real estate prices are high, interest rates are rising, and people are buying. Higher costs slow down building new construction; therefore demand and the rate of investments fall, and the whole economy falls into a crisis.
The role of cities in the crisis is therefore double: they are the arenas where the business cycles play out, and at the same time, they face the immediate material consequences of their downturn, namely, urban decay. Cities have been the first victims of any economic crisis, while their upper class and elite only have been the best beneficiaries of financial upswings and developments. Harvey sees the intensification in the frequency of economic crises as a consequence of the historical turn in world economic and political history in 1979 and 1980, when neoliberalism became the dominant discourse (Harvey 2005). There is a common understanding in urban research that industrial cities in Europe and the Western world disappeared to make space for the post-industrial ones. This assumption is based on the quick and still unresolved transfer of production to enormous urban conurbations in countries with cheaper workforces, such as China and India. Of course, this shift transformed and it is still transforming many city centres in Europe and the United States.
Industrial Crisis as Atmosphere
Nowadays, any European city would find it difficult to define itself as industrial; for instance, Sheffield brands itself as green and innovative, and it describes its industrial past only in terms of history and cultural heritage (Marketing Sheffield 2018). There is a growing conformity in European cities around the idea that capitals, citizens, and tourists should be attracted through spectacular infrastructures and intense cultural life. Not all cities were obliged to completely reshape their economic structure, and some of them, under the innovation surface, are simply continuing to function as industrial centres. Taking into account two cases from this book, in Torino, the FIAT Mirafiori plant in the southern end of the city is still producing, at least partially, real cars, and in Tampere, the Metsä Board Tako paper mill puffs out smoke in the city centre, a few hundred metres from the reconverted ‘post-Fordist’ factories. This is, of course, not to undermine the fact that the 1970s crisis and subsequent deindustrialising left a big impact on former industrial cities in terms of unemployment, distress, and empty and vacant industrial premises and spaces. Every economic crisis is bound to leave material debris behind. The concept itself of creative destruction implies a material legacy of ruins. This has been particularly true of the 1970s paradigm change, which erased much employment in the industrial sector from Western Europe and transformed industrial cities into decaying, empty, shrinking centres, abandoned by labour forces. This happened at various speeds and in different national contexts across Europe, and the way this was carried out in the United Kingdom is striking in its quick and painful operationalisation. However, the results were similar in terms of built environment: what was once a thriving mechanism of technological production became ruins. Ruins are nothing new in European continental understanding. For instance, anarchist Buenaventura Durruti said in an interview during the Spanish Civil War that
it is we [the workers] who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. . . . That world is growing in this minute. (Van Paassen 1936)
In his utopian abandonment, Durruti understands ruins as a necessity, for the new revolutionary world to rise from them, even if it means destroying what the workers have materially built themselves. Ruins are projected, therefore, into the future, as a signal of the oncoming demise of the bourgeoisie.
Ruins had interested aesthetic and philosophical thought for centuries before Durruti but always in connection to the past. Enlightenment and later Romanticism saw in them an architectural memento mori and a symbol of the irreversibility of time, to be ruminated upon through the lenses of nostalgia (Huyssen 2006). For Georg Simmel (1907), the architectural ruin represented the revenge of nature over the human spirit. Simmel understood ruins in paradoxical dialogism, torn between human spirit and nature, past and present, purpose and chance. According to the German sociologist, built architecture rested upon humanity bending natural matter into precise forms according to its own imagination; on the other hand, a collapsed building, its turning into ruins, is a tragic confirmation of its artificiality. In a ruin, materials regain their true form and return to their natural status; they emanate peacefulness and melt back into the surrounding natural environment, confirming their being something ancient, something of the past.
The attempt to describe and make sense of industrial cities has characterised a great deal of cultural production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For instance, in the British literary context, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1855) takes place between London and Coketown, a fictional northern English city of red bricks, covered in thick smoke. Manchester resident Elisabeth Gaskel also sets two of her novels (Mary Barton, 1848, and North and South, 1855) in industrial settings of the North, also contrasting industrial cities with the supposedly more civilised South. Descriptions of the early-industrialised towns are from the very beginning based on a comparison with more cultural or refined places. At the same time, authors are always keen in portraying architectural and atmospheric features. These elements didn’t change much over the years. There has always been an attempt to understand industrial cities through cultural ones, that is, by comparing landmarks, layers of history, inhabitants, and cultural artefacts.
The 1950s’ so-called kitchen-sink films also focus on describing northern industrial cities. These black-and-white portrayals of desolate individual destinies, in surroundings dominated by brick walls, gasworks, and puddles, collaborate in defining the post-war industrial crisis. The same happens with Italian neorealismo, which often focuses on the inner migration of unskilled workers from the rural South to the northern industrial metropolises, such as Milan, or to desolate lives at the margins of quickly developing but still ambiguous in-between spaces. These films share a common trait: their portrayals of poverty, social distress, and urban problems come from a privileged standpoint, that in the British new wave film has been codified as ‘that long shot of our town from that hill’. According to Andrew Higson (1996), the abused opening shot from above is, in fact, programmatic to the romanticising of working-class lives in industrial settings. Neorealismo, on the other hand, focused its view on industrial wastelands and on the undefined spaces, rising between rural surroundings and city outskirts. These vague spaces were used as mirrors for the eradicated individual not able to be modern or traditional, no more rural but not yet proletarian. This is, for instance, the dramatic condition of the protagonists of Pasolini’s works such as the film Accattone and the novel Ragazzi di Vita. All these works codified industrial landscapes as mirrors for troubled subjectivities, thanks to the use of black and white and to the focus on industrial debris. Rarely do we see in these films active industrial spaces at work; they are more a medium to define a certain sensibility, which goes back a long way. Industrial wastelands become in the post-war European cinema the topos of what Boym calls ‘ruinophilia’ (Boym 2008).
An interesting aspect, however, is the persistence with which the industrial atmosphere and the ‘industrial crisis atmosphere’, in particular, continue to haunt our urban mindscape. According to Böhme (1993), atmosphere is a spatial concept that arises neither from the subject nor from the object, although it maintains object-like and subject-like features. Atmosphere is the space allowing objects to articulate their presence; however, it is also sensed in bodily presence by subjects—it is a subject’s state of being in space. Böhme’s definition of atmosphere makes sense of the modes of relation between object and subject in spatial constellations. It implies, therefore, not only art-related judgemental elements but, as stated by Lehtovuori, ‘it foregrounds a two-way relation between people and their environment, where both the social and the material aspect are equally constitutive. People bring with them the social questions: Class, gender, professions, culturally coded practices and social networks, as well as urban economy and policies, enter the analysis’
