Si la vallée du canal de Lachine a été le berceau de l’industrialisation canadienne, la géographie industrielle métropolitaine ne s’y est pas confinée, peu s’en faut, Outre les grandes concentrations d’entreprises des quartiers centraux, elle est constituée des réseaux infrastructuraux, d’une douzaine de centrales hydroélectriques et des ensembles manufacturiers disséminés dans une quinzaine de petites villes aujourd’hui intégrées dans l’aire métropolitaine. La conférence proposera un survol historique de cette composante de premier plan de l’établissement et un examen des enjeux de conservation de cet héritage dont on a découvert, à compter des années 1980, la richesse, la vulnérabilité et le potentiel de valorisation.

Join us for an informal continuation of the discussion started with the public lecture.

A drink will be offered to the first fifteen people.

Efforts to preserve industrial heritage occurs in a socio-economic and political context. But what is being preserved and for whom? And, relatedly, what is the relationship between industrial heritage sites and the deindustrialized working-class communities that often adjoin them? The keynote will consider the ways that the preservation of Montreal’s Lachine Canal, Canada’s premier industrial heritage site, has enabled gentrification processes that have forcibly displaced the very working-class communities who once worked in these neighbourhood factories. Sadly, the preservation of the area’s industrial aesthetic and the creation of a green belt has served real estate developers extraordinarily well. The industrial heritage sector needs to go beyond recognition and consider the material consequences of our work for deindustrialized working-class communities. 

Join us for an informal continuation of the discussion started with the public lecture.

A drink will be offered to the first fifteen people.

In this lecture, I would like to talk about deindustrialised communities, heritage and memory in the context of right-wing populism. Drawing on studies of memory and heritage, I argue that right-wing populists have cornered the market on talking about the past of deindustrialised communities. They have successfully misrepresented this rich and complex history to fuel rage, resentment, fear and reactionary nostalgia. Indeed, ‘the past’, and in particular the industrial and working-class past, has been a feature of recent right-wing populist rhetoric around the world. Recent work in heritage studies has identified ‘the past’, particularly as feelings of ‘nostalgia’, as being particularly useful in mobilising affect and emotion.

I would like to draw on this work to challenge the rather journalistic assumption that working-class communities decimated by deindustrialisation are now the natural allies of right-wing populists. There are rich veins of heritage and memory to mine in these communities that can enliven progressive repertoires of emotion. Rather than just despair and rage, there is also an emotional vocabulary of progressive nostalgia that can be mobilised to move people to act in concert for positive ends. By building on emotional commitments to histories of strong communities, collective action, and trade union activism, ‘the past’ can be drawn on to give life to a progressive nostalgia.

Join us for an informal continuation of the discussion started with the public lecture.

A drink will be offered to the first fifteen people.

This lecture will argue that the landscapes of industrial heritage that can be found in different parts of the world are directly related to the place-specific trajectories of deindustrialization. In other words: the different ways in which deindustrialization impacts on local communities has a direct bearing on the emergence of forms of industrial heritage. I will differentialte between deindustrialization paths and related industrial heritage regimes in a) Anglo-Saxon countries, b) continental West European countries, c) post-Communist East European countries, d) capitalist countries in the global south, e) post-Communist countries in the global south, and f) China as an officially Communist country developing a turbo-capitalist system under the label ‘socialism with a Chinese face’. 

As industrial heritage amounts to a form of memorialization of industrial pasts, the memoryscapes that are inherent in these six different industrial heritage regimes reveal the power structures that have determined the pathways of deindustrialization but they can also represent the resistance to such pathways of deindustrialization. Hence we often encounter pluralistic and multiperspectival memories that are contained in industrial heritage sites. I will relate the memoryscapes of deindustrialization to three different memory regimes: antagonistic memory, cosmopolitan memory and agonistic memory. Drawing on the theory of agonistic memory, as it was developed by Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen, I will argue in favour of agonistic memories of deindustrialization as these are more capable in politicizing industrial heritage landscapes and giving voice to those who seek to represent working-class communities in their struggle to counter the negative effects of deindustrialization on their respective communities.

In the refusal of people in communities abandoned by industrial capital to abandon their own places, we can read an implicit critique of the mobility and unaccountability of capital, raised by those who were once inside (however tenuously or uncomfortably) and now find themselves marginalized, “left behind.” The desire to catch up again, whether through attracting new investment or transvaluing abandoned sites as tourist attractions, makes this an essentially conservative critique that is reluctant to question the underlying logics of industrial capitalism more directly. But as those logics continue to create conditions now rendering planetary systems themselves inhospitable to human life, the time feels right to ask: what would it take to imagine a heritage practice in solidarity with what is now or has long been structurally outside, one that aligns that implicit critique with projects of economic transformation, not merely revitalization? I propose two lines of possibility, one emerging from a more radically reflexive mode of practice and the other imagined within the conditions of breakdown and crisis that the COVID-19 pandemic has prefigured and illuminated. I root this imagined practice within my own current location in a deindustrialized New England mill town where I am engaged with food systems projects. This work has given me unexpected insight into what it means to be structurally “outside” and pointed the way toward modes of community wealth and investment that can shift the sense of what cultural labor may be working toward.