however, the term is/was an attempt to overcome some of the analytical misrepresentations and stigmatizations I saw in classifying such places as “postindustrial” or, more common to the United Kingdom, “left-behind towns.”
It is also my modest attempt to challenge resurgent forces that “recast the real injuries of class through the politics of racist resentment” (Virdee, 2019: 24) at the same time as representing deindustrializing geographies as vanguards of racial nationalist politics. As Luger and Schwarze (2024; see also Virdee, 2023) discuss in their paper, the everyday language of postindustrialism has been seized upon by reactionary forces through allied terms such as “left behind.” Such populist forces have also been much more effective in the co-optation of post-industrialism than progressive forces have been in recognizing the continued salience of historical class injustices and the “extinguishing [of] educated hope” (Virdee, 2023: 468) among multiethnic working-classes—though I would contest the degree to which this has either translated into, or can be traced by, voting behaviors (Emery, 2023).
However, while in agreement with much of Luger and Schwarze's (2014) critique, it seems we arrived at the point of tentatively leaving the postindustrial behind by slightly different critical routes, which, in turn, has implications for routes we might now take.
The first route concerns how the overlapping processes of industrialism, deindustrialization and, I would argue to a lesser extent, postindustrialism are conceived and temporalized. With regards to “deindustrializing towns”—and by no means limited to them (Emery, 2019; Mah, 2012)—conceptualizations of industrialism/industrial society require encompassing more than just how things are/were produced in an economy but the cultural and political forms of life and sociality that found their institutional and organizational forms in labor movements as well as social clubs and societies and struggled into being most apparently in the period of democratic capitalism (Clark, 2023; Streeck, 2011).
It is acknowledged that this conceptualization of industrialism is absolutely a geographically, socially and historically narrow one, limited to particular industrial communities in certain spaces (no matter how numerous), and should always be caveated, qualified and specified as such to the geographies or communities in question. The solidarities, cultures and political infrastructures that emerged and embedded in this conceptualization were never total and never uniformly inclusive. Yet, the understandings are rooted in dominant ways that contemporary (deindustrializing) communities I encounter understand “industrial society.” To extend Walkerdine's (2010: 97) theorization, the spatial, social and political formations of industrial communities, however incomplete and problematic, provided “a dream of symbiosis and an ego-skin,” which was/is ruptured by the closure of communities’ foundational reason for being, whether steelworks, mine, factory, plant, whatever.
Crucially, such affected communities are not “post” these ruptures and the loss or erosion of the above elements of industrialism are felt most acutely as “legacies” (Mah, 2012), “affects” (Walkerdine, 2010), “half-lives” (Clark, 2023) and “urban traumas” (Emery, 2022; Pain, 2019). In seeking to understand the reality of deindustrializing spaces, we would be remiss to devalue or disregard the intensity of feeling around these affective temporalities, however ambiguously articulated or surfaced. As such, it is the ongoing presence of the industrial past interwoven with personal and collective traumas wrought by deindustrialization that is, in part, captured in “deindustrializing” rather than “postindustrial” (or “deindustrialized”).
In my reading, Luger and Schwarze (2024) indirectly reference the cultural and social dynamics of industrialism in their discussions of the impacts of deindustrialization. However, omitting the same dynamics in their conceptualizations of industrialism itself, which is limited to modes and processes of production, leads to the conflation of multiple forms of labor and workplaces across geographies and time periods around technical aspects of industrialized economy. To me, this downplays too much how deindustrializing communities view themselves, interpret the changes they are undergoing and value any “new” economies that are replacing the “old” (Pattison, 2022).
This is pertinent to discussions of reindustrialization that Luger and Schwarze (2024) importantly bring to the fore. Similar forms of reindustrialization to those noted by Luger and Schwarze (2024) have taken place in the deindustrializing towns I research with. For example, in Grimsby, United Kingdom, where fish manufacturing plants provide (precaritized and low-paid) employment and the wind energy sector ostensibly provides high-skilled employment opportunities. Both may resemble reindustrialization if we take a technical, economistic definition of industrialism. However, this reindustrialization does not resemble industrialism as industrialism is conceived in respective communities, principally due to high-skilled industries rarely being accessible to the most marginalized and precaritized and low-paid industries not giving rise to the aforementioned “dreams of symbiosis” and “ego-skins” whose loss is so keenly felt by deindustrializing neighborhoods.
That said, partially for reasons signaled above, I do not see such instances of “reindustrialization” as being “postindustrial” employment sectors either. Rather, I see the (re-)emergence of forms of employment in deindustrializing spaces as part of an unfolding process of uneven neoliberal development whereby certain people, neighborhoods and places have been alternately selected to benefit from such things as limited high-skilled industrial sector jobs or, more commonly, rendered surplus. As Jones (2024: 2, added emphasis) states, the current crises of entrenched sociospatial inequalities and disposability, and the lack of political capacity or will to address them: …has been decades in the making, and is rooted in the past 40 years of neoliberalism, a political strategy which has overseen a rolling back of the welfare state, deindustrialization, attacks on wages and working conditions, and a weakening of local civic infrastructure, all of it subsequently exacerbated by over a decade of austerity.
Further, while existing terms undoubtedly carry synonymic associations, in our push to conjure and name new concepts, we risk further distancing urban theory from lived language, with potential implications for the relevance of urban scholarship in the wider (policy) world. Knowledge of the processes mentioned throughout this commentary accumulates in the collective experience and histories of “de-”, “post-,” “re-,” and just plain industrializing communities. If we center this class-based knowledge and how its articulated and understood by those that experience(d) it, as opposed to formulating conceptual and classificatory language for them, there remains hope to shape an emergent multiethnic class politics around commonalities of contemporary as well as historical class violence (Emery et al., 2023).
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
