The Deindustrialized World
The Deindustrialized World
Confronting Ruination in Postindustrial Places
Since the 1970s, the closure of mines, mills, and factories has marked a rupture in working-class lives. The Deindustrialized World interrogates the process of industrial ruination, from the first impact of layoffs in metropolitan cities, suburban areas, and single-industry towns to the shock waves that rippled outward, affecting entire regions, countries, and beyond.
Seeking to hear the “roar ... on the other side of the silence,” scholars from France, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States share their own stories of ruin and ruination and ask others what it means to be working class in a postindustrial world. In Part 1, they explore the ruination of former workplaces and the damaged health and injured bodies of industrial workers. Part 2 brings to light disparities of experiences between rural resource towns and cities, where hipster revitalization often overshadows industrial loss. Part 3 reveals the ongoing impact of deindustrialization on working people and their place in the new global economy.
Together, the chapters open a window on the lived experiences of people living at ground zero of deindustrialization, revealing its layered impacts and examining how workers, environmentalists, activists, and the state have responded to its challenges.
This volume will appeal to historians, geographers, and social science scholars as well as anyone interested in the issues surrounding capitalist development, urban revitalization, and poverty, class, and community.
The editors and contributors are to be commended for creating a multi-faceted study that shows that deindustrialization is far from a closed subject.
This is an important book. It enriches debates about deindustrialization by taking them in a number of new directions and by probing how the term is understood. Taken together, the chapters offer insightful comparative analyses on issues such as race, gender, gentrification, and the stigmatization of the white working class.
Steven High is a professor of history at Concordia University and the author of a number of books on deindustrialization, including Industrial Sunset and Corporate Wasteland. Lachlan MacKinnon holds a PhD in history from Concordia University and specializes in workers’ experiences of deindustrialization in Atlantic Canada. Andrew Perchard is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Business in Society at Coventry University.
Contributors: Andy Clark, Jackie Clarke, Sylvie Contrepois, Andrew Hurley, Arthur McIvor, Tracy Neumann, Seamus O’Hanlon, Andrew Parnaby, Jim Phillips, Cathy Stanton, Robert Storey, and Lucy Taksa
Introduction / Steven High, Lachlan MacKinnon, and Andrew Perchard
Part 1: Living in and with Ruination
1 Deindustrialization Embodied: Work, Health, and Disability in the UK since the Mid-Twentieth Century / Arthur McIvor
2 Beyond the Body Count? Injured Workers in the Aftermath of Deindustrialization / Robert Storey
3 Environmental Justice and Worker’s Health: Fighting for Compensation at the Sydney Coke Ovens, 1986-90 / Lachlan MacKinnon
4 Growing Up Even More Uncertain: Children and Youth Confront Industrial Ruin in Sydney, Nova Scotia, 1967 / Andrew Parnaby
5 Afterlives of a Factory: Memory, Place, and Space in Alençon / Jackie Clarke
6 Romance of the Rails: Deindustrialization, Nostalgia, and Community / Lucy Taksa
Part 2: Urban Politics
7 Keeping “the Industrial”: New Solidarities in Post-Industrial Places / Cathy Stanton
8 Regeneration and Class Identities: A Case Study in the Corbeil-Essonnes-Evry Region, France / Sylvie Contrepois
9 Goodbye, Steeltown: Planning Post-Steel Cities in the United States and Canada / Tracy Neumann
10 The Transformation of Industrial Suburbs since the First World War / Andrew Hurley
11 Selling “Lifestyle”: Post-Industrial Urbanism and the Marketing of Inner-City Apartments in Melbourne, Australia, 1990–2005 / Seamus O’Hanlon
Part 3: Political Economy
12 Deindustrialization on the Industrial Frontier: The Rise and Fall of Mill Colonialism in Northern Ontario / Steven High
13 A Little Local Difficulty? Deindustrialization and Glocalization in a Scottish Town / Andrew Perchard
14 The Moral Economy of Deindustrialization in Post-1945 Scotland / Jim Phillips
15 “Stealing Our Identity and Taking It over to Ireland”: Deindustrialization, Resistance, and Gender in Scotland / Andy Clark
Afterword: Debating Deindustrialization / Steven High, Lachlan MacKinnon, and Andrew Perchard
White Space
Race, Privilege, and Cultural Economies of the Okanagan Valley
Edited by Daniel J. Keyes and Luis L.M. Aguiar
