Introduction: Picturing Post-industrialism Visual Culture and the Regeneration of European Landscapes

Summary

Abstract

The introduction lays out the intellectual terrain for a collection of chapters on Picturing Post-industrialism. It offers an overview of the fields of post-industrial studies and articulates the intervention made by the new scholarship featured in the volume. The introduction defines and discusses the historical, aesthetic, and conceptual issues that structure the anthology, and explores the themes that make it cohere.

Keywords: post-1970s regeneration; visual culture; post-industrial Europe; community engagement; art for social change

In its time, the nineteenth-century industrial revolution and the enormous changes it enabled to the way that we live and work were enthusiastically embraced. In recent decades, disillusionment has grown in line with the catastrophic consequences of the industrial way of life. Despite starting to be dismantled over fifty years ago, the upheavals resulting from the closing of mines and heavy industry in Europe, including their removal to developing countries since the 1970s, continue to contribute to some of the greatest challenges facing Europeans today. These include (un)employment and segmentation of the labour market, demographic changes in patterns of ageing, migration, austerity, growing poverty, climate change, and environmental sustainability. The consequences of the cultural, economic, and social shifts to a period of post-industrialization weigh heavily on daily life in Europe today.

Since the 1970s, many of Europe's one-time thriving industrial landscapes have been de-industrialized, mining and heavy industry have wound down, commodity production declined, or become refocused on non-fossil-fuelled production and manufacturing. There is no single European experience of the transformation from the industrial to post-industrial age. Similarly, revitalization, dereliction, or destruction of once thriving hubs of industrial activity across Europe have depended on a range of factors, including national and regional government policies, geographical and social context, and demographic identity. Abandoned and demolished factories, powerplants, blast furnaces, and reactors litter Europe's former industrial heartlands. Thus, for example, the IKA cable-manufacturing plant in Köpenick, Berlin or the Hunedoara Ironworks in Romania—once the biggest iron foundry in the Austro-Hungarian Empire—have lain derelict and abandoned for years.1 Such spaces attract stray cats, graffiti artists, and drug dealers, apparently devaluing their environs. In other locations, industrial sites have been transformed to meet the changing needs of consumer societies. For example, the renowned Lingotto building of the Fiat manufacturing plant in Turin has been transformed into a commercial complex.