North America has a large number of historic canals, which have been closed to commercial shipping due in part to the evolution of transportation (higher tonnage ships, trains, trucks, etc.). While some historic canals have been filled in, forgotten or disused, many have survived, in whole or in part, becoming attractive heritage sites. For some of these, the challenge is to reconcile the preservation of historic components with the need to keep their waterway accessible to navigation. Thi...

North America has a large number of historic canals, which have been closed to commercial shipping due in part to the evolution of transportation (higher tonnage ships, trains, trucks, etc.). While some historic canals have been filled in, forgotten or disused, many have survived, in whole or in part, becoming attractive heritage sites. For some of these, the challenge is to reconcile the preservation of historic components with the need to keep their waterway accessible to navigation. Thi...

This session presents case studies and policy reviews that contribute to ongoing debate and international dialogue on the role of planning systems and conservation practices in addressing the challenges of citizen engagement—conserving local interests, place attachments alongside physical remnants of industrial heritage. Over the past half century, we have witnessed the development and changing focuses of urban planning and conservation discourses addressing industrial heritage. Relevant p...

Industrialization processes have been global from their very beginning. However, their interpretation still tends to be limited to specific locations or regions, and to specific time periods. Regularly, for example, it is stated that the industrial revolution started in Europe, from where it spread to the world, supposedly bringing technological and social progress to „less developed“ countries. Earlier periods of technology and knowledge transfer processes, that were already in place in t...

Industrial heritage and photography have a close relationship. Photography is a source for industrial archaeology. It sheds light on the links between people, their tools, their machines and their workplaces. Once the industrial activity is over, photography is also a tool for documenting and studying the sites. But far beyond that, captured by artists capable of transcending common representations, conferring on industrial remains the ugliness of an era that was thought to be over, photog...

This session focuses on company towns from the perspective of urban planning. “Company towns” are here defined as single-enterprise planned communities, usually centered around a single industry, where a company commissions an urban plan, builds housing for its workers, and sets up recreational, commercial, institutional or community facilities. While these are now endangered by a second wave of deindustrialization, we observe that, aside studies or monographs of individual towns that popu...

As a "continent” country, in which industrialization began as early as the 19th century, Canada has seen through deindustrialization and urban redevelopment, parts of this heritage have been either altered or destroyed. Yet, Canada still possesses a very significant industrial heritage. With Canada being a confederation, approaches to the protection and the safeguard of its industrial heritage differs throughout the provinces and territories of the country. The same is true of i...

Past efforts to conserve and interpret industrial heritage have rarely acknowledged the role of industry causing damaging environmental change. But todays obvious worldwide climate change inevitably impacts our thinking about conservation. This is why we propose a Roundtable session to encourage people to take a fresh look at environmental impacts of industrial heritage.Already in the 1970s narratives of industrial history as a succession of triumphs began to be qu...

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 forc...

The Soulanges Canal is an infrastructure, located on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, which was opened to maritime traffic in 1900, succeeding the "old canal" of Beauharnois (established since 1843 on the north shore of the St. Lawrence). The Soulanges Canal was abandoned in 1959, when the current St. Lawrence Seaway linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic opened.The Soulanges Canal was designed by the engineer Thomas Monro (1831-1903). Of Irish origin but trained in civil engin...

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Examples from several continents, in Europe, South America, North America, Turkey, show strong continuity in the objectives that govern the reuse of industrial buildings, for example the concern to take into account the industrial heritage as a resource for urban and territorial development, or the close links that it has with culture, whether it is used to house cultural facilities or more simply to bear witness to the history and memory of the place. Increasingly, policies for the reuse ...

The proposed session will examine the unfolding relationship between industrial heritage and those left behind in adjoining deindustrialized working-class areas. The four papers seek to understand the socio-economic and political impact of recognizing the industrial past in the present. Two guiding questions will be asked. Can industrial heritage support those ‘left behind’ in deindustrialized areas where nothing, or very little, has filled the economic or cultural vacuum? Has industrial h...