Many people are actively using working class heritage as a resource to reflect on the past and the present, and there is a growing tendency for the heritage of working class people to be interpreted and presented to the public in museums and heritage sites—see for example the Worklab network of museums. Working class communities and organizations also play active roles in creating a memory of their own past, and mobilizing this to sustain political action in the present. Drawing on scho...

In recent years, there has been a great deal of debate surrounding so-called ruin gazing and the politics of representing industrial or urban ruination. Recent years have seen photographers, artists, film-makers, urban explorers, scholars and others flood into newly deindustrialized areas to record signs of ruins and abandonment, prompting a public backlash against the hipster commodification of misery. Some have gone so far as to call the voyeuristic appeal of industrial or urban ruinatio...

In a collaborative and image-rich conversational presentation, “Teaching/Learning/Living Post-Industrial Ecologies” outlines the potentials and problematics of “The Right to the City,” a multi-year transdisciplinary curriculum initiative that brings graduate and undergraduate students from Concordia University to Montreal’s historic South West borough. Through our tethered teaching, four professors have asked, “what does it change for the university to teach/learn on-site with the resident...

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 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...

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...

Welcome addresses and cocktail, followed by the Concordia Signature Event "The Garden of the Grey Nuns". As the opening ceremony and cocktail take place in the former Grey Nuns' Motherhouse, recycled into campus residence and reading rooms by Concordia University,  delegates will also have the possibility to discover the video Three Grey Nuns (3 minutes, by Ron Rudin and Phil Lichti. Three Grey Nuns recount their memories of communal life in the Grey Nun’s Motherhouse.  Built...

Working with archival documents and the current-day morphology of the Grey Nuns' site, Dr Cynthia Hammond, Dr Shauna Janssen, in collaboration with Dr Jill Didur, will curate a series of installations and performances that speak directly to the rich heritage of a specific urban landscape: the gardens of the Grey Nuns' Motherhouse, now part of the Concordia University downtown campus. Visitors will have the opportunity to explore the lost working gardens of the Grey Nuns. As with other such...

Industrial heritage in Britain has tended to be romanticised in museum ‘cathedrals’ and ‘theme parks’ (like Beamish), with workers’ lived experience subordinated to the machines, buildings and physical artefacts that dominate these spaces. Here workers’ lives are more often than not celebrated rather than critically reconstructed and interpreted. The politics, class relations and struggle, violence, poverty and murkier side of working life is increasingly being neglected as the past is san...

While intangible cultural heritage is an important factor in maintaining cultural diversity in the face of growing globalization, there is still little appreciation of its value. UNESCO endorsed the importance of intangible cultural heritage not only as a cultural manifestation but also, and more importantly, as a wealth of knowledge and skills that are transmitted through generations. We invite paper contributions that address multiple ways of understanding, recognizing, valuing, and p...

You are invited to the McGill-Queen’s University Press book launch of “Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence and Class” on Sunday August 28th (1-3pm) at Batiment 7’s

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Join the conference organisers and TICCIH board members for a welcome cocktail and some festive words of introduction, in the former forge of the École technique de Montréal, founded in 1909, now part of the Université du Québec à Montréal campus.

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...

During the Industrial Revolution coal was the most important energy source for both homes and industries. At the time, coal mining created strong regional industrial identities and mentalities, as well as industrial images and imaginaries in the eyes and minds of external observers. Such identities and ideas of coal would go on to shape industrial landscapes and communities.The papers presented in this session  investigate the social and economic changes that were triggered by ...

It is widely accepted that understanding a historic place is a critical first step to guide subsequent management and conservation. Industrial sites present a number of challenges as understanding their form, function, design, boundaries, and conservation often requires a high degree of technical expertise and experience. In Canada, gaining this expertise and information sharing is hampered by a limited number of institutions offering training in industrial archaeology and the lack of a na...

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...

During this lunch break, you can come and discuss with the author about his most recent book.This is happening at the DePOT Table in the main hall of the conference. DePOT refers to the group "Deindustrialization and the Politics or our Time"; DePOT examines the historical roots and lived experience of deindustrialisation as well as the political responses to it. It is a SSHRC Partnership project consisting of 33 partner organizations and 24 co-applicants and collaborators from six ...

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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...

L’activité industrielle est un puissant facteur de concentration de population. En témoignent les sites antiques ou médiévaux étudiés par les historiens, souvent proches des mines, des carrières ou des chantiers de construction. À partir du XVIIIe siècle, cependant, avec les premiers développements industriels, des liens forts se tissent entre les usines et diverses formes d’urbanisation. De la variété de rapports que construit l’industrie avec la ville ou, plus largement, avec les lieux d...

Many of the remained big scale Industrial heritage in Taiwan were the products of the Japanese colonial period between 1895 and 1945, which spans the first half of the twentieth century. This fifty-year colonial industrialisation is arguably Taiwan’s most influential industrial heritage because it began a rapid process of modernisation that is continuing today. The key to this process is the industrialisation that led to the development of main parts of the island, catalysed new communitie...