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Abstract: In this paper I examine what economic geographies of the steel industry might learn from cultural economy and what cultural economy might learn from manufacturing industries. In particular, I draw on the concept of assemblage to outline a performative economic geography that emphasises the importance of material encounters, process, and working with, and containing, lively matter. My account argues that production complexes like steel plants are constantly made and unmade through material practices, doings and actions – all of which matter economically. The paper then puts the concept of assemblage to work, drawing on research during escorted tours to steel plants and employing literary narrative to frame the day-to-day rhythms and ruptures of industrial work. The effect is an economic geography of steel making that recasts overlooked and routine work (like monitoring, handling and transforming materials; repair and maintenance; and health and safety) as fundamental to economic activity and the creation of value. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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]