PICTURING

Post-Industrial Chimneys seen Through Urban Regeneration Imaginaries: toward a Networked GeoHumanities

This research explores the industrial heritage and urban redevelopment in deindustrializing European cities, with a focus on the cultural, social, spatial, and economic implications for historically working-class, industrial neighborhoods and towns. It focuses on specific elements of urban landscapes that have served as the predominating symbol of industrial—and postindustrial—settlements: industrial chimneys. Exploring perceptions of residents, retired industrial workers, neighborhood activists, policymakers, designers, and investors of the value(s) of artifacts of the industrial past, as well as planning approaches to the protection, reuse, and/or demolition of industrial structures, I use the case of smokestacks to explore the dual processes of deindustrialization and the transformation of the built environment.

The project focuses on Barcelona, Spain and Greater Manchester, England. The societal challenges of deindustrialization and questions of how to manage economic and physical transition in formerly industrial cities drive difficult conversations about collective memory, gentrification, and capitalist redevelopment. These urban areas, historically key production centers with their industrial roots in textiles, have become focal points in industrial heritage and aspirations for postindustrial reinvention, yet their experiences of deindustrialization, geographies, and approaches to industrial heritage are quite distinct. While the Manchester conurbation represents the first industrial city in the world (and arguably the first self-consciously post-industrial city as well), metropolitan Barcelona remains one of the most industrialized cities in Europe, and complicates more well-trodden narratives of deindustrialization.

These two individual case studies take different methodological approaches, but will also be considered comparatively, exploring different approaches to conservation and regeneration strategies through exploring the totemic presence (or conspicuous absence) of smokestacks. It asks, how have each of these cities approached, and responded to, these massive spatial, social, and economic shifts spurred on by the restricting of the global economy, how has this manifested in what has been preserved and what has been demolished in the historical built environment, and how have local communities fared in the process?

The Barcelona case focuses on an approach to industrial heritage, beginning in the 1980s, when the city began restoring disuses smokestacks as monuments, while often demolishing other factory buildings and structures, in a unique and heavily criticized approach to the redevelopment of former industrial districts. Along with archival and interview-based research, the project employs photographic and curatorial methodologies involving the participation of residents and workers of historically industrial districts. As part of this approach, I held a photographic exhibition called Obeliscs Industrials (Industrial Obelisks) at MUHBA Oliva Artés, a public urban history museum located in a converted factory. This exhibition was on view from March to July 5, 2022, and involved various public debates and community workshops, to ascertain what Barcelona’s monumentalized smokestacks signify.

The Greater Manchester case study looks at the cultural phenomenon surrounding Fred Dibnah, a steeplejack from Bolton who came to national fame in the United Kingdom as a specialist in the demolition of smokestacks, as well as an advocate for the industrial heritage, made the subject of a number of television documentaries between the 1970s and 1990s. In exploring Dibnah’s work and public legacy, especially the melancholy secular ritual of demolition, I seek to understand how industrial chimneys came to stand in for the industrial past of the North in the popular imagination.

Along with contributing to urban geography, deindustrialization studies, critical heritage studies, and visual studies scholarship, this proposal specifically will contribute to the emerging field of the GeoHumanities. It is being conducted at the Department of Humanities of Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona).

This research was funded by a three-year Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship from the European Commission, from July, 2020 to July, 2023.