Post-Industrial Cities

Ever since Marcel Duchamp devised his 'readymades' in the early twentieth century, the majority of the critical literature on artworks that comprise readymade and found objects focuses on the commodity status of these items and the critique of consumer culture. This session, instead, invites papers that explore the links between found object-based sculpture and its relationship to the economies and technologies of production in industrial and postindustrial metropolitan areas-as Anne Wagner has argued, the history of sculpture is in constant dialogue with the history of technologies of production. From the dominance of industrial zones in early twentieth-century modern cities around the world to the waning of industry, the emergence of service-based economies and the growth of the financial sectors in postindustrial, postmodern urban areas, this panel explores how artistic practices that incorporate found objects negotiate the shifting texture of cities on the level of the street, the neighborhood, the workplace, the local store, real estate and urban life. This panel encourages the participation of art historians, curators, museum professionals, artists and theorists whose work and scholarship encompass the study of readymades, found objects, and simulated everyday objects in modern and contemporary sculpture and explore its links to obsolete and emerging technologies and sites of production in the context of industrial and postindustrial cities worldwide.

* Please send proposals for a paper including title, abstract (250 words maximum) and a short bio to Dr Natasha Adamou at adamou.natasha@gmail.com

For more information concerning the conference, see: http://www.collegeart.org/programs/conference/

Abstract
This thesis aims to investigate the dialectics between urban planning and policy on the one hand and economic change and crises in the city of Malmö on the other, with a focus on both the city in general and the specific district of Western Harbour.
Malmö provides a (highly) fascinating place to investigate relations between urban and economic change. The city embraced the industrial path longer than many other Western cities, only to crash into a severe crisis in the 1980s and early 1990s. In the mid-1990s the city embraced a “post-industrial” strategy, and from this point onward urban changes became resolute and drastic. Less than a decade later the image of the city had fundamentally changed. But the international economy that served as foundation for the post-industrial city proved to be crisis-prone, and the 2008 crisis especially called this urban-economic arrangement into question.
This thesis answers two broad research questions: how did Malmö respond to (the “industrial” as well as the “current” economic) crises? What characterises Malmö´s transformation from an industrial to a post-industrial city and which strategies have been mobilised? Based on semi-structured interviews, written material and secondary sources (in particular municipal planning and policy documents), four theoretical papers seek to investigate these issues. I argue that Malmö met the current crisis by actively continuing to develop the “post-industrial” city that had evolved starting in the mid-1990s. The dissertation then draws parallels with the city response to the “industrial” crisis, and finds interesting similarities. Malmö, then and now, met the crisis by “building more of the same”. The dissertation also investigates the metamorphosis the city has gone through, and argues that class is a crucial component that must be understood in this process: not only in terms of distribution of money and wealth, but also in term of the production of the city. One strategy that has become important for Malmö has been to highlight “green” and “environmental” parts of the urban development to get out of the “industrial crisis”. The thesis conceptualises this in terms of a “green fix”.
Theoretically the paper builds on four (related) fields of inquiry: i) urban theory, ii) dialectics, iii) crisis theory, and iv) planning and state theory. The latter two have undergone more thorough investigation, while I argue that discussions on (Marxists’) crisis theories within human geography would benefit from a broadening of the current perspective, and that urban planning should be conceptualised as a “condensation of social relations”. (Less)

Like many other cities around the world, at the end of the twentieth century, Manchester was reimagined as post-industrial space. This research draws on Lefebvre's spatial triad focusing primarily on the struggles that this generated both within official public sector representations of space and between public sector representations and the representations of key amenity societies. The paper presents the findings of a case study analysis that reveals how the 1970s saw differing interests lay claim to the right to determine the spatial meaning and future of city-centre industrial space. The research deconstructs the (re)production of the Grade I listed Liverpool Road Station, the first train station in the world, and its conversion into the successful Museum of Science and Industry. The conclusions show that the 1970s (re)presentation of the station site facilitated its (re)production as a site of revalorised industrial heritage. The consequences were the “rediscovery” of the Castlefield area of the city, and the later reimagining of post-industrial Manchester in the 1990s, which continues in the twenty-first century.
. . . countries in the throes of rapid development blithely destroy historic
spaces—houses, palaces, military and civil structures. If advantage or profit is
to be found in it, then the old is swept away . . . Where the destruction has not
been complete, “renovation” becomes the order of the day . . . In any case what
had been annihilated in the earlier frenzy now becomes an object of adoration.
(Lefebvre, 1991, p. 360).

Here I outline some new thinking regarding Lefebvre's concepts of differential space and the right to the city. The previous empirically orientated chapters in the book point to the potential of differential space but have so far left its nature and processes of production unexplored. Following Goonewardena et al (2008: 13) who argue for the need to take Lefebvre's spatial triad and the production of space ideas as a point of departure and Merrifield (2011) who urges us to go beyond Lefebvre, this chapter seeks to do just that. It does so by incorporating a fusion of differential space and right to the city ideas into contemporary contexts and grounded empirical case studies in the three cities which are the focus of this book. What follows is firstly, a conceptual discussion of the nature of the right to the city and its relationship with differential space. In the discussion below I focus on the ludic aspects and politicised appropriation characteristics of differential space. Secondly, is an analysis and discussion of case study empirical research, which argues that, inadvertently the potential for differential space was created through various heritage-led beautification and urban regeneration schemes

This paper contributes to a critical understanding of the production of space through an exploration of notable spatial moments in the 1990s work of the Central Manchester Development Corporation (CMDC), particularly its role in the creation of new public space. Henri Lefebvre's ideas regarding the production of urban space provide rigorous theoretical grounding for the empirical research. Two chronologically overlapping 20th century discourses: the inner city urban policy discourse from the 1960s and the modernist city planning discourse that peaked in the era of technological optimism after World War Two are shown to be vital for a critical understanding of the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) regime. The paper unravels the as yet unproblematised origins of UDCs and CMDC and shows how the reorientation of the 1960s Urban Programme by the Labour government laid the ground for some of the subsequent Conservative government's urban policy shifts. New evidence from archival sources, supplemented by interviews with key informants, is presented which challenges and disrupts some conventional wisdoms regarding UDCs and CMDC. Research findings point to the crucial role of CMDC in stimulating the creation of significant new public spaces akin to differential space, which remain of great importance for Manchester. CMDC's deployment of large scale resources compounded the spatial practice of the previous decade leading to the production of unanticipated public space potentials and the politicised appropriation of urban space. In closing, the paper highlights the unintended and inadvertent legacies of the CMDC for public space in the 2000s.

The Research Overview

[To reveal the production of space] we should have tolook at history itself in a new light. We should have tostudy not only the history of space, but also the historyof representations along with that of their relationships –with each other, with practice, and with ideology. History would have to take in not only the genesis of these spaces but also, and especially, their interconnections, distortions, displacements, mutual interconnections, and their links with the spatial practice of the particular society… (Lefebvre 1991: 42)

- Theoretical framework: Henri Lefebvre's spatial triad
- plus understanding role of capitalist abstract space
- Archival and interview research methodology
- Counter-projects led by civil society groups
- Aspirational urban regeneration
(Leary and McCarthy 2013)
- Five axes of public space
- Public space as crucible of democracy
- Production of differential space through
urban regeneration interventions
- Visual representations of space

This is the manuscript version of chapter two of the book:

http://policypress.co.uk/exploring-the-production-of-urban-space

Chatper Summary
How did an isolated, tough, masculine, nondescript logging camp
with one rough and ready pub become transformed into an iconic
world city? How did the neighbourhood ‘written off in the early
1960s as a slum’ that should be ‘cleared to make room for a highway’,
become one filled with ‘high-end restaurants, condominiums, offices,
modern furniture’ and men’s clothing stores so ‘hiply minimal that it
makes a person’s teeth hurt’ (Bula 2011). A couple of chapters in this
type of book cannot provide definitive answers to all these questions.
The more modest objectives are to explore the recent histories of the
production of urban space and ramifications for city transformation in
that most iconic of Vancouver neighbourhoods, Gastown.

This paper contributes to a critical understanding of the production of urban space through an exploration of notable spatial moments in the 1990s work of the Central Manchester Development Corporation (CMDC), particularly its role in the creation of new public space. Henri Lefebvre's ideas regarding the production of urban space provide rigorous theoretical grounding for the empirical research. The paper unravels the as yet unproblematised origins of Urban Development Corporations (UDCs) and CMDC and shows how the reorientation of the 1960s Urban Programme by the Labour government laid the ground for some of the subsequent neoliberal Conservative government's well known urban policy shifts led by Michael Heseltine. New evidence from archival sources, supplemented by interviews with key informants, is presented which challenges and disrupts some conventional planning wisdom regarding UDCs and CMDC. The paper argues that CMDC's deployment of large scale resources compounded the planning and spatial practice interventions of the previous decade leading to the production of unanticipated public space potentials and the politicised appropriation of urban space. Research findings point to the crucial role of CMDC in stimulating the creation of significant new quasi-public spaces akin to differential space. What are called 'inadvertent differential space legacies' created by CMDC, which remain of great importance for Manchester are highlighted. The paper closes with a number of theoretical conjectures and reflections.

The paper was published:
Progress in Planning, Volume 85, Pages 1-52 (October 2013)
"A Lefebvrian analysis of the production of glorious, gruesome public space in Manchester "
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/03059006/85

Minor cities represent urban centres on a sub-metropolitan scale which are struggling to integrate into competitive city networks characterized by intense, worldwide agglomeration processes. Lacking sufficient mass and often situated on Europe's geographic or socio-economic peripheries, they must balance specialization and diversification agendas, and develop effective urban governance to remain viable economic centres. This paper investigates ongoing urbanization processes and their effects on minor cities, illustrated by three case studies from Hungary. Findings suggest that development cooperation and the foundations of ‘urban regimes’ emerge even in small and institutionally weak city-regions, although the content, as well as organization of the resulting arrangements exhibit differences from the base model.
Published: International Planning Studies, 2014