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This essay works with afterimages of the steel industry to explore the material legacies and many afterlives of industrial remains in Dortmund. Inspired both by Walter Benjamin’s writings on the afterimages of capitalist modernity in the Arcades Project, and by the afterimages of steel produced by Haiko Hebig, the article gathers fragmented encounters in an account that evokes the materiality, textures, co-habitations, and memories of Dortmund’s postindustrial landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At one level, this paper centres on the closure of a steel plant in Germany, the closure and then reprieve of another in the UK and the expansion of a third in China, but at another level this changing geography of steel production can be seen as symptomatic of and symbolizing profound changes in the global manufacturing economy. The closures at Dortmund (permanently) and Redcar/south Teesside (temporarily) both reflected the growing international – not to say global – restructuring of the steel industry and the strategies that steel-producing companies adopted in the face of profound changes in markets and patterns of production and trade. To that extent, at first sight this might appear to be a familiar and not unexpected outcome of those processes. However, the outcomes both at local level and for the steel plants themselves turned out to be very different because they reflected the complexity of global processes and the interacting effects of many influences operating at different spatial scales within the complex social relations of capital. Not least this was because the closure in Dortmund and the ending of steel-making there were directly implicated in a major expansion of steel production in China, by Shagang in Jiangsu Province, via the transfer of a major steel complex, disassembled in Dortmund and reassembled in Jinfeng. The disassembly of a major production complex, its transport to the other side of the world and its reassembly there as functional fixed capital added a dramatic and radical new twist to the meaning of global shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including urbanization, another which focuses on the critical urban theory and one on contemporary urban processes.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including assemblage thinking and critical urbanism, relations of political economy and everyday life, and the importance of sociomateriality.

By approaching the road as a contact zone, I develop novel insights into the turbulent multiculture of a northern mill town in England. Through a montage of encounters with taxis and `flash' cars on the streets of Keighley, West Yorkshire, I illustrate how social differentiation is performed on the road as human difference is sorted and judged through assemblages of flesh, metal, and road. I develop recent debates on the social construction of race, arguing for a perspective that foregrounds what race does in social interaction. And so I offer a reconsideration of race as a technology of differentiation at work in interaction that is allied to what I call the `racism of assemblages', which traces how loose racial summaries distributed across bodies, things, and spaces become the basis for perception, judgment, and action. In the process, I also assemble perspectives on multiculture from below, which disrupt talk of segregation and 'parallel lives' in northern mill towns, and question arguments that more interaction and community cohesion are the answer to living with difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]