Urban post-industrialism's long shadow and lasting spell

Abstract

The commentaries introduce some important challenges to our provocation, and in other ways, take our critique even further and in new directions. Rather than addressing each commentary sequentially, we structure our response to the commentaries around a few key critical themes that emerged across the group. These are: a) The need to retain post-industrialism as a conceptual framework for understanding urban processes, spaces, lives and change; b) for also differentiating between de-industrialisation and post-industrialisation; and c) for carefully deconstructing (and listening to) who, how, and why post-industrialism is used (i.e., whose voices, stories, histories are included or excluded? What political intentions lie behind the use of post-industrial and related terms such as ‘left-behind?’), with specific attention to the structures and experiences of race, class, and gender. In other words, the focus needs to be on the discursive and symbolic power, politics, and cultural sensitivities when the notion of post-industrialism is evoked.

We are grateful for and inspired by the thoughtful commentaries from Michael Glass, June Wang, Jason Hackworth, Jay Emery and James Pattison, whose own experiences with the post-industrial compelled them to read and critically engage with our provocation: thank you. We are grateful also to Yolande Pottie-Sherman and Kirsteen Paton who (along with Michael Glass, Jason Hackworth and June Wang), participated in a colloquy session on this topic at the Urban Affairs Association Conference in New York in April 2024. They, and those in the audience at the session, and in the written commentaries responding to our paper – have given us much to think about and pulled out some valuable notes of critique that we now reconsider.

We write our rejoinder, once again, from the vantagepoints of our commonly-depicted, post-industrial homes of Tyneside, England and Clydebank, Scotland. Recently, Bruce Springsteen – who has made a career out of narrating the post-industrial American experience – performed at Sunderland's Stadium of Light. Post-industrialism, it would seem, casts a long shadow, an ongoing spell, a residual legacy, that sells tickets and fills stadium seats. Whether or not we are finished with the post-industrial, it is clearly not finished with us.

While there seems to be strong consensus across the commentaries to our paper – and we agree – that post-industrialism remains a useful concept, it must be deployed with care. Our aim, as we stated in our forum paper, has not been to leave behind this concept entirely, and its cognate languages, like ‘left-behind’ or ‘rust-belt’ or ‘organised abandonment’, but rather, to critically question how, why, where, and by whom such language is used, understood, and crafted. The language of post-industrialism has power, and this power can shape places, lives, trajectories. In closely-scrutinising the concept, we agree with our interlocutors that rather than being discarded, it can be expanded, contextualised and diversified, so that it is not reduced to stereotypical geographies (like Tyneside, Detroit, Pittsburgh), or deployed haphazardly and interchangeably by political pundits and mass-media headlines. Furthermore, we reiterate our acknowledgment of the lasting scars – or, ‘stigmata’ (as Michael Glass puts it), of the industrial, and the residualities and legacies, from the abandoned infrastructure of disinvested places to the industrial byproducts – pollutants and toxins – that, like stigmata, continue to bleed into and out of the earth. We also acknowledge that post-industrialism has different relevance and cadences across global urban geographies: a single language is not suitable for capturing change across hemispheres, cultures, landscapes.

All that said, the commentaries introduce some important challenges to our provocation, and in other ways, take our critique even further and in new directions. Rather than addressing each commentary sequentially, we structure our response to the commentaries around a few key critical themes that emerged across the group. These are: a) The need to retain post-industrialism as a conceptual framework for understanding urban processes, spaces, lives and change; but b) for also differentiating between de-industrialisation and post-industrialisation; and c) for carefully deconstructing (and listening to) who, how, and why post-industrialism is used (i.e., whose voices, stories, histories are included or excluded? What political intentions lie behind the use of post-industrial and related terms such as ‘left-behind?’), with specific attention to the structures and experiences of race, class, and gender. In other words, the focus needs to be on the discursive and symbolic power, politics, and cultural sensitivities when the notion of post-industrialism is evoked.

Retaining urban post-industrialism as a concept – but situated contextually and within wider urban processes

We agree that the changes wrought by industrialisation's growth or decline are poignant, powerful, and lasting, across different and changing urban environments, and that retaining the notion of post-industrialism is worthwhile. James Pattison poignantly notes that ‘these social and economic changes are…enduring processes which hold relevance for the present’. To deny that post-industrialism is relevant is to falsely deny that changes wrought by capitalism have not occurred. However, our commentators caution against a reduction of post-industrialism as a unifying, essential model. This is an important point we also make in our forum paper, but which perhaps can be articulated more forcefully. We agree with Michael Glass’ observation that perhaps ‘the enduring benefit of the post-industrial is to provide a mid-range concept that indicates a moment of rupture between one spatial fix and the next.’ Our critique of the notion was not intended to eliminate its use as a mid-range concept in order to decipher processes of industrial and economic change in specific spatial contexts. Indeed, as June Wang suggests with regards to the ‘female-friendly’ attributes of the platform economy (e.g., the ‘TikTok Goddess’ in China) – post-industrialism can be empowering, and a means through which to consider the dynamic possibilities of urban life today. Instead, we wanted to foreground that the use of post-industrialism as-concept, as commentators have also pointed out, needs to be sensitive to the local nuances, differences, and unique characteristics of a specific space/place if it is to have explanatory power when deciphering such ‘ruptures’ of economic production. This seems important in order to avoid totalising descriptions through the language of post-industrialism.

As Jay Emery notes in his comment, the ‘affective intensities and traumas of de-industrialisation [need] to be brought into dialogue with [the wider processes of] … neoliberal urbanism’ (citing Silver et al., 2021). Neoliberalism, for example, has different impacts for cities and is not a one-size-fits-all process, as Le Galès (2016) notes. How neoliberalism happens, and what it means for a neighbourhood in Istanbul, Johannesburg, Chongqing or Detroit, requires deeply situated observations. So, too, should it be for framings of post-industrial urban narratives. In this respect, Hackworth makes an important point to not take a too-uncompromising construction of the post-industrial and to not overly focus on the discursive in conceptualisations of post-industrialism. We agree, and our point was not to remain at the level of discursive critique, but to urge scholars and others alike to carefully consider whether the language of post-industrialism adequately reflects the urban realities it seeks to describe. We agree with Hackworth to instead approach the post-industrial with a ‘discursive and ontological flexibility’ which is rooted in contextual and nuanced explorations of local spaces and places beyond mere analyses of the language of post-industrialism.

Relatedly, we take the strong point by Michael Glass that post-industrial legacies can be understood as ‘stigmata’, as things that remain stamped upon lives and environments like tattoos. These stigmata are material – oozing toxins, decaying infrastructure – and structural, insofar as the socio-economic impacts of industrial changes are cross-generational, sticky, and entrenched. But the textures of these changes, materials, and legacies are highly-variegated, and what is often invoked as symbolism of them – things like Pittsburgh's abandoned steel mills, Newcastle's coal-tunnels, or (more structurally), the archetype of the white-male-post-industrial tribe – should not be taken as exemplars when considered more globally. This leads to the second critical theme picked up in the commentaries, which is that post-industrial urbanization should sit alongside, carefully contextualised, related (yet distinct) processes such as de-industrialisation and organised abandonment.

Conceptual ‘alternatives’ to the language of post-industrialism: ‘De-industrialisation’ or ‘organised-abandonment’

We note the critique that post-industrialism should be considered within wider processes of change: those that are not just post-industrial, but also de-industrial, re-industrial, and/or abandoned or disinvested via different contextual trajectories. These differentiations can be substantial, even if there are shared features and common stories among urban environments facing change. For example, Jay Emery notes the important distinction between larger cities and smaller towns, and how for the latter, de-industrialisation and ‘organised abandonment’ (Safransky, 2023) may be more apt descriptors. While we can continue to debate the natures of post-industrialism (Is it ongoing? Did it already happen? Are we really ‘post?’) – it is in-arguable that de-industrialisation has taken, is taking place, encapsulating industrial shift, re-scaling, relocation, and downsizing. De-industrialisation does not eclipse the possibility of re-industrialisation (which we suggest in our paper is happening). Therefore, it contains less essentialising prescription than the notion of ‘post’. Furthermore, as Emery (2023) suggests, thinking through ‘organised abandonment’ allows us to better understand how many people are ‘continuing to live with these processes’ (Emery, 2023) in global urban areas impacted by (all forms) of industrial change. Acknowledging the organisation of urban abandonment also allows appreciation of the ongoing project (and uneven geographical articulations) of capital accumulation and dispossession. In these ongoing extractive processes, there is no ‘post’. Industrial capitalism is re-imagined, perhaps – as in our examples of the Amazon fulfilment warehouses, or the social media-influencer industries – and these new configurations require new urban material spatial fixes. But these, too, are caught up in processes of organised abandonment. Just witness how rapidly logistics warehouses (like the online-shopping fulfilment centres) can be dis-assembled: these are never built to be permanent structures. Or, June Wang's examples of the social-media-savvy women in China mastering new avenues of the ‘influencer’ industry, taking flight – while ‘ghost cities’, massive examples of state-led organised abandonment, slowly decay. The post-industrial urban contains such contradictions.

Furthermore, we take James Pattison's important point that these new industries – and the labour associated with them – are often associated with forms of precarity that previous waves of industrial labour safeguarded against. This is not to glamourise ‘older’ industrial work, which was often dangerous, exploitative, and unsteady. But the structures underpinning nineteenth and twentieth century industrial labour, like unions and the wage-guarantees they provided, social clubs, community social-capital and infrastructures – are much shakier now. Things move faster, get broken, melt into air, mediated now as they are by the hyper-speed of algorithms, automation, and digital technologies. Pattison suggests the new forms of industrial labour are thus ‘distinctly post-industrial’ because they are so different from previous eras of industrial labour, rather than (as we argue), new versions of industrial labour for today's economy. We want to push back on this point softly, however, as this may be too broad of a characterization. Some of the newer forms of labour emerging in urban areas do indeed resemble previous versions (working with one's hands, for example), and we note again the recent reinvigoration of labour solidarities and union membership among younger workers in certain industries in certain places. We point also to a more global, less-Western lens that may open up other possibilities and ways of framing what industrial labour looks and feels like today, and here, June Wang's examples of the woman/machine interface are instructive: how might this army of labour be mobilised in the future?

But this brings up another important critique our commentators rightly noted: to speak of the post-industrial, whether we consider utilising it or abandoning it, cannot be done without regard for racial capitalism and the structuring forces of social formations other than class. As Pattison correctly notes, ‘looking beyond the typical “left behind” towns and towards the inner-city reveals different accounts of de-industrialisation impacting women and racialised minorities at least as much as white men.’ Central to this is the need, we agree, to listen to local voices and understand how local communities wish to be portrayed and how they relate to industrial pasts, presents and futures. Doing this is a worthwhile interruption to any attempt to debate the state of urban post-industrialism.

Urban post-industrialism's discursive power, politics and cultural sensitivities: Whose stories, histories, spaces are included or excluded?

The portrait of the post-industrial represented by Bruce Springsteen playing to the crowd in Sunderland is only one depiction of what post-industrial cultures can look like. As Jason Hackworth points out, portrayals like this are representative of a certain ‘Herrenvolk’ nostalgia for a largely white labour history, in an industrial age deeply structured by racial exclusions and social deprivations that privileged some over others. In his commentary, Pattison cites Du Bois’s (1935) notion of the ‘wages of whiteness’ where industrial labour's stability and protections, and the urban life these things provided (housing, access to education and broader social mobility, etc.), was historically exclusive of non-white people. As Hackworth notes, this was starkly the case in North America, where racial capitalism, he suggests, has been a deeper structuring mechanism in urban geographies than, say, the availability of jobs or the rise of new industrial technologies. Even more broadly, we might point to Wilkerson's (2020) thesis on caste as a meta-structure for the prioritization of exclusionary hierarchies in the labour market, in geographical location, and in different contexts, attached to certain skin colours, genders, ethnicities.

The caste system of the post-industrial may therefore shed important light on the racial dynamics of the American inner-city versus suburbs, or ‘Rust Belt’ versus sunbelt; or, the regional differentiations between the British North or South, or, more globally, how labour is racialised and gendered in ways that become entrenched and material. In Singapore, Dubai, Kinshasa or Delhi, we might look more closely at how industrial labour today structures bodies and renders some more elite than others. This will tell us more not only about what post-industrialism means, but will also highlight the social structures and organisations which bind communities and places together, bringing Black Detroit into conversation with Northern England's white underclass, with Dubai's Bangladeshi construction workers, with Hong Kong's Filipino service workers. As we point out in our paper, much of this industrial labour today is undertaken by women. As June Wang notes, ‘women have mastered machines of different natures at different industrial revolutions’, and this is not only a story of exploitation and abuse, but (contextually), also one of empowerment and independence.

Comparative conversations like these may, we hope, point to avenues for new solidarities and alliances to be identified and supported through engaged, community-focused dialogue (especially where scholarship moves toward activism – a vital, yet too-often under-achieved outcome of urban research – as Loretta Lees (2024) recently argued in this journal). But crucially, a form of engaged dialogue encourages us to ask: how do communities want to relate to the industrial? What does post-industrial mean, in situated contexts? And in answering these questions, it is important to do local-listening from global contexts not often included in discussions around Western urban-capitalism. For example, Michael Glass helpfully points us to the case of Medellín, Colombia where local post-industrial narratives are employed optimistically as part of the city's post-war makeover. There, post-industrial still leaves a mark, but it might be interpreted as a badge of honour rather than territorial stigmatization. In a similar vein, June Wang notes that for the East Asian cities now undergoing various stages of industrialisation (e.g., rapidly-growing Phnom Penh), post-industrialism is not necessarily associated with the negative connotations and territorial stigma seen in some other places, but represents the positive aspirations of joining the elite club of global cities. Whereas a dis-used factory can in one city or town represent failure, it might represent elsewhere an optimistic trajectory of change and adaptation.

Such regional differentiations matter, just as conceptual differentiations do. Glass urges caution, too, in deciphering the discursive construction of post-industrial, urging urban researchers always to ask: who is using it, in what ways, and for what purposes? In Pittsburgh, Glass points to the ‘BioForge’ project, championed by local economic development and university elites, which plays upon the steel-industrial history but ultimately aims to foster urban development that will be out of reach for deprived communities and highly-concentrated in select geographies. In other words, it is another form of ‘organised abandonment’ through the rhetoric of post-industrial progress. The contrasting examples of Medellín, Phnom Penh and Pittsburgh, therefore, point to the importance of nuanced interpretations (across place, time, culture, scale) of how different industrial stories are crafted and marketed.

Failing to listen to communities leaves notions like post-industrialism too easily misunderstood, co-opted, appropriated or simplified – whether that be by real estate development interests (in the case of gentrifying neighbourhoods that play upon the market-value of post-industrial ‘chic’); by right-wing populists (who constantly invoke the ‘Herrenvolk’ nostalgia that Jason Hackworth warns against), or by misguided policy and political officials, who reinforce unhelpful divides like ‘North’ versus ‘South’ and weaponize the language of ‘left behind’ (again, which is then abused by populists). Urban researchers are not off the hook, either! We, too, are guilty of playing into all these tropes and tricks and for setting the boundaries of the dialogue in which we can become trapped. This was the reason we felt the need to write our critique and carve out this moment of self-introspection and conceptual reflection.

In sum, we are in consensus with our interlocutors in the value of thinking through contemporary urbanisation through the post-industrial which has already generated much discussion in Dialogues in Urban Research. And we conclude with an open door, and open eyes and ears, to how these discussions might be taken forward in ways that engage productively with communities and utilise resources to ethically archive and safeguard stories as they emerge.