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Wastelands, urban voids, interstices: especially since the 1990s, there has been a proliferation of terminologies projected on (supposedly) empty urban spaces by designers, scholars, and artists. These discussions emerged as responses to landscapes of deindustrialization, increasing sensitivity to the impacts of infrastructures on the urban fabric, the declining currency of modernist planning and a shift towards piecemeal regeneration and aestheticization of ‘left-over’ spaces. A key text typifying this fixation, offering an umbrella term for these spaces, was the Terrain Vague by architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales. His theorization of spatial indeterminacy, borrowing concepts from photography, was driven by ambivalence towards designers’ approaches to the urban residuum. We attempt to reterritorialize de Solà-Morales’ critique within the context it responded to, the ‘Barcelona Model’ of design-led regeneration. With terrains vague remaining focal points in urbanist discourse, there is increasing acknowledgement that urban spaces are rarely devoid of social activity, value, or meaning. Nevertheless, planners, architects, and policymakers continue to project voidness onto these spaces to justify their reconfiguration and revalorization. We argue that the discourse on emptiness has lost much of its novelty – especially when divorced from the political economic processes that create them – and suggest ways to move beyond this impasse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study critically examines the transformation of industrial chimneys into monuments within Barcelona's deindustrializing urban landscapes. Since the 1970s, redevelopment contexts and reimaging strategies have led to the conservation of industrial chimneys as public art and historic monuments. This paper explores the intersection of urban memory, heritage, and transformation in Barcelona, highlighting the absence of a coherent 'Authorized Heritage Discourse' and the resulting ambiguity in the meaning of these monuments. Analyzing this unique heritage practice, the study considers its impact on historic memory and working-class identity within the city's urban fabric. The research situates chimney-monuments within broader discussions on postindustrial redevelopment, urban design, heritage conservation, and public memory amidst deindustrialization. By examining the symbolic and material dimensions of industrial chimneys within Barcelona's political-economic shifts and contemporary social movements, the paper unpacks their polysemic meanings. This analysis contributes to local debates and reflects broader European trends. The study questions how these monuments are integrated into working-class memory politics and shifting heritage regimes. Recognizing that historic monuments are dynamic material and cultural processes subject to ongoing resignification, the paper concludes with a discussion on the potential roles of insurgent heritage practices in connecting past and present social struggles. • Examines how Barcelona's industrial chimneys have been repurposed amidst deindustrialization and urban redevelopment. • Analyzes how these chimney-monuments influence historic memory and working-class identity in the city. • Discusses the lack of a coherent heritage discourse and the resulting debates among historians, activists, and urban designers. • Investigates public perceptions through surveys and an exhibition, emphasizing industrial pasts and working-class landscapes. • Highlights the evolution of Barcelona's heritage policies and the role of urban design in preserving landmarks, influenced by working-class memory activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Journal of Professional Business Review (JPBReview) is the property of Open Access Publications LLC and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study analyses the emergence of steel industry-related public sculpture in Britain in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The creation of these sculptures is viewed as part of the response of local authorities, artists and community groups to the large-scale loss of steel-making jobs and infrastructure in Britain since the mid-1970s. It posits that the rapid demolition of redundant steelworks plants after closure erased many of the physical reference points to steelmaking in its traditional heartlands, creating a material void which public sculpture has helped to fill. While belief in the ability of public art to stimulate urban regeneration lay behind the commissioning of many of these sculptures, especially from the 1990s onwards, we argue that they make more sense when viewed as a form of industrial heritage. Sometimes depicting the skills, clothing or iconic structures associated with steel, sculptures provided visual references to the industry, often in places where it no longer existed, thus becoming important sites of steel industry memory in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sokoto Caliphate of northern Nigeria was the workshop of West Africa in the pre‐colonial nineteenth century, producing famous blue‐black cloth that reached many markets south of the Sahara as well as across it. Under British colonial rule this large handicraft textile industry was faced with the winds of foreign competition. We rely on a newly digitized set of colonial district reports to measure the impact of trade on northern Nigerian textile manufacturing and find that (contrary to British expectations) areas closer to railway stations were less likely to experience industrial decline. We argue that the resilience of local textiles relied on the low opportunity cost of dry‐season labour. Analysing a piece of tax microdata, we show that a low opportunity cost of labour outside of the rainy season was associated with a higher likelihood of engaging in textile by‐employment. Seasonal changes in relative factor prices were a trap as well as a refuge. Part‐time employment limited specialization and technological innovation, and can help to explain why northern Nigerian textiles eventually declined. Thus, beyond our particular case study, these results contribute to our understanding of the role of seasonality in determining the structure and pace of development of tropical economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a footloose capital model in a two‐country economy and the manufacturing and natural resource sectors with heterogeneous manufacturing firms to analyze the impacts of trade liberalization and technological progress on the net capital flows, net export, and social welfare. Our main analytical result is that a lagged country initially experiences capital outflow due to the high technological gap in the manufacturing sector with increasing returns to scale, then capital inflow due to the home market effect. This corresponds with the fact that China was a net importer of manufactured goods initially, and became a net exporter recently. These results are consistent with the data obtained after the reform and opening‐up policy in 1978. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study brings new interpretations about the phenomenon of Brazilian deindustrialization. From a perspective that has been used recently, the Marxian analysis associated with the inter-regional input-output analysis, we sought to understand how manufacturing lost space in the dynamization of Brazil’s economy. Presenting a critique of the use of relative manufacturing employment as an indicator of deindustrialization and understanding deindustrialization as a loss of manufacturing participation in the process of reproduction of capital on an expanded scale in a national economy, the domestic and foreign components of manufacturing backward multipliers were analyzed. In line which the literature, the main results indeed point to the existence of deindustrialization in the period between 1995 and 2010. In turn, as a new element raised from the discussion of the results in light of current literature, the hypothesis raised was that the deindustrialization resulted from the productive restructuring process that occurred in Brazil from the 1990s onwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assumes the importance of the manufacturing industry to long-term growth and examines Brazil's deindustrialization process since its economic opening. The manufacturing sector's recovery is analyzed in light of the proposal to reindustrialize the economy in the ongoing global climate emergency. In line with the new-developmentalist literature, reindustrialization implies widening policy space to recover public and private investment in productive assets, providing financial conditions compatible with long-term returns. It assumes an active role in state intervention. In this sense, the New Brazilian Industry industrial policy should anchor long-term expectations to enhance productive investment committed to the green transition. This approach positions industrial policy as the anchor to build a sustainable development convention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates whether and how the contexts of the Rust Belt decline extend collaborative planning theory. We evaluate two collaborative planning projects in Northeast Ohio: (1) the Cuyahoga Greenways (CG), a regional trails project and (2) the Mahoning River Corridor Initiative (MRCI), a postindustrial river restoration project. Based on participant interviews and document analysis, we find that the projects are distinct in their contextual conditions and collaborative processes, with CG better aligning with common expectations found in the literature. MRCI deviates from normative theory pertaining to collaborative planning; we discuss how this might relate to processes of institutional change. Our results suggest that the collaborative planning literature is insufficiently tailored to assess collaborative projects in the context of decline—particularly where there is controversy around the project and where collaborative institutions and networks are weak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent contributions to the literature on industrialization and development have confirmed that manufacturing continues to play a key role as a driver of economic development. As a corollary, these contributions highlight the importance of premature industrialization as a barrier to economic development and as one of the main sources of the middle-income trap. In this paper, we analyze the factors that may have hindered industrial development in the past four decades. In particular, we focus on the role of (non-Foreign Direct Investment) net capital inflows as a potential source of premature deindustrialization. We consider a sample of 36 developed and developing countries from 1980 to 2017, with major emphasis on the case of emerging and developing economies (EDEs) in the context of increasing financial integration. We show that periods of abundant capital inflows may have caused a significant contraction of manufacturing share to employment and GDP, as well as the decrease of the economic complexity index. We also show that the phenomena of "perverse" structural changes are significantly more relevant in EDE countries than in advanced ones and that they may similarly occur across EDE countries, regardless of structural differences in the way manufacturing contributed to their development. Based on such evidence, we conclude with some policy suggestions highlighting capital controls and external macroprudential measures taming international capital mobility as useful policy tools for promoting long-run productive development on top of strengthening (short-term) financial and macroeconomic stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A few decades ago, an enthusiastic researcher would have found relatively few data to analyze, looking for such information about the ruins of modernity as the structural consequences caused by rapid cycles of industrialization and desolation, development and depopulation, conflict and reconciliation. However, conducting the same search today reveals an extraordinary increase in academic and public interest in the ruins of the recent past and the associated abandoned places. The authors of this article join in the discussion and explore the images of deindustrialization posted and distributed in the online communities among abandoned sites enthusiasts. The aim of the research is to form an idea of “everyday life policy” about the abandoned industrial facilities popularized by amateur photographers. “Everyday life policy” is expressed through the signifying and conceptualizing the abandoned and ruined places when putting them in a close-up. The authors rely on the ideas of the architect and historian I. de Sola-Morales, who calls the places left by people “terrain vague”. Photographic images of the terrain vague spaces play an important role in conceptualizing them. In order to understand what meanings exactly shaped the public policy, the authors use the ethnographic method of immersion in the online VKontakte/Telegram communities of abandoned sites enthusiasts to discover the recurring iconographic elements of the derelict places. Deindustrialization in photographs is reflected through 1) loss of human; 2) violence of vegetation or nature agency; 3) artifacts and texts of the past or material objects agency. The authors discuss the similarities of the images taken by amateur photographers and those media clich?s found in popular movies and video games. Photographs are a way of explaining space and spatial experience. Furthermore, like any other work of art, a photo conveys not only and not so much the actual characteristics of the depicted objects, thanks to which we can form an idea about them (in this case, about space), but also effects and experiences. Thus, a photograph becomes a tool that helps us form value judgments about the places we have seen.

Pittsburgh has changed considerably since deindustrialization, with a shift in industry from steel to medicine and from public to private infrastructure. Segregation patterns form in response to the economic statuses within a region. Exclusionary zoning codes have shaped segregation patterns in Pittsburgh. As these zones become increasingly obsolete with the decline of the steel industry and the subsequent rise in the white-collar economy, the potential for these zones to change increases. This study uses the Dissimilarity Index to measure changes in segregation levels in Pittsburgh’s twenty most segregated neighborhoods as measured in 1970, to 2020. Segregation levels have decreased in all neighborhoods evaluated except one. This reveals that overall, Pittsburgh is desegregating. The results of this study also indicate the effects of private infrastructure, decreasing population, and areas of concentrated poverty on the demographics of a city.

This book aims to show, in a nuanced and precise way, the effects of deindustrialization on a territory of eastern France. This can change the electoral behaviour of a population whose habits have been upset by the closure of businesses and the dislocation of the community they helped to forge. Another development contributes to these changes: the aging of the population and the departure of young people, which is accelerating after the 2000s. The old world also began to disintegrate under the influence of factors such as the entry into the consumer society and the weakening of religious practices.

Since 1991, Bangalore has seen spectacular redevelopment through the political hegemony of real estate, IT and parastatals in local urban governance. The global city literature has demonstrated how gentrification and real estate redevelopment have been at the heart of such neoliberal urban transformation. Yet, the literature's roots in notions of 'post‐industrial' cities obscure a view of how industry remains a key part of contemporary global cities. The persistence of the Peenya Industrial Area, one of South Asia's largest industrial areas today, reflects the negotiated, partial, contested and uneven character of the neoliberal urban project. Peenya demonstrates how obdurate inherited urban industrial geographies continue to shape the dynamics of world city‐making. Established in the heyday of Bangalore's postcolonial public sector industrialization, Peenya employs over 180,000 workers in 8,236 manufacturing firms, even today. How does such vast industrial space persist within the core of a global city? I draw on interviews and qualitative field research to argue that Peenya's resilience is rooted in the complexity of private land aggregation and state‐sponsored industrial relocation within an interwoven geography of tiny, legally fluid land holdings with variegated tenure regimes as well as the challenge of re‐signifying space in a region with obdurate industrial imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the growing trend of unionization among tech workers in the United States. It acknowledges the significant power that tech workers possess in both their workplaces and the broader economy. The article compares the organizing efforts of tech workers to historical labor movements in other industries and discusses the challenges they face due to the industry's resistance to unions. Despite these obstacles, there has been a noticeable increase in tech worker organizing, resulting in thousands of workers joining unions and securing collective bargaining agreements. However, this represents only a small portion of the overall tech industry. The article explores the potential for a tech worker movement, highlighting the development of networks and shared narratives among tech workers, as well as instances of worker activism and unionization efforts. It also delves into different theories of class, such as the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) and Contradictory Class Locations, and emphasizes the importance of addressing issues like compensation and job security in tech worker mobilizations. The article discusses the transformation of worker consciousness and the unique challenges of organizing in the tech industry. It identifies progressive workforces and lower-paid workers as potential strongholds for majority unionism in tech. Lastly, the article draws parallels between tech workers and autoworkers in the historical labor movement and considers the possibility of industry-wide settlements in the tech industry. [Extracted from the article]

What role has labor-saving technological change played in the recent past in charting out the trajectory of employment? Have we already transitioned into a new technological regime where production technologies are more invasive upon labor's terrain? In this study, I provide empirical evidence to answer these questions. Using industry-level data from 12 advanced economies for 1970–2007, I show that capital goods did not become more effective in labor-saving after 1980 or 1990. Similarly, the strength of the relationship between employment and output did not decline after 1980 or 1990. While many recent econometric studies have estimated the number of workers displaced due to industrial robots with which the media and public are highly preoccupied, there is nothing new in the fact that production technologies are labor-saving and displace workers. The importance of demand side factors and structural change (mainly deindustrialization) in determining employment patterns is often neglected, leading to a misleading assessment of the impact of labor-saving technologies on employment. • It is not new that automation is labor-saving or displaces labor. • Deindustrialization is a secular dynamic that depresses manufacturing employment. • No acceleration in within-labor-saving effect of capital goods since around 1980 or 1990. • No weakening in the strength of the relationship between employment and output since around 1980 or 1990. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British Historian John Hiden once called pre-WWI Latvia "the Belgium of the East" due to its highly advanced manufacturing, serving the Russian market. The independent Latvian nation-state (1918–1940) lost this status together with the industrial equipment, evacuated in 1915–1916 to mainland Russia and never returned. Inter-war Latvia did attempt to "Denmarkize", i.e., to become an internationally important exporter of food and to re-industrialize. Both its economic success and growth performance are severely contested. According to Roses and Wolf (in: Broadberry S, O'Rourke KH (eds) The Cambridge economic history of modern Europe, vol 2. 1870 to the present. Cambridge UP, Cambridge, pp 183–207, 2010), Latvia's GDP per capita growth rate was the highest among the European countries in 1929–1938. According to the most authoritative expatriate Latvian account by Aizsilnieks (Latvijas saimniecības vēsture, 1914–1945. Daugava, Stockholm, 1968), the growth stagnated in the years of the authoritarian Karlis Ulmanis regime (1934–1940). Roses and Wolf estimates are indirect. Aizsilnieks grounds his conclusions in the methodologically outdated national income estimates from inter-war times. This paper resolves the controversy by providing direct supply-side time series of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 1920–1939, based on a benchmark estimate of Latvia's GDP in 1935 by Norkus et al. (Cliometrica, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-022-00260-x, 2022). Main findings: The economic growth continued after 1934, but it was not Europe´s top growth performer in 1929–1938. However, in 1922–1938, its growth performance was the best, also due to a very low baseline after the extreme war-related economic destruction. The "Denmarkization" process was only partially successful because agricultural productivity remained low, and the re-industrialization was mainly import-substitution. We also did find that since 1936, Latvia's GDP per capita grew with substantial stagnation of the sectoral share of agriculture and a re-shift from services to manufacturing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, industrial metropolises in China have experienced a surge in proactive planning initiatives aimed at developing high-rise industrial structures, commonly known as "Industry's Going Upstairs (IGU)." This study argues that the IGU represents a distinct form of urban verticality that is neither motivated by capitalist speculation nor sustainability prompts but rather by local states' intervention to ensure economic resilience and enhance innovation capabilities. This study presents the case of Shenzhen to demonstrate how the adoption of the IGU initiative is catalyzed by concerns over manufacturing sectors' out-migration and the effects of volatile US-China relations on the city's competitiveness. In light of these circumstances, Shenzhen has embraced the ambitious IGU initiative as a practical approach to reverse the trend of deindustrialization while sidestepping the lengthy process of industrial land redevelopment. The paper concludes by emphasizing the need for a comprehensive understanding of political-economic factors that drive urban vertical expansion and their potential consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the causes of structural change in Brazil, through the rise and the fall of the manufacturing industry, and the consequences for total factor productivity and manufacturing labour productivity, from 1947 to 2021. Our results show that the industrialization of the Brazilian productive structure is positively associated with expansions in infrastructure investments and with the pursuit of a competitive real exchange rate, that is, with policies oriented towards economic development. Our findings also indicate that such variables exert a direct influence on total factor productivity and manufacturing labour productivity and an indirect influence through their impacts on the Brazilian productive structure. Our conclusions suggest that an important cause of the Brazilian premature deindustrialization, and then of its poor performance in terms of total factor productivity and manufacturing labour productivity, is the adoption of policies not oriented towards economic development adopted since the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A dominant interpretation of the twentieth-century U.S. city is one of declension, wherein cities contracted following a number of profound ruptures. At these moments, neoliberalism began its ascent, disconnecting the historical processes that created the city from the current policies and realities of American urban centers. By documenting the histories of urban agriculture in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this essay seeks to complicate this declensionist narrative while highlighting the overlooked role that food production played in the growth of a major urban center—all the while providing a usable history for efforts to renew the twenty-first century city. Even during the height of industrial expansion in Milwaukee, urban agriculture played a significant role in the economic, social, and spatial development of the city. Then, as both deindustrialization and responses to such phenomena began to dramatically affect Milwaukee by the 1960s, urban agriculture remained a viable tool for urban redevelopment, one employed by both public- and private-sector actors well into the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great Bengal Famine of 1770 took 10 million lives. The British East India Company's (EIC) extraction of resources and imposition of brutal tax policies in Bengal exacerbated the disaster. By exploring the intersections of corporate interests, colonialism, and biopolitics, this paper provides a new perspective on the Bengal famine of 1770 by introducing and visualizing it through a unique theoretical framework—corporate colonial biopolitics. Adopting Michel Foucault's notion of biopolitics, my focus is primarily on the corporate colonial biopolitical strategies enforced by the Company, which led to dispossession, violence, and resource extraction exploiting Bengal's landscape and impeding the region's progress and development. The essay unveils the racist policies and profit-driven principles of the EIC and how they prioritized generating revenues, financing its military, and exporting food grain even at the peak of the famine. I point out how the EIC systematically dismantled the Indian agricultural system, fueling deindustrialization in India and ultimately making the region vulnerable to famines. The Bengal famine of 1770 remains unexplored by geographers despite being the first colonial famine in India. One of the primary objectives of this paper is to bridge this gap by shedding light on the geographical dimensions of this pivotal historical catastrophe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detroit's intertwined history of deindustrialization and racial segregation is often explored separately. In The Origins of the Urban Crises (1996), Thomas Sugrue examines post-WWII job losses and housing discrimination without elucidating why and how the city came to experience the abrupt flight of capital in that period. Conversely, Murray and Schwartz's Wrecked (2019) details the catalysts for Detroit's deindustrialization but neglects its impact on the African-American community. This paper aims to bridge these perspectives by utilizing various secondary sources and archival evidence to analyze how concurrent discrimination and economic decline have maintained the persistent segregation between Detroit and its suburbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tropelías: Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada is the property of Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The author comments on an article on the value of the post-industrial concept for urban studies. He discusses the significance of a careful conceptualisation of post-industrial and the distinctions between related concepts, as well as the importance of the objects of study in examining critiques of post-industrialism in relation to gender and race and other structuring forces. He explores key arguments that can be taken from deindustrialisation to further refine the post-industrial concept.

The commentaries introduce some important challenges to our provocation, and in other ways, take our critique even further and in new directions. Rather than addressing each commentary sequentially, we structure our response to the commentaries around a few key critical themes that emerged across the group. These are: a) The need to retain post-industrialism as a conceptual framework for understanding urban processes, spaces, lives and change; b) for also differentiating between de-industrialisation and post-industrialisation; and c) for carefully deconstructing (and listening to) who, how, and why post-industrialism is used (i.e., whose voices, stories, histories are included or excluded? What political intentions lie behind the use of post-industrial and related terms such as 'left-behind?'), with specific attention to the structures and experiences of race, class, and gender. In other words, the focus needs to be on the discursive and symbolic power, politics, and cultural sensitivities when the notion of post-industrialism is evoked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Luger and Schwarze's critical unsettling of postindustrial is a presciently welcome one. For some years now, I—and others—have become increasingly uncomfortable with referring to and describing the locations of our research as "postindustrial." The main focus of this commentary is on the facets of Luger and Schwarze's (2024) arguments as they relate to nonmetropolitan deindustrializing urbanisms in the North Atlantic in an attempt to develop how we better conceptualize, understand and do justice to and with such spaces. The main thrust of the contribution is for the affective intensities and traumas of deindustrialization to be brought into closer analytical dialog with the profusion of processes associated with, in particular, "organized abandonment" and "neoliberal urbanism." If classed experiences and knowledge shape these dialogs, there remains hope for urban studies to contribute to an emergent multiethnic class politics around commonalities of contemporary as well as historical class violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this response to Luger and Schwarze I concur that the meaning and application of the "post-industrial" is imprecise. In particular, I argue that current manifestations of the concept background the role of racism at generating the landscapes often solely attributed to deindustrialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This article assumes the importance of the manufacturing industry to long-term growth and examines Brazil’s deindustrialization process since its economic opening. The manufacturing sector’s recovery is analyzed in light of the proposal to reindustrialize the economy in the ongoing global climate emergency. In line with the new-developmentalist literature, reindustrialization implies widening policy space to recover public and private investment in productive assets, providing financial conditions compatible with long-term returns. It assumes an active role in state intervention. In this sense, the New Brazilian Industry industrial policy should anchor long-term expectations to enhance productive investment committed to the green transition. This approach positions industrial policy as the anchor to build a sustainable development convention.

This article presents the results of a study on the current state and evaluation of the Polish tanning industry, focusing on its production characteristics. The research sample included 220 companies that were contacted to gather in- formation about their operations. Some of these companies have been suspended, liquidated, or have changed their business profiles. Approximately 30 % confirmed that they are still active in leather manufacturing, indicating that the Polish tanning industry is experiencing a process of deindustrialization. Surveys conducted in 20 companies revealed that Polish tanneries operate on national, European, and global scales. Most of them are micro or small enterprises with annual revenues of up to PLN 5 million. The primary factor defining their competitiveness is the high quality of the products and services they offer. They mainly process calfskin and cowhides sourced from Poland and abroad, primarily for the footwear sector. Polish tanneries are aware of global trends, including the industry's shift towards ecological practices, the adoption of modern technologies, and the introduction of innovations. Given the current challenges facing the Polish tanning industry, it is essential to take action to improve the health of this sector of the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Job security has always been a paramount concern for the trade union movement. This article explores the ways that unions used collective bargaining to gain a measure of job security for their members in the face of deindustrialization as unionized factories in North America began to close in large numbers after the 1970s. These new measures included advance notice, severance pay, plant closing moratoria, restrictions placed on plant movements, transfer rights, and expanding the scope of collective 'social' bargaining to cover training and adjustment. In some sectors, such as automotive, collective bargaining has also been extended into areas normally left to management. The price was often high. Eventually some unions, notably the Canadian Auto Workers (established 1985; part of Unifor after 2013), prioritized winning new capital investments and product lines for unionized plants in their negotiations, though often at the cost of jobs, wage freezes or reductions, and other concessions. By focusing upon auto sector deindustrialization in Canada since the 1980s, we draw lessons from more recent union bargaining strategies, and how they constitute an important element of worker responses to industrial job loss and manufacturing closure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the divergent trajectories of automotive investment and employment in Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario. Located on opposite shores of the Detroit River, in the United States and Canada respectively, Detroit and Windsor are the founding cities of the North American auto industry. Long dominated by the Big Three, their factories have produced vehicles for the same continental market since 1965. Each has weathered parallel challenges since then, including spikes in the price of oil, the Big Three's loss of market share, the transition to lean production, and the near-collapses of Chrysler and GM. Yet Detroit began deindustrializing decades earlier and lost much more employment than Windsor. To determine why, we compared their automotive sectors from 1900 to the 2010s. Since the Depression, each city has repeatedly confronted the prospect of deindustrialization, but three factors have made Windsor more resilient: (1) federal and provincial interventions on its behalf, (2) Windsor's greater competitiveness with respect to factor costs, quality, and innovation, and (3) Windsor's annexation of outlying territory to capture new factories. These differences show how national, subnational, and regional/local policies have mediated corporate decision-making to produce a variegated North American Rust Belt, with Canada outperforming the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Far from simply being a 'bookend' of the industrial age, deindustrialization is an integral part of capitalist development and thus has a long history. In the North American context, the early scholarship on deindustrialization emerged from the efforts to resist plant closures as they were happening. More recently, the field of deindustrialization studies has been reinvigorated by authors who have shifted the centre of gravity from the US Rust Belt to Europe and increasingly to other parts of the world. This introduction traces the emergence and recent transformations in the field of deindustrialization studies. It also introduces this themed issue on the politics of deindustrialization, which tells the stories of shuttered mines, mills, and factories within the wider restructuring of the international division of labour in the late twentieth century. The articles, written from a range of disciplinary perspectives, extend outward to how workers, their unions, state actors, and the general public responded to the challenge of deindustrialization. The authors are all affiliated with the 'Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time' (DePOT) research project (deindustrialization.org), which brings together many of the world's leading deindustrialization scholars to put the field in transnational perspective. By extending the range of comparisons and scales of analysis, this special-themed issue invites us to broaden our understanding of deindustrialization, both thematically and methodologically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through historical and anthropological inquiry, this paper addresses the issue of memory antagonisms involving cultural landscapes in the context of a former mining region: the Belgian Black Country. This region, which became increasingly industrialized in the 19th century through the massive development of coal mining and steel industry, subsequently experienced deindustrialization, and now finds itself mobilized in a process of 'post-industrial' mutation. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, it examines how the landscapes inherited from industry, and in particular the slag heaps of the coalfield, have over time become repositories of a working-class memory, through the living and working practices of the communities surrounding the mines. It also documents the various representations attached to these landscape objects, whose contradictions echo the oppositions between capital and labor that have marked the development of industrial capitalism. The second part of the paper, which focuses on the present situation, examines how these representations are remobilized in the valorization processes that are initiated by different actors, in the context of a 'post-industrial' urban transition strategy that seeks to produce a unified and pacified historical narrative. We'll be looking at how historical conflicts still permeate the representations of these landscapes, the question of their conservation, and their possible future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the racialized experiences of industrial closure and economic restructuring of the former Pilpilco coal mine through oral histories and feminist arts-based methods. We argue that Pilpilco's industrial closure illuminates the layers of historical violence exerted on bodies and land as inseparable categories to colonize and extract resources and labour in the Chilean coal basin in Mapuche land. Pilpilco's industrial closure illustrates how coloniality operates in Latin America, perpetuating racial, gender, political and social hierarchical orders and prescribing value to certain peoples and territories while disenfranchising others (Quijano, 2000, Lugones, 2008). The article reflects on the colonial wounds that continue to harm inhabitants and their environments, prolonging their inability to heal intergenerational pain. Finally, we analyse residents' creative strategies to reclaim Pilpilco's land through heritage recognition, women's solidarity, and alliances with indigenous struggles. The study expands the reach and depth of deindustrialization studies, providing insights into how processes of industrialization, deindustrialization, and reindustrialization unfolded through the entanglements of settler colonialism and indigenous dispossessions, authoritarian regime and political repression, and neoliberalism and social demobilization. It also contributes to the field by providing a perspective on industrial closure from women's experience – those unpaid care workers who sustained life in coal mining communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study calls for greater scholarly engagement with the generational experiences of the socialist working class in China. Through an analysis of collective actions in response to the reform of state-owned enterprises at the turn of the century, the paper divides the Chinese socialist working class into the Revolution Generation and the Transition Generation. Amid the restructuring of the state sector, workers from the Revolution Generation exhibited a proclivity for civic activism and petitions, while the Transition Generation, though grappling with unemployment, largely refrained from public dissent, instead expressing sentiments of bewilderment and resignation. The study illustrates how the differing lived experiences of two working-class generations played a pivotal role in shaping their interpretation of grievances and contention repertoire. The article underscores the significance of generational perspectives in gaining insight into the destiny of the Chinese working class, advocating for the integration of such perspectives into the broader fields of deindustrialization and labor studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last quarter of the 20th century, worker ownership emerged as a popular option for North American workers trying to save their mills or factories from closing. Most of these efforts eventually failed, sometimes at great financial cost to workers who gambled away their savings or pensions. Yet a few worker buyouts succeeded over the long term. This article examines two of these success stories, one on either side of the Canada-United States border, while situating them within the wider history of worker ownership in North America. When the United Steelworkers of America engineered the worker buyout of Algoma Steel in 1992, Canada's third largest integrated steel-maker, it became the largest worker owned industry in North America. Before that, Weirton Steel had been the largest since 1984 when independent steelworkers there bought the mill from National Steel. If worker ownership offered short-termed relief to workers facing plant closings, its longer-term viability is highly suspect. Many worker-owned firms shut during the next down-turn. Both Weirton and Algoma eventually reverted back to corporate ownership, albeit this time inside Indian-based multinationals, but worker ownership saved the two steel mills and helped modernize them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China–Malaysia economic engagement has deepened since the 1990s. The scale and scope of this relationship has also expanded significantly following the 2013 announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative. Offering a context-rich, historically-nuanced perspective, this paper analyses how Malaysian policymakers have engaged with economic opportunities opened up by the burgeoning Chinese market. In particular, it examines how Chinese foreign direct investment has contributed to industrial upgrading trajectories in Malaysia. The paper makes two inter-related arguments. First, it uncovers a correlation between closer Chinese–Malaysian economic integration and services liberalization, which results in Malaysia's lower emphasis on manufacturing and 'proper' industrialization. In other words, structural transformation has occurred, but it is geared towards the services sector. Relatedly, Chinese investment entering Malaysia, notwithstanding its relatively recent status, is composed primarily of service industries. The services-heavy nature of Chinese investment results in a relatively modest economic multiplier effect, potentially exacerbating some societal tensions and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural America is shaped by a conflicted sense of the ordinary: a place where a pastoral imagination of the countryside overlaps with, obscures, and, at times, is obscured by images of addiction and economic abandonment. This essay explores how these two senses of the ordinary are interdependent: how the possibility of a postindustrial future depends on the abjection of a deindustrial present. The essay approaches this problem through the analytic lenses of three scenes along a road known as "heroin highway" in rural New York. Tracing the ambivalence of these ordinary scenes makes it possible to see people and places excluded from the American dream as essential products of its logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anthracite coal mining landscape of northeastern Pennsylvania is in ruin, a by-product of two centuries of unchecked capitalism. Much of the land is stripped of its timber and surface mines lay abandoned. The industry began its decline after WWI and virtually collapsed during the post-WWII era. Waste piles of coal litter the landscape, and the streams and rivers are considered dead because of the minerals and high acid content of water draining from abandoned mines. Many scholars have written about the extreme work conditions the coal workers faced, the demise of the coal industry, and the impact of deindustrialization on the region's people. Often overlooked is how members of the mining communities had a radical hope. Radical hope helps oppressed people to see that another condition and another world is possible, although not guaranteed. Re-examining oral histories from the anthracite region recorded in the 1970s, when the industry was in its great decline, demonstrates how these mining communities anticipated a future good, understanding the struggle to attain it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]