Geographies of Post-Industrial Place, Memory, and Heritage

"While the economic, technological, and political changes that caused deindustrialization are global, their effects play out locally, as each community draws on its history, its cultural memories, and its social networks to respond to industrial decline and large-scale layoffs. A realistic, complex sense of place, rooted in particular experiences of work and community, can help a town or region respond to the loss of its major industry and even find resilience in the face of such losses. Yet those who study deindustrialization must also recognize how the particularity of place co-exists with global commonalities. This book takes us on a world tour of the costs of economic restructuring and approaches to industrial heritage. As Geographies of Post-Industrial Place, Memory, and Heritage reminds us, deindustrialized communities everywhere face similar challenges." - Sherry Linkon, Professor of English, Georgetown University, USA

"Geographies of Post-Industrial Place, Memory, and Heritage hits the nail on the head - more care and attention is needed to advance our understanding of memory, community, place. All three editors grew up in, and now study dusty, smoky, oily, rusty, scarred places and Rhodes, Price, Walker have curated an excellent volume with passion, sensitivity and critical insights that avoid pit-falls of romanticisation. Chapters focus on a fascinating range of case studies, such as; slate mining in North and coal mining in South Wales; railway towns in India; gentrification of working-class markets in Scotland; industrialized killing/capital punishment in USA prison towns; decommissioned nuclear power plants in Lithuania; and industrial farming in Cambodia. Contributors provide fascinating empirical evidence enlivened through theoretical engagements with class; postcolonialism; slavery; emotions/affect; community; identity; contamination; waste; climate change etc. Offering rich and detailed thinking with regard to the endurance and decline of communities, the lasting effects of social relations, lifestyles, materialities and multitude legacies and memories of industrialization this book is a must read for anyone interested the ways in which geographical imaginations are generating new and exciting avenues for interdisciplinary work on memory and heritage." - Mark Jayne, Professor of Human Geography, Sun Yat-Sen University, China

"Aside some important works that inform this collection, Geography's contribution to understanding post-industrialism, a fundamentally spatial process, is latent. Responding, Geographies of Post-Industrial Place, Memory, and Heritage greatly advances geographical enquiry of post-industrialism by demonstrating its salience to major disciplinary concerns. The volume is distinguished in attending to international contexts and subjects largely absent in post-industrial studies - (post-)colonialism, environmentalism, carcerality - uniquely exploring their complex spatiotemporal relations with deindustrialisation. The contributions by both well-established and emerging scholars expand our conceptions of the spatial legacies, heritages and resonances of industrial transformations, documenting fresh empirical insights and developing novel theoretical directions." - Jay Emery, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, The University of Sheffield

"Rhodes, Price, and Walker have curated a set of eye-opening essays that map the complex transformations and tensions facing communities as they remember, forget, and live with the legacies of industrialization. By embracing the heterogeneous and emergent nature of place, contributors problematize not just what we have come to regard as the politics of industrial heritage but also where we expect to find those consequential struggles. This edited volume reflects the best in memory studies by connecting the heritage making process to the totality of everyday life and recognizing the many faces of post-industrial memory within society-from source of community identity, storytelling and tourism development to unreconciled reminders of capitalistic and colonial exploitation and the slow violence of environmental degradation." - Derek H. Alderman, Professor of Geography, University of Tennessee

 "I've been on the lookout for a book like this on post-industrial memory, place and heritage, especially one that I can recommend to my students. What I especially love about this book is the jargon free text, the research rich case studies and the contributors' creative methods and approaches. It's a book that feels fresh and lively, led by a group of researchers passionate about the legacy of (de)industrialisation for communities." - Katy Bennett, Associate Professor in Human Geography, University of Leicester, UK