Urban Re-Industrialization

URBAN

RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION

a

2 |

Sludge intake...

%,
Se i
%, * Krzysztof Nawratek, editor

©

URBAN RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION

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HIC SVNT MONSTRA

URBAN

RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION

Krzysztof Nawratek, editor

Contents

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Urban Re-Industrialization As a Political Project
Krzysztof Nawratek 15

PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE DO IT?

Re-Industrialization as Progressive Urbanism: Why and How?
Michael Edwards and Myfanwy Taylor 21

Mechanisms of Loss
Karol Kurnicki 29

The Cultural Politics of Re-Industrialization: Some Remarks on
Cultural Policy and Urban Policy in the European Union
Jonathan Vickery 39

PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
‘Shrimps not Whales’: Building a City of Small Parts as an Alter-

native Vision for Post-Industrial Society
Alison Hulme 53

‘Der Arbeiter’: (Re-)Industrialization as Universalism?
Krzysztof Nawratek 61

Whose Re-Industrialization?: Greening the Pit or
Taking Over the Means of Production?
Malcolm Miles 69

Crowdsourced Urbanism?: The Maker Revolution and
the Creative City 2.0
Doreen Jakob 81

Brave New World?!
Tatjana Schneider 89

The Political Agency of Geography and the Shrinking City
Jeffrey T. Kruth 97

PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

Beyond The Post-Industrial City?: The Third Industrial Revo-
lution, Digital Manufacturing and the Transformation of
Homes into Miniature Factories

John R. Bryson, Jennifer Clark and Rachel Mulhall 107

Conspicuous Production: Valuing the Visibility of Industry in
Urban Re-Industrialisation
Karl Baker 117

Industri[us]: Re/Use, Re/Work, Re/Value
Christina Norton 127

Working with the Neighbors: Cooperative Practices
Delivering Sustainable Benefits
Kate Royston

Low-Carbon (Re-)Industrialization: Lessons from China
Kevin Lo and Mark Wang

Bibliography

About the Contributors

137

149

159

177

Acknowledgments

This book has emerged as a result of two mini-conferences I
organised at the Plymouth University: ‘Re-Industrialisation and
Progressive Urbanism’ in 2013 and ‘Industrious Ecologies: Re-
claiming the Subjectivity of the City’ in 2014. The main inspira-
tion for these events (and subsequently the book) came from the
work of the Master of Architecture programme I was leading
from 2012 to 2015, and from discussions with professor Michelle
Adams from Dalhousie University, who also gave me the idea
for the structure of this book. I am also grateful to Eileen A. Joy
who enthusiastically reacted to the book proposal and to Vin-
cent WJ. van Gerven Oei for his work as an editor.

xiii

Introduction

Urban Re-Industrialization
As a Political Project

Krzysztof Nawratek

Urban re-industrialization could be seen as a method of in-
creasing business effectiveness in the context of a politically
stimulated ‘green economy’; it could also be seen as a nostalgic
mutation of a creative-class concept, focused on 3p printing,
‘boutique manufacturing’ and crafts. These two notions place
urban re-industrialization within the context of the current
neoliberal economic regime and urban development based on
property and land speculation. Could urban re-industrializa-
tion be a more radical idea? Could urban re-industrialization be
imagined as a progressive socio-political and economic project,
aimed at creating an inclusive and democratic society based on
cooperation and a symbiosis that goes way beyond the current
model of a neoliberal city?

In January 2012, against the backdrop of the financial crisis
that began in 2008, Krzysztof Nawratek (leader of the Master of
Architecture program at Plymouth University) published a text
in opposition to the fantasy of a ‘cappuccino city’ arguing that
the post-industrial city is a fiction, and that it should be replaced
by ‘Industrial City 2.0:

The Master of Architecture program at Plymouth University
has been working on a vision of such a city for the last few years.
The idea of urban re-industrialization appeared, in some senses
organically, when in 2009 they were invited to Riga, to look at

15

URBAN RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION

the Andrejsala peninsula, which is an area that Rem Koolhaas
and his company oma (Office for Metropolitan Architecture)
prepared a master plan for. The plan envisaged the construction
of luxury apartments for thirty thousand inhabitants (Riga dur-
ing this time had been losing 10,000 residents per year), supple-
mented by a modern art museum. However, the financial crisis
of 2008 made this plan irrelevant. This was a typical ‘cappuccino
city’ project, targeting the urban middle classes, and expecting
them to magically appear in a post-socialist city. This type of
thinking doesn’t bother to ask questions about where the middle
classes (or indeed their money) are coming from; it just assumes
that they are ‘somewhere out there’, and that they will come and
spend their money and spare time indulging in expensive res-
taurants and a range of cultural activities.

Industrial City 2.0 is an attempt to see a post-socialist and
post-industrial city from another perspective, a kind of negative
of the modernist industrial city. If, for logistical reasons and be-
cause of a concern for the health of residents, modernism tried
to separate different functions from each other (mainly industry
from residential areas), the Industrial City 2.0 must be based on
the ideas of coexistence, proximity and synergy. A good exam-
ple of this is shown in a design by Jonathan Pickford, a former
Master of Architecture student, for Riga. He proposed the cre-
ation of a state-funded ‘industrial think-tank connected with a
small factory and a technical school that focused on timber pro-
cessing as catalysts for further development. On the one hand
the project envisaged a use of timber, the only natural resource
Latvia possesses, and on the other tied this in with the local tra-
dition of timber buildings and modern, timber-based industrial
design, mainly developed in nearby Scandinavia. This concept
was then developed in the coming years in Gdarisk, Zielona
Gora, Warsaw and Cieszyn, and was based on a similar search
for synergies between different urban processes and the idea of
an inclusive city, a city for all its residents. These projects were
located in a context of a post-socialist and neo-liberal city and
were based on invitations from local institutions or organiza-
tions. But so far none of them has been developed any further.

16

URBAN RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION AS A POLITICAL PROJECT

Are they all just theoretical exercises? Is urban re-industrializa-
tion a valid concept at all?

In this book Jeffrey T. Kruth’s chapter presents an example
of the ‘Health-Tech Corridor, which was developed in Cleve-
land, Ohio, proving that if cities are shrinking and neoliberal-
ism creates bankrupt companies and wastelands, progressive re-
industrialization could be a way towards an alternative, effective
economic model. This does not happen by itself, of course: a po-
litical will is required to cut off (at least for a while) a fragment
of the economy that supports the neoliberal logic of immedi-
ate profit at any cost. At the heart of the “Health-Tech Corridor
is the Cleveland Clinic, which, like the university and several
other key institutions, is a not-for-profit organization, which al-
lows considerable tax relief. Kruth discusses the importance of
mechanisms to avoid land speculation and to base the economy
on income and business taxation. Cleveland is not the only ex-
ample of a successful industrial cluster associated with a clinic
and a university. Evergreen Cooperative is a cooperative enter-
prise, and owner of, amongst others, the Green City Grower,
which is one of the largest hydroponic farms in the United States
and plays a significant role in a development of the city. It is
interesting that Evergreen is by no means a grassroots mobili-
zation model but is based on close cooperation with the most
important local institutions and enterprises.

The Cleveland example is important because it shows two
key aspects of contemporary, progressive re-industrialization:
firstly, that re-industrialization becomes possible where the city
is shrinking and neoliberalism is unable to sustain itself on land
and property speculation (for it also proves that neoliberalism
is not the most effective economic regime), and secondly, that
contemporary re-industrialization should be closely linked with
a progressive, social economy, one that tries to take into ac-
count the social and environmental costs of production. Such
an economy requires a rebuilding of the social context in which
it operates because it has to earn acceptance and support from
the local community, and it also has to satisfy the material and
ethical needs of that community. Similar issues are discussed in

17

URBAN RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION

the chapter by Karl Baker, which examines enterprises that al-
low the general public to ‘look inside} and somehow to control
the working conditions of employees and the environmental
standards. The “Transparent factory’ could also put industrial
production, as a kind of a spectacle, at the center of the social
and cultural life of the city.

Of course, urban re-industrialization does not have to be a
progressive, emancipatory and inclusive political project. As
Kate Royston shows in her chapter, it could still be adjusted
by capitalist logic to increase productivity and diminish waste.
Conditions which may allow for a radical paradigm shift are
analyzed by Michael Edwards and Myfawny Taylor but also by
Tatjana Schneider. In a similar way, Malcolm Miles connects
re-industrialization with solidarity built on common activities.
Krzysztof Nawratek uses Ernst Junger’s idea of ‘total mobiliza-
tion’ to argue for urban re-industrialization as a new universal-
ism. Alison Hulme examines the various phenomena of Chi-
nese industrial urbanization, existing parallel to the mainstream
neoliberal strand, paying attention primarily to those that grew
from the bottom up, mobilizing different parts of Chinese soci-
ety and Chinese culture in a multidimensional synergy. China
is also the focus in the chapter by Kevin Lo and Mark Wang,
who analyze the impact of the regulation of co, emissions on
the economy of China, arguing that although in the short term
adjustments reduce the possibility of the development of Chi-
nese industry, in the long term regulations stimulate innovation
and the development of high-tech industry. John R. Bryson,
Jennifer Clark and Rachel Mulhall consider the consequences
of decentralized production mainly based on 3p printing for
future cities and homes, and Doreen Jakob goes further to con-
sider the consequences of decentralized capitalism, pointing to
the promises and weaknesses of crowd- sourcing projects. Jakob
observes the non-democratic nature of these types of urban-
ization. Karol Kurnicki introduces a ‘loss’ as a third aspect, in
addition to production and consumption, of the discussion of
re-industrialisation. Loss is what opens up the production to a
change, to innovation, to the unknown. Jonathan Vickery tracks

18

URBAN RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION AS A POLITICAL PROJECT

the progressive elements supporting cultural and material pro-
duction in the documents of the European Union.

The presented texts are attempting to create a framework for
a better, more just and more democratic world, linking social
progress closely to technological progress and industry. Urban
re-industrialization could and should become an integral part
of the chain of knowledge production and for fulfilling human
needs. These texts argue that social progress must go hand in
hand with technological progress and that urban re-industrial-
ization is a key component of both.

19

Chapter 1

Re-Industrialization
as Progressive Urbanism
Why and How?

Michael Edwards and Myfanwy Taylor

Introduction

This book, like the conference which led to it, is part of an essen-
tial and expanding discussion which criticizes the fundamental
structure of contemporary economy and society and examines
the scope for long-term alternatives and worthwhile immedi-
ate interventions, demands and experiments.’ The context is
partly a historical one. Over thousands of years, but especially
since the emergence of capitalism a few centuries ago, we have
moved away from forms of society where needs were almost
always met locally, from local resources and with rather little
division of labor or division of time between ‘production, ‘dis-
tribution, ‘consumption, caring, nurturing, playing and all the
other things people do to the elaborate divisions of labor out-
lined below. Although anthropologists, archaeologists and his-
torians continue to expose and refine our understanding of the

1 ‘There are intersections with the de-growth movements, research and prac-
tice in social innovations, many green movements, and Occupy and other
emerging urban social movements. Some of these are discussed later in the
chapter, while others are linked from the bibliography.

21

PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE DO IT?

actual course of events, it is very useful to think in terms of the
progressive shifts from a stylized subsistence society in which
exchange was highly localized, long-distance trade limited to
rare materials (gold, spices) and products of extreme skill or art
(scythes, ornaments, fine utensils, weapons).? We can think of
the settlements and architectural expressions of such societies
as relatively un-differentiated buildings, with specialized build-
ing types emerging alongside specialization in manufacture
(forges, grain mills, boatyards), in the reproduction of popula-
tion, collective services and social control (schools, hospitals,
churches and mosques, prisons) and the infrastructure required
(ports, canals, railways, water supply systems), all of which are
profoundly influential in the formation of our cities. The coun-
terpart to that is evolution of non-residential built forms has
been the dwelling, robbed of most of its earlier functions and
now reduced — for most of us—to a box for sleeping, eating,
child-raising and private, individualized consumption. Many of
the physical structures we now take for granted are the distinct
products of exploitative systems of supervision and control of
‘work —the factory, the office building — systems which may
now, for some, become obsolete through virtual control of dis-
tributed work and through casualized self-employment in which
we manage our own exploitation.*Two other features of modern
capitalism are relevant to this issue of ‘re-industrializatior: the
growth of globalization, especially of trade and money-flows,
and the dual role of buildings and land as having both use value
and asset value. The explosive growth of international trade has
tended to integrate previously-localized economies and at the

2 Paul. Seabright, The Company of Strangers (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2004) and David. Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn: Mel-
ville House, 2011), are two outstanding long views.

3 Richard. Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences
of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998); Madeleine
Bunting, Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives
(London: Harper Collins, 2011).

22

RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION AS PROGRESSIVE URBANISM

same time transform them.‘ Thus in recent decades the growing
mass of profits accumulating in the world has tended dispropor-
tionately to be invested in manufacturing production, where la-
bor is cheap and authoritarian regimes can keep it so; elsewhere
investment has focussed on extraction of hydrocarbons, metals
and other minerals; and elsewhere again (strongly here in the
UK) a major focus of investment has been in land and prop-
erty, driving up housing and premises values and costs as in-
vestors seek rents. This is profoundly important for settlements
and buildings which increasingly are produced and managed
as ‘assets’ to satisfy investment markets, rather than simply as
what is useful or desired by citizens. All of this is both a conse-
quence and an engine of globalization. The availability of cheap
container shipping and extremely cheap manufactured goods,
mainly from Asia, has made it possible for wages in the global
north to remain static or to decline in real terms, while work-
ers have been paying more for fuel and rent and profits grow.
Meanwhile, money capital has been increasingly free to move
to exploit these changing patterns of extraction of social surplus
and support the credit-fueled maintenance of consumption.
Many of these mechanisms are lucidly unpacked in the work of
the geographer David Harvey and are linked with food and en-
ergy crises (and their related land grabs) by the economist Alain
Lipietz.° These social processes are large-scale, spanning the ge-
ography of the whole world and penetrating the most remote
and previously autonomous regions. Meanwhile, marketized re-
lations penetrate into spheres of life previously outside the com-
modity economy — child and elderly care, recreation and sport,
education — replacing reciprocity and free, collective provision
and ratcheting up the charges for utilities and social housing.

4 Andrew Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed: Finance, Globalization, and Welfare
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

5 David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (Lon-
don: Profile, 2010); Alain Lipietz, “Fears and Hopes: The Crisis of the Lib-
eral-Productivist Model and Its Green Alternative, Capital & Class 37, no. 1
(2013): 127-41.

23

PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE DO IT?

What might provoke change?

A variety of circumstances may start to reverse some of these
trends, prompting what the organizers of this conference have
termed ‘re-industrializatiom. Reduction in world trade could
come from (a) a general contraction of global activity in the
crisis; (b) rising relative wages and production costs in China
and other countries, reducing their competitive advantage; (c)
increases in the cost of freight transport through rising oil pric-
es or through taxation, or even enforcement aimed at ending
marine/aviation pollution; or (d) protectionist measures by na-
tional or EU governments. Some of these tendencies are already
visible on a small scale and it’s worth reflecting on what could
cause each to accelerate. These forces in combination could im-
pel economies like the uxK’s towards greater self-sufficiency in
raw materials, in manufacturing (and even in certain services,
like tourism). Most of those factors don’t apply at a regional
scale but affect whole nations. Rising transport costs, however,
would be an important factor in redistributing activity within
the country, fostering more localized production and compress-
ing supply chains, which means there are more local materials
in construction, local brewing again and fewer Cornish potatoes
going to be scrubbed in Lincolnshire and then sent to shops in
Bristol. Its worth taking great care with words in this discussion.
In particular, the term ‘post-industrial society’ is to be avoided,
because our society is just as dependent as it ever was on ‘in-
dustry. Much of the production we depend on nowadays takes
place abroad, so that fewer of us do factory jobs in Europe and
many people under about thirty may never have entered a fac-
tory. But whether we use ‘industry’ in the sense of ‘hard work’
or loosely, as an approximation for manufacturing, we are ut-
terly dependent on it. Perhaps individual cities which have ex-
perienced dramatic deindustrialization can more accurately be
called ‘post-industrial cities, but it is important to recognize that
even in a city such as London there remain significant portions
of land currently labelled for industrial use and many workers
still deal with physical goods. Groups such as Just Space and

24

RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION AS PROGRESSIVE URBANISM

the London Thames Gateway Forum are currently campaigning
to prevent such spaces from being converted for office use or
housing use. We therefore need to be careful that ‘re-industrial-
ization doesn't blind us to the industry that already exists, even
in primarily service economies.

Re-industrialization as progressive urbanism?

This takes us to the issue of why re-industrialization might be
something we want to propose or encourage. There are multi-
ple answers to this question, and we are not all coming from
the same positions. In one corner, there are those who strongly
reject today’s rampant capitalism — or capitalism of any kind.
Another strand is the critique of the conceptualization of ‘the
economy’ as just the money-traded part of social life, valuing
output on a market basis and devaluing much of society’s most
precious activities and skills. A third strand is the imperative to
take full account of environmental impacts in measuring and
valuing activity, and to reconfigure activity to stop or reverse
environmental damage. A fourth strand will be the multiple
demands to re-humanize work,° reduce our alienation from
what we ‘produce’ and ‘consume; transform social relations in
work groups and retain the full value of people’s labor under
their individual, collective and/or local control.’ These are, of
course not rival or competing arguments — they intersect and
are mutually reinforcing. This conference has specifically asked
us to consider re-industrialization as a route to a more progres-
sive urbanism. This takes us directly to the issue of the nature of
urban growth which a re-industrialization strategy might gen-
erate, and whether this might be considered to be more or less
progressive than present approaches, or indeed other alterna-
tive strategies. Presently, urban growth strategies tend to be in-

6 Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

7 Jamie Gough, ‘Neoliberalism and Socialisation in the Contemporary City:
Opposites, Complements and Instabilities, Antipode 34, no. 3 (2002): 405-
26.

25

PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE DO IT?

formed by powerful narratives that position a small proportion
of the activities that go on in cities as productive and generative.
We are all familiar with global cities, creative cities, high-tech cit-
ies, etc. As Doreen Massey’s work on London‘ has shown, these
perspectives imply that the interests of all lie in the performance
of these sub-sectors of cities’ economies. In fact, as we know,
urban growth strategies that privilege high-skilled and high-
income activities over all others tend to increase inequality, at
the same time as they produce riches for the few. Researchers
studying cities in the global South know this only too well,’ rec-
ognizing that the means by which the poor make cities work are
at risk of being neglected or even destroyed through the appli-
cation of such narrowly-framed strategies. In this context, per-
haps the most powerful contribution the notion of ‘re-industri-
alization’ can make is to unsettle these dominant narratives by
positioning a very different set of activities in the driving seat
of future urban development. Even in a so-called ‘global city’
such as London, industrial activities play an essential role in
making the urban economy work. Simple industrial surveying
by the London Thames Gateway Forum has exposed clusters of
specialist lift manufacture and repair companies, for example,
which are able to respond rapidly and competently to lift break-
downs in London's tubes and offices, as well as aggregate yards,
whose central riverside location meant that aggregates could
be transported by river and rail rather than road, minimizing
air pollution. Re-Industrialization prompts us to look again at
these neglected industrial activities and to ask how they might
be connected to other urban activities. This is also important
in light of the evidence that firms benefit from the co-presence
of same-sector and different-sector firms, and that it is the
collective coordination of urban activities amongst firms and

8 Doreen Massey, World City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).

9 Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development
(Oxford: Routledge, 2006).

10 Gilles Duranton and Diego Puga, ‘Nursery Cities: Urban Diversity, Process
Innovation, and the Life-Cycle of Products, American Economic Review 91,
no. 5 (2001): 1454-77.

26

RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION AS PROGRESSIVE URBANISM

other economic actors that creates agglomeration economies."
If we are interested in progressive urbanism, however, we per-
haps ought to go further than ‘re-industrialization. Some of the
other contributors to this book and the associated conference
are hopeful about a humanizing re-industrialization, in which
engaged work as a maker, perhaps in the 21st-century industry
of mass customization, transforms our relations of production.
Others are hopeful about the potential of re-industrialization to
drive the ecological changes we are concerned to see. What we
are missing, perhaps, is a specifically feminist perspective, alert
to the ways in which whole aspects of life have been ignored
by mainstream approaches to cities and the economy. Feminist
geographers have showed how cities rely on the unpaid work
of women and men in connecting the realms of work and life,”
while feminist economists have been at pains to demonstrate the
value of unpaid work in conventional economic terms.” What
this work has shown us is that unless and until we re-think ‘the
economy; our efforts to achieve more progressive urbanisms
will face some serious limitations.’ Re-Industrialization has
much going for it as a starting point for thinking about progres-
sive urbanism. It offers the potential to re-connect with mean-
ingful and humanizing work in cities, and to begin to adapt the
ways our cities work to avert ecological crisis. It moves in direct
opposition to many of the recent developments towards globali-
zation and modern capitalism, as well as against the dominant

u1 Allen Scott and Michael Storper, ‘Regions, Globalization, Development; Re-
gional Studies 37, no. 6-7 (2003): 579-93.

12 Linda McDowell et al., “The Contradictions and Intersections of Class and
Gender in a Global City: Placing Working Women’s Lives on the Research
Agenda, Environment and Planning A 37 (2005): 441-61; Helen Jarvis, ‘Mov-
ing to London Time: Household Co-ordination and the Infrastructure of
Daily Life, Time & Society 14 (2005): 133.

13 Jenny Cameron and Julie Katherine Gibson-Graham, ‘Feminising the
Economy: Metaphors, Strategies, Politics, Gender, Place & Culture 10, no. 2
(2003): 145-57.

14 Julie Katherine Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It):
A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2006), first published in 1996 by Blackwell.

27

PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE DO IT?

narratives of how urban economies work and the narrow city
strategies they inform. As such, it powerfully opens up the more
important — and yet neglected — question of who or what cit-
ies and their economies are for.” At the heart of a progressive
urbanism would be a concern for life as well as work and for
the ways in which they together make our urban lives possible.

15 Massey, World City.

28

Chapter 2

Mechanisms of Loss

Karol Kurnicki

Introduction

Even without recalling the generalizing notion of ‘human na-
ture, it is not excessive to suggest that human activity is creation.
The delimitation in human life between work, learning, leisure
or play is useful in as much as it allows for the analysis of differ-
ent segments of social reality. However, in spite of its conveni-
ence, this delimitation is artificial and problematic because it
hides relations which are based on the production of new things
on the level of everyday practices. These relations engage vari-
ous resources and link different levels of social life which always
resist categorization and analytical simplification. Everything
is — or can be — production. Everything is a social product.’
The ideologies of the post-industrial city,? which are widely
accepted in developed countries, induce a concentration on the
maintenance of the privileges of a comfortable life that are far
away from the real conditions of its reproduction. This situation
is not only unaltered, but is reinforced by the demands imposed
on people and the things that people demand of themselves: be-
ing creative at work, having fun, creating a pleasant personal

1 Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, trans. J. Sturrock (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 102-20.

2 See, for example, Richard Florida, Cities and the Creative Class (New York:
Routledge, 2005); Charles Landry, The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban
Innovators (London: Comedia, 2008).

29

PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE DO IT?

image for others (as consumers), undertaking constant efforts to
prove oneself valuable for existing modes of production, etc. In
this context, it is often seen as more important to make a good
choice of colors on the custom-made Nike trainers than to be
aware of the social and economic networks that made their ex-
istence possible. Production and creation go hand-in hand with
consumer individualism.

Problems with re-industrialization

In the urban context of developed regions, the question of re-in-
dustrialization is entangled with two major issues. First are the
overproduction of goods and the domination of consumerism,
which can basically be seen as two sides of the same coin. The
second issue regards an overtone of international competition
and rivalry which is difficult to sustain in the globalized world.

Re-industrialization, as with any other economic process,
raises questions about its entanglement with social relations.
It is particularly so if we accept that re-industrialization is not
only a way out of the recent economic crisis or about simply
relocating factories, but is primarily a social activity, and that
the restoration of industrial production is important for society.
For a consumer, it is often irrelevant whether the product he or
she purchases was made fifteen, fifty or five thousand kilometers
away, especially if the price stays the same. To pose the question
in a different way: is the geographical location of industry perti-
nent in a situation when it serves as a means to maintaining ex-
isting relations, defending old welfare states, reproducing power
structures or supporting society as a consumers’ assembly?

It seems that the problem here is again that of external con-
text, i.e. a set of criteria which can be used to evaluate social
development or to choose a more or less pro-social political
economy. Despite the impossibility of returning to the modern-
ist ideals of progress, which not so long ago supported beliefs
in slogans such as the one adopted by German carmaker Audi
(Vorsprung durch Technik’, meaning ‘Advancement through
technology’), strong ideas should not be abandoned. Critique of

30

MECHANISMS OF LOSS

contemporary modes of production, with its center—periphery
divide or its impossibility of negative judgement of seemingly
free consumerism (manifest in modern-day proverbs such as
‘the customer is always right’ and ‘the market is free’), is prob-
lematic. It is so not for the reason that it takes an extraneous
position full of dignified superiority. It is rather because of its
inability to create its own system of convincing ideas and solu-
tions, which would form a positive, adequate and viable prop-
osition. The fact that tools of social and political critique are
widely known and available, does not translate to their usage.
Luc Boltanski argues that there is a need to create an analytical
framework which would integrate what he calls an ‘overarching
programme’ with a ‘pragmatic programme.’ The former pro-
vides an external and general picture of social order, including
something which can be called ‘commensurability’ (or ‘princi-
ples of equivalence’, in Boltanski’s terminology). The latter turns
its attention to the competences of actors and their actions as
well as their own justifications for those actions.
Re-industrialization could be an ideology which has more
widespread social meaning and influence, providing that it
is defined as a tool for as precise as possible, and at the same
time (auto-)reflexive, social operations. What we learned from
historical social processes of de-industrialization was that the
transformation of social models and breaks with development
paths over a hundred years old is possible in a very short time.‘ It
means that new reconfigurations are possible, even more so since
some elements of this possibility are already available. However,
it should imply the rejection of a currently functioning, clear-cut
division between production and consumption, producer and
consumer. Instead of asking what and where something can be

3 Luc Boltanski, On Critique: Sociology of Emancipation, trans. G. Elliott
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 48.

4 Such was the nature of neoliberal restructuring; see Neil Brenner and Nik
Theodore, ‘Cities and the Geographies of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”,
in Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and West-
ern Europe, eds. Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, 2-32 (Oxford: Blackwell

Publishing, 2002).

31

PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE DO IT?

produced, we should be asking for what and for whom is a given
thing valuable? Additionally, we should ask how to make con-
version between production and consumption at the same time
smoother and more complicated? To put it differently, the issue
here is about procedures linking economic transformation and
material practices with conditions of existence on the level of
individual actions and justifications. Moreover, in the wider so-
cial context it should be possible to relate the above- mentioned
elements with ideas such as ‘for the common good’ or of ‘right to
the city; as defined by Lefebvre.’ Accordingly, and for the same
reasons, referring to the ideals of universal and everyday social
emancipation would be appropriate. Secondly, and only be-
grudgingly mentioned, the reason for re-industrialization is the
economic success of countries and cities outside of Europe and
North America, with simultaneous worsening of the situation
in these two regions of the world, epitomized by post-Fordism‘
and the resultant reshuffling of welfare state systems.” For some
time now, it seems that developed countries are losing the ability
to create their own history, not to mention to decide about the
fate of the world. If we believe Wallerstein, it has to do with the
general, and possibly long-lasting, crisis of the modern world-
system.® Re-industrialization could be used as one of means of
escaping this crisis. The question is, can it be used only in a re-
actionary way? It does not seem to be a big problem to re-estab-
lish industry as a pillar of developed countries, especially as it
is still an important element of their economies and continues
to form a significant share of their Gpps.* However, for better or
for worse, it would not mean returning to the era of bright and

5 Henri Lefebvre, ‘Right to the City, in Writings on Cities, trans. E. Kofman
and E. Lebas, 147-59 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

6 Krishan Kumar, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society: New Theories
of the Contemporary World, 2nd edn. (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

7 Gosta Esping-Andersen, Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

8 Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2006).

9 World Bank, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.TOTL.ZS.

32

MECHANISMS OF LOSS

brave modernization. Thus, the more important issue is a crea-
tion of mechanisms of re-industrialization. These mechanisms
could operate to facilitate and strengthen social relations, which
would in turn enable the development of alternatives to the cur-
rent and existing mode of ‘creative destruction, especially that
it currently becomes less and less creative. Another issue is that
the term ‘re-industrializatior itself implies a certain geographi-
cal perspective. While Western countries were experiencing a
dismantling of industry, many peripheral regions have started
to industrialize and grow economically. In fact, (re-)industriali-
zation is constantly happening. Unfortunately, as it is controlled
from London or New York and based on outdated Western pat-
terns, it usually produces or reproduces conditions which were
shared by European or American workers in the past.’°

Dialectics of loss/surplus

The dialectical relation mentioned above between producer and
consumer is at once the strength, and also the biggest problem,
of existing modes of production. Paradoxically, it is something
that, in a new form and within a different context, should be
retained for use in re-industrialization processes. Every per-
son and social institution can be perceived as both a creative
producer of objects and other goods, and a consumer. The rela-
tion here is analogical between a human and space. Although
we cannot determine the exact properties of this relation, it
does not mean that the reciprocal influence is not real. The key
problem of such a relation is that it does not enable change. Of
course, we can accept that there is a margin of free choice. We
can use one space but not another, go to work for a seemingly
better company or buy a shampoo with conditioner or without.
The fact remains that it is a closed system and that those free
choices and the current social conditions are not transformed
but reproduced. As observed by Lefebvre, “the opposition be-

10 Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy, 3rd ed. (Thousand Oaks: Pine
Forge Press, 2006).

33

PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE DO IT?

tween production and consumption [...] cannot completely
mask the dialectical conflict suggested by the term ‘productive
consumption”.” Is there really nothing else to do but take the
external position of critique and bring to light contradictions
caused by the aforementioned opposition? There might be an-
other way which is related both to breaching the dialectics of
production and consumption and to the possibility of a critique
grounded in real, everyday human actions.

Every instance of production and consumption comprise a
loss. It might be a by-product, waste, trash, unused energy, an
empty lot or even the opening of new possibilities which cannot
be taken at the given moment. A loss can be a third element,
supplementing production and consumption. In other words, a
loss can bea surplus, an excess, a resource for further use. More-
over, in relation to production and consumption it can function
as a correcting element, disrupting a simple binary opposition.
Importantly, this three-way relation is not logical but dialectical,
although by its character it is different from traditional linear
dialectics, which dictate that the end of a workday means leisure
and consumption, after which there is another day of work.

Using the most evident example of rubbish as a symbol of
loss, we can notice how in some situations it is considered prob-
lematic, while in others it becomes a resource which enables the
constitution of a third important element and a complication of
the binary production-consumption duo. In the first instance,
the loss resulting from production or consumption is managed
by means which negate its value. The only solution for loss is
then either its complete exclusion from circulation or — and this
is a more contemporary capitalist (and ecological) way — its re-
introduction to the system as a part of production or consump-
tion. In the meantime, the qualitative difference of loss is gone.
In many countries, rubbish is a property of those who create
it until it is collected from the street or a backyard by (often
private) cleaning services. Paying for rubbish collection means

u Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson Smith (Ox-
ford: Blackwell, 2010), 354.

34

MECHANISMS OF LOSS

that, even within the green and seemingly circular politics of
recycling, waste is treated only as a part of a binary relation. The
rubbish producer is compelled to become a consumer of waste-
management services.” The other instance occurs when rubbish
is not included in this binary relation and is instead treated as
a resource. It is not surprising that many of the most advanced
systems of recycling, innovative rubbish treatment and the abil-
ity to use a loss as a resource function in urban slums.? Slum
dwellers cannot afford to simply throw away things that can
be preserved for further use. They cannot waste time or space
if it can be made use of. Paying for organized rubbish collec-
tion would be a similar squander. People who live on resalable
rubbish found in dumpsters in urban areas of developed coun-
tries are another example of this.* They can virtually support
themselves relying only on things (mainly recyclable materials)
which other city dwellers deem disposable. These two cases are
not presented here to glorify social exclusion or enchant indi-
vidual marginalization of a ‘poor mam Instead it is about the
fact that mechanisms of using a loss are already present on the
level of everyday practices, and as such they could be put to
wider use.

Connection attempts

Despite the two above-mentioned examples, general mecha-
nisms of utilizing loss and breaking with the production-con-
sumption paradigm are so far not available, partly because they
would have to be locally reappropriated. However, conditions

12 Garth Myers, African Cities: Alternative Visions of Urban Theory and Prac-
tice (London: Zed Books, 2011), 33-34.

13 Jac Smit and Joe Nasr, ‘Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Cities: Using
Wastes and Idle Land and Water Bodies as Resources, Environment and Ur-
banization 4, no. 2 (1992): 141-52; Diana Lee-Smith, ‘Cities Feeding People:
An Update on Urban Agriculture in Equatorial Africa, Environment and
Urbanization 22, no. 2 (2010): 483-99.

14 T. Rakowski, Lowcy, zbieracze, praktycy niemocy. Etnografia cztowieka zde-
gradowanego [Hunters, Gatherers, Practitioners of Feebleness: An Ethnogra-
phy of Degraded Man] (Gdansk: Stowo/Obraz Terytoria, 2009).

35

PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE DO IT?

for a possible three-part relation can be provisionally deter-
mined. If we accept that re-industrialization is a tool, we need to
think about the application of a loss/surplus in the urban con-
text. Additionally, we need to consider to what extent mecha-
nisms of loss have socially inclusive potential.

Getting access to traditional production processes on the
level of organized creation (i.e. above the individual level, such
as being an employee) is rather complicated and requires the
overcoming of existing dependencies, e.g. technological, insti-
tutional or political barriers. Personal involvement in the pro-
duction process in the form of becoming a worker is also not
relevant, because it does not transform the general situation.
Opening a brewery in Camden or a cheese factory in Brook-
lyn is surely nice, but has it any wider impact on the capitalist
mode of production based on the production-consumption du-
alism? The worker swiftly becomes a consumer, and the other
way around, while being caught up in the reproduction of the
conditions of his or her own dependency, which are constantly
reinforced in colonized daily life.’ Exploiting resources gener-
ated by loss means breaking with this dialectical opposition and
doing it with means already available. The worker/consumer is
not compelled to struggle over traditional means of production,
for his or her strength lies elsewhere — in the control over a loss/
surplus.

It is difficult to imagine a circular production system which
on the one hand would be able to fully make use of the losses
it produces and on the other maintain an entry gate allowing
for the inclusion of external elements. Such a system would be
doomed either to authoritarian subjection of all elements of cir-
culation or to a utopian (in the traditional meaning) and petri-
fied autarky.

Recognizing the value of a loss is a condition of its social
control and responsiveness towards new circumstances and
needs. This social control is a crucial and critical element, be-

15 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 3, trans. G. Elliott (London:
Verso, 2008), 26.

36

MECHANISMS OF LOSS

cause it could form a mechanism preventing the seizure of loss
by either production or consumption and by slipping to old di-
visions. It would also counteract the rule of internalization of
profits and externalization of costs, which is essential for mod-
ern capitalism. This system is increasingly unable to manage
surplus, understood both as consumer goods and as unwanted
by-products. Mechanisms of loss, namely apprehension and so-
cial control of surplus, open possibilities for emancipation and
for complication of capitalist functions.® Therefore, possible
change lies not in the policies which would, for instance, enforce
high fees for dumping waste in peripheral regions. That means
at most giving poor countries a choice about a preferred form
of subordination.” Recognition of the importance of loss for the
socio-economic system and treating it as a manageable resource
implies a shift in the power relations. The moment of power is
relocated: hitherto weaker actors become decisive in the usage
of loss/surplus. For instance, the development of digital technol-
ogies (mainly mobile phone applications, mobile banking and
communication networks) in African countries is not a result
of external capital or infrastructural investment, but innovative
and productive ways of using computers and handsets deemed
worthless by citizens of the developed countries."

In the urban context, re-industrialization equals reformula-
tion of spatial relations. Perhaps it is time now to think about
something that could be called ‘the architecture of loss’? Prob-
ably in the perspective of social control over the space right in
the city is also to be practically reformulated. The starting point
would be a practical reformulation of the ‘right to the city’ con-
cept from the perspective of social control over space. On a low-

16 See the reconceptualization of city politics and policies in Edgar Pieterse,
City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development (London: Zed
Books, 2008), 85-89.

17 Steven Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked In-
frastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London:
Routledge, 2001), 304-78.

18 Anon., ‘Press 1 for Modernity, The Economist, April 28, 2012, http://www.
economist.com/node/21553510.

37

PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE DO IT?

er and more important level, processes of industrial production
are related to the material practices of people, their activities in
and contacts with the environment. Possible social control over
loss can be compared to the dominance over fragments of space,
which, in spite of their crucial position for the functioning of
the system, are currently understood as a burden, unless they
can be subjugated and commodified. If the right to the city is
a right to a social production of livable space, which in turn al-
lows the individual and communal creation of reality, then the
key condition of its realization does not mean becoming a pro-
ducer or a consumer. Rather it means recreating and taking ad-
vantage of available resources, such as losses, remainders, voids.
The dialectical overcoming of productive or consumptive loss
means constant creation of renewable resources. Loss/surplus
is continuously produced by both practices of everyday life (i.e.
most of people’s activities in a city) and by industrial produc-
tion. Therefore, re-industrialization should be comprehended as
a social process containing and being contained by totality, but
one without a center” It means going through different levels,
understanding and inducing change which includes both gen-
eral systemic importance and even people's minuscule material
practices and their justifications.

It is not an attempt to determine the hard core of human
identity (exemplified by the worker/consumer). It cannot be if
we consider how inexhaustible the forms of people's productiv-
ity can be. It is rather about facilitating individual and social po-
tential for shaping relations of production and consumption. By
using existing resources and preserving the world as we know it,
it is possible to change it completely.

19 Lefebvre, ‘Right to the City, 147-59.

20 Jason Edwards, “The Materialism of Dialectical Materialism, in New Mate-
rialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics, eds. D. Coole and S. Frost (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2010), 286.

38

Chapter 3

The Cultural Politics of
Re-Industrialization
Some Remarks on Cultural Policy
and Urban Policy
in the European Union

Jonathan Vickery

Cultural policy and urban policy in the European Union are
two quite distinct policy fields. They overlap insofar as ‘culture’
is more often than not both urban and public culture, and the
greatest density of publicly-funded cultural projects in Europe
take place in cities. In this chapter I discuss how both cultural
policy and urban policy are changing and are contributing to
the ongoing need for re-industrialization, in part through pro-
viding the means to a new (or renewed) vision for the European
city.

Europe experienced the de-industrialization of its post-war
economy in the 1970s, then emerged a partial re-industrializa-
tion through a rising service economy in the liberalization of
trade and property ownership in the 1980s, then to be followed
by the informational, communications or so-called ‘micro-chip
revolution’ of the 1990s — giving us the digitally-mediated eco-
nomic world we today inhabit. And yet historical periodizations
do not explain a great deal. How we conceptualize the meaning
of ‘industry’ in the digital and so-called “knowledge economy’

39

PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE DO IT?

of the present time remains a matter of debate, if not confusion,
We currently seem to be living through an endless recessionary
re-scaling of national economies within a supra-national Euro-
pean economic framework that is attempting to re-negotiate its
relation to the global economy at the same time as its manage-
ment of the grand political settlement of European unity, deci-
sively forged at Maastricht in 1993. This will no doubt play out
through successive political negotiations in the next decade or
more, as Europe struggles to recover from the global financial
crisis that impacted it in 2007.

In 2013, the Ev arrived at the end of its last seven-year policy
cycle (largely conceived before the European financial crisis
fully emerged) and forthcoming strategic development frame-
works—‘Europe 2020’ being the ‘growth strategy —are all con-
fronting challenges greater than anything the Union has hith-
erto faced.’ In this context, I will discuss the matter of policy
with reference to ‘Creative Europe (the new cultural policy) and
the somewhat less specific but equally significant policy term,
‘integrated sustainable urban development.

Even though it legislates, the EU is not a government, and so
its political will is heavily invested in its policy discourse. While
the EU’s spectrum of competencies historically revolve around
the governance of economy and trade, it now encompasses a
range of rights and social values, supra-national political insti-
tutions and an increasing geo-political identity. “The European
Spatial Development Perspective’ is, notionally at least, its larg-
est framework for geo-social planning. This ‘perspective’ em-
bodies related policy aspirations for territorial cohesion and
regional integration, the cultural implications of which seem
to contradict the ‘principle of subsidiarity’ enshrined at Maas-
tricht. In one sense, Eu cultural policy and urban policy both
fall victim to the principle of subsidiarity (a member state's right
to act outside the Union in certain areas), but in another sense,

1 European Commission, EUROPE 2020: A Strategy for Smart, Sustainable
and Inclusive Growth (Brussels: Publications Office of the European Union,
2010).

40

THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION

subsidiarity motivates an ever greater need for a convincing
policy unity. As articulated in the two treatises of the European
Union, (which along with various additions are now considered
in one ‘consolidated’ document), subsidiarity in principle is ab-
solute but in practice must be interpreted within the priority of
the ever expanding field of Eu legal jurisdiction.’

Arguably, the most visible and recent EU discourse of re-
industrialization revolves around the ‘knowledge economy’
concept, which can be understood less as a response to the
rise of technology and the industrialization of science than as
a permutation of the entrepreneurial city that emerged out of
the widespread de-industrialization of the 1970s. The entre-
preneurial city, as Bob Jessop explains, is not just a city with a
competitive industrial infrastructure. It is a city in which ‘com-
petitive advantage’ is a hegemonic political discourse, which has
re-structured the political complexion of the State, its services
and welfare, urban space and social institutions, civil society
and markets. This re-structuring has taken place around nor-
mative assumptions on the fundamental role of ‘the economy’
and how only market-driven economies are possess the energy
and developmental potential to provide a stable ground for, and
productive means to, animate and perpetuate a healthy society.
Further, the entrepreneurial city as manifest in Europe has con-
vincingly embodied a symbolic (and creative) articulation of

2 See: European Commission, Committee on Spatial Development, European
Spatial Development Perspective: Towards Balanced and Sustainable De-
velopment of the Territory of the European Union (Luxembourg: Office for
Official Publications of the European Communities, 1999). The two prin-
cipal treaties are Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (since
1958) and Treaty on European Union (i.e. the Maastricht Treaty, 1993); they
were last updated at Lisbon (2009), whereupon the Charter of Fundamen-
tal Rights became legally binding. See European Union, The Consolidated
Treaties [and] Charter of Fundamental Rights (Luxembourg: Publications
Office of the European Union, 2010). This document cites ‘subsidiarity’ but
also the ‘harmonization of the laws and regulations of the Member States’
(Article 167, 121-122).

3 Bob Jessop, “The Entrepreneurial City, in Transforming Cities: Contested
Governance and New Spatial Divisions, eds. N. Jewson and S. MacGregor,
28-41 (London: Routledge, 1997).

41

PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE DO IT?

civic identity, where even heritage or abandoned factories be-
come sites for aspirant innovative actors in the fast-changing
global economy. Renewal, regeneration and innovation are the
marks of the entrepreneurial city, whose techniques range from
dissolving the public ownership of welfare services, land and
property, to the use of the arts, culture and heritage to build a
branded visitor economy with extensive corporate hospitality
capability.+

The challenge for a critique of the entrepreneurial city, is that
its ‘entrepreneurship’ (and subsequent ‘neoliberal’ approach to
development) has been startlingly effective in giving culture,
arts and heritage a substantive socio-economic role in the urban
economy of the European city. In most European countries, the
so-called ‘cultural sector’ is now larger than it ever has been,
with impressive facilities and routine public funding. There
is little political solidarity among the European cultural elites
against a neoliberal regime that offers culture a lucrative role in
the contemporary city. For it does so without divesting it of its
historic (and hard-won) social autonomy, at least immediately.

This situation, however, is deceptive, and arguably retrenches
‘autonomous’ cultural sectors in politically marginalized social
spaces whose only function is to perpetuate a model of the city
it has received by fiat, and not to which it has imaginatively con-
tributed. My argument, however, is that entrepreneurial neolib-
eral urban development has invoked a critical tension within
policy development at Ev level. For the Eu policy imaginary
must contend with the political conditions of its own legitimacy,
emerging from its own historicity, as well as offer an economi-
cally pragmatic and viable future for all its member states. I will
attempt to indicate how the Evu’s changing policy frameworks
articulate the political necessity of moving beyond the assump-
tions on the efficacy of corporate expansion and markets on
which the entrepreneurial city is founded.. The Ev cannot fa-

4 Graeme Evans, ‘Creative Cities, Creative Spaces and Urban Policy, Urban
Studies 46, no. 5-6 (2009): 1003-40; Anne Lorentzen, ‘Cities in the Experi-
ence Economy; European Planning Studies 17, no. 6 (2009): 829-45.

42

THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION

cilitate the propulsion of its member-state cities into the global
economy and endure what it calls the ‘zero-sum’ game of unre-
strained competition between member state cities, between cit-
ies and regions, and city-regions with each other.’

For both urban policy and cultural policy, the EU was only
really met with substantive enthusiasm from independent or-
ganizations, associations and city municipalities themselves, not
national governments—for example, since 1951 the Council of
European Municipalities and Regions (CEMR) and since 1986
EUROCITIES, have both played important roles in facilitating the
credibility of Eu policy. As by far the smaller of the two policy
fields, cultural policy presides over a portfolio featuring educa-
tion and media as well as the arts, culture, heritage, (and increas-
ingly, the creative industries). Responsible for many high visibil-
ity projects (like the European Capital of Culture program) its
success is largely judged by its central strategic funding project,
formerly called the ‘Culture Programme (2007-2013).° Having
reached the end of its seven-year lifespan in 2013, the program
had three objectives: cultural mobility, intercultural dialogue
and the distribution of cultural goods (all geared to the central
Eu Treatises’ aim of promoting the European polity through cit-
izenship). It had a budget of €400 million and funded hundreds
of projects, many of which had an urban dimension, such as the
innovative project, House for Open Mobility Exchange (HOME)
for ‘personal contact in public spaces; and the BelBoBru ‘urban
parade laboratory.’ Impressive as the Programme was, its dis-

5 The phrase ‘zero sum is used in European Commission, Cities of Tomorrow:
Challenges, Visions, Ways Forward (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the
European Union, 2011), 22.

6 Culture is one of areas of the Directorate-General (DG) Education and Cul-
ture, the others include education and training, youth, sport, languages and
media. The ‘Cultural Programme (2007-13)’ is one of seven programmes,
some of which are relatively small (like the EU Culture Prizes, or the Euro-
pean Capital of Culture, which despite being a flagship programme has little
funding attached).

7 European Commission, Culture in Motion: The Culture Programme (2007-
2013) (Luxembourg: Communications Office of the European Union,
2010); see also European Commission, Crossing Borders — Connecting Cul-

43

PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE DO IT?

crete range of projects and events (it did not fund individuals or
places) only seemed to highlight the politically insular world of
the European cultural elites, as if European cultural space is a
parallel universe to national cultural sectors, and more so to the
cultural life of rural and local communities.

Since 2000 and the largely over-optimistic ‘Lisbon Agen-
da’—aiming to make the Ev ‘the most dynamic and competi-
tive knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010’ (a policy
framework that exhibits the direct influence of Manuel Castells
as well as Richard Florida)—cultural funding has been distrib-
uted outside the confines of the cultural sector, in industry and
innovation schemes.’ These schemes, arguably like the UK’s
‘culture-led regeneration’ phenomena, utilized culture as an ‘in-
strument’ within a broader set of non-cultural objectives. The
new ‘European Agenda for Culture’ (2007), however, shifted the
gear of cultural policy.’ While the initial ‘Communication on a
European Agenda for Culture in a Globalizing World’ (2007)
re-stated a commitment to national subsidiarity, it nonetheless
asserted the historically international character of “European
culture’ as a profound unity, and that economic growth now de-
pends on digital connectivity, globalized markets and the distri-
bution of cultural goods, which all now exceed national policy
frameworks. There is a strong sense in which new urban and
cultural policy is being bolstered in the face of intra-European

tures: The Eu Culture Programme (2007-2013) (Brussels: Publications Of-
fice of the European Union, 2011). For cited projects, see ‘Other Projects,
Lucp [website], http://www.ljud.si/slo/?page_id= 10&lang=en, and http://
newnostradamusofthenorth.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/celebrating-variety-of-
eu-taxpayer.html (original website now expired)

8 The ‘Lisbon Agenda action and development plan (2000), for the EU econ-
omy between 2000 and 2010. See Arno Tausch, Titanic 2010: The European
Union and Its Failed Lisbon Strategy (Hauppauge: Nova Science Publishers,
2010).

9 European Commission, European Agenda for Culture in a Globalizing World
(Brussels: Publications Office of the European Union, 2007), 2-3. See also
the accompanying document on policy implementation: European Com-
mission, Working Document: The European Agenda for Culture — Progress
towards Shared Goals (Brussels: Publications Office of the European Union,
2007).

44

THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION

competition and against member states’ particularist planning
trajectories.

The new cultural program is ‘Creative Europe’ (2014-2020).
The budget was agreed upon in 2011, adjusted downwards due to
recessionary pressures, but still now stands as an almost 10% in-
crease at a substantial €1.46 billion.” It is structurally different to
its predecessor in two crucial ways: it merges funding for culture
and media (the previous Culture and Mepra and MEDIA Mundus
programs); and positions the commercial creative industries as
co-extensive with ‘culture, further opening cultural projects to
industrial innovation and scientific funding collaborations. The
first of these is significant in view of the established debate and
frustrated pan-European attempts to develop a European public
sphere." The second is significant in that culture has explicitly
been positioned within economic development, and this seems
to have come at the cost of the traditional aim of Ev cultural
policy—European citizenship. The new policy emphasis for cul-
ture as economic stimulus sees culture as the mobilization of
a young, flexible, mobile and largely a-political workforce for
either new enterprise or corporate expansion through innova-
tion. The new aims of cultural policy feature a repetitive use of
the lexicon of economic growth— globalization, employment
and markets.

On the face of it, the new central policy program for culture
may seem like an attempt to dissolve the hegemony of the tradi-
tional institutions of culture in favor of a new EU-wide dynamic
culture industry, driven by ‘creative’ industries’ models of devel-
opment (itself driven by American models of business entrepre-
neurship). The culture program offers Bank Loan Guarantees

10 European Commission, Creative Europe: The European Union Programme
for the Cultural and Creative Sectors (2014-2020) (Brussels: Publications Of-
fice of the European Union, 2011), 786/2

11 Ofthe many Ev-sponsored studies of the so-called ‘European public sphere;
see: H.G. Sicakkan, Diversity and the European Public Sphere towards a Citi-
zens’ Europe. EUROSPHERE Final Comparative Study, vol. 3 (2013), http://
eurosphere.uib.no/files/2010/07/EUROSPHERE_Final-Report_Web_ver-
sion2.pdf.

45

PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE DO IT?

for sMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) managed by the
European Investment Fund (£1F), and so for the first time the
cultural and the banking sectors become interconnected. And
yet, the 2010 European Commission green paper Unlocking
the Potential of Cultural and Creative Industries (2010) did not
appeal to the Ev’s Enterprise and Industry policy field, but to
cultural policy itself? Culture’s ‘autonomy’ is actually prized in
the face of the apparent instrumentalist orientation of culture to
economy. Creative Europe, it seems, indeed exhibits all the ele-
ments of New Economic Growth Theory, with its talk of cross-
sector partnerships and service-based administration methods,
clusters and incubators, and a capitalization on so-called ‘cross-
over effects. Yet again, it is assertive in valuing culture on its
own terms and of artistic or aesthetic experience as a significant
realm of meaning as much as social benefit. EU policies can-
not simply be understood as a series of statements or directives
issued from discrete documents. Policy in the Ev is a political
imaginary, where a vision of a distinctive European society is
required to safeguard the authority and legitimacy of the ‘man-
agers of this society (the Eu as democratic polity).

The inextricable interconnection of the cultural and the ur-
ban at the level of policy was made apparent by Richard Florida’s
2004 study of European countries, Europe in the Creative Age.®
Ironically, cities themselves did not feature large in his study,
but Florida since remained a central figure in the development
of the entrepreneurial city discourse across Europe. While os-
tensibly based on ‘data’ the 2004 study was tacitly animated by
a demand that European policy makers reconcile themselves to
a new ‘creative age. This ‘age’ sustained itself through economic
growth, and growth was maintained through individual profes-
sional success, and a success that emerged through specialist ed-
ucation, skills and competitiveness, resulting in new enterprises

12 European Commission, Unlocking the Potential of Cultural and Creative In-
dustries (Brussels: Publications Office of the European Union, 2010).

13 Richard Florida and Irene Tinagli, Europe in the Creative Age (London:
Demos, 2004).

46

THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION

and cities bustling with enterprise-affected activity (more pro-
duction, but also intensified consumption). The many official
Ev events for the so-designated European Year of Creativity and
Innovation in 2009 articulated this logic very effectively, but in
two ways. The consequent and widely circulated European Am-
bassadors for Creativity and Innovation Manifesto (with Florida
as an ‘ambassador’) was cosmopolitan and in a general way lo-
cated the conditions for such growth in the material-institution-
al environments of particular urban economies (which indeed
require a cognitive infrastructure of actual cultural creativity).
Other areas, like the ‘cluster’ discourse, emerged across Europe
and presented a more narrow investment in business enterprise
and innovation models (see the European Cluster Alliance, Eu-
ropean Cluster Observatory, and others). Related streams of the
‘Europe 2020’ framework—like the ‘Innovation Union’—along
with the new Eu Small Business Act for Europe (2008), and EU
Strategy on Intellectual Property, could have served either, and
both strands could have complimented each other on the level of
practice. In policy terms, the narrow version of Florida's creative
age thesis has become dominant in many European countries
and for the most part simply promotes the economic agenda of
the old entrepreneurial city.“

And yet, the EU requires more than just operational effec-
tiveness on the economic register; it requires the perpetual le-
gitimacy of its increasingly complex governance, particularly in
current times of crisis. Reading across the major policy decla-
rations and directives on the urban policy and cultural policy
of the last two decades, one encounters the rhetoric of entre-
preneurial economic growth for sure, yet also something else.
On the one hand urban policy is the locus of some of the most
compelling problems in technology and engineering (security,
renewable energy, transportation, and so on), and on the other
it remains animated by, and continues to respond to, the social
dilemmas that has faced European identity since its original

14 European Commission, State of the Innovation Union 2012: Accelerating
Change (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2013).

47

PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE DO IT?

historic emergence (dilemmas of integration and a common
culture, social welfare and equality). The same can be said for
cultural policy.

Urban policy in the Ev is a hybrid field with no actual basis in
any treaty. There are relevant committees or representatives on
urban matters in almost all of the Ev’s institutions, and some of
its investment projects (such as the European Regional Devel-
opment Fund: the ERDF). While managed in the broad context
of Cohesion Policy, and as a specific investment arm of Regional
Policy, the ERDF has played an increasingly significant policy
role for culture — providing new spaces, places and facilities as
part of broader urban development projects.* One of the most
important policy developments, however, is actually not a policy
at all. The ‘European Acquis Urbain’ (sometimes just referred to
as the Eu Urban Agenda) is is like the term ‘Integrated Sustain-
able Urban Development and acts as a meta-theory of EU urban
policy implementation. While in practical terms, it articulates
an understanding of urban policy that presents itself in terms of
a strategic pragmatism accumulated through decades of prac-
tice. Philosophically, the Acquis Urbain is a significant counter-
weight to the continued enthusiasm for the ‘Lisbon Agenda for
a knowledge economy (2000) — which was not backed by much
statutory power in any case, but which has maintained the en-
trepreneurial lexicon of terms for many an urban policy maker
interested in culture and creative industries.

While the Cohesion Policy 2014-20 supports an ‘integrated
sustainable urban development’ approach to all policy making

15 The European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the Cohesion Fund and
the European Social Fund are the three main financial instruments of EU
Cohesion Policy (run by pG Regio). The Cohesion Policy for 2014-2020
contains new regulations to set out common objectives for all structural
intervention (under the new mantra of ‘smart, sustainable, and inclusive’).

16 Successive informal ministerial meetings on urban development (in Lille
in 2000, Rotterdam in 2004, Bristol in 2005, Leipzig in 2007, Marseille in
2008 and Toledo in 2010) shaped the common Acquis Urbain: the found-
ing document is the 2003 Declaration of Strasbourg, influenced in no short
measure by the Council of Europe’s Urban Charter II in preparation at the
time (ratified in 2008).

48

THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION

in principle, in reality it is mandatory only in small and spe-
cific areas (parts of ERDF spending). There remains an appar-
ent problem: policies on urban life are a vast field for which a
vision of a re-industrialized city is not a specific model of city
planning.” Nonetheless, the Acquis Urbain is as much a rejec-
tion of the economic instrumentalism of the UK model of ‘urban
regeneration’ as it is the narrow Florida-style entrepreneurial
economy (and its recent reincarnation in the ‘Smart City’). For
while economy and business remain emphatic in Ev urban pol-
icy, they are not internal to development itself, and not a con-
dition of sustainability as such. This can be seen in part in the
adopted Ev Sustainable Development Strategy (sps) of 2006,
the 2007 ‘Leipzig Charter on Sustainable European Cities’ and
up to the brochure-style publications like Promoting Sustainable
Urban Development in Europe (2009), and particularly the in-
spirational Cities of Tomorrow: Challenges, Visions, Ways For-
ward (2011)."* The elements of New Economic Growth Theory
are present, but taken as ‘given, albeit meaningless without a
greater strategic European vision for social change. And this vi-
sion is articulated in a way that is ideologically incontestable, as
it draws on the originary European Union political philosophy
of equitable pan-national social welfare, where development is
most fundamentally a form of socio-cultural participation, and
sustainability is a non-negotiable ethic of everyday life.

Of course, one could easily retort that this above vision is
little more than the old traditional European statism, reliant on
national monocultural allegiances, a heavy industrial base and
high taxation, which were all the reasons for Europe’s economic
decline. However, this is not the case; what I am identifying here
is not a battle between two ideologies or state systems, but the

17 See European Commission, Inter-Service Group on Urban Development: The
Urban Dimension in European Union Policies 2010, Introduction and Part 1:
European Commission (Brussels: Publications Office of the European Un-
ion, 2010).

18 European Commission, Promoting Sustainable Urban Development in Eu-
rope: Achievements and Opportunities (Brussels: Publications Office of the
European Union, 2009); European Commission, Cities of Tomorrow.

49

PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE DO IT?

fact of a strategic contention between two complex discourses,
both of which retain a profound dimension of necessity. The
entrepreneurial neoliberal city and the historic (if evolving)
‘European’ city are not exclusive. It is their perplexing mutual
interconnection that has, at least in part, motivated the huge
and increasing need for research, addressing an acute deficit in
theoretical understanding.

It is the Acquis Urbain that articulates this most vividly,
with its call for knowledge. Required is the knowledge gen-
erated from actual practice—urban development itself is a
knowledge-generating activity. Embedded knowledge gather-
ing (what it calls an ‘urban methodology’) can be generated out
of actual place-based engagements, where these take place on
the basis of the socio-cultural or ‘Europear’ orientation of the
Acquis Urbain. This has been done to some degree in past ur-
ban development with the Urban Pilot Projects (1989-99) and
the URBAN and URBAN 11 Community Initiatives (1994-2006)
and the URBACT program (2002-13: the acronyms of EU such
projects, which having their source in benign terms like ‘urban
actions, are now established and strategically managed cultural
brands). The URBACT strategic funding instrument has been
exemplary in its demonstration of the need to understand the
complexity of urban culture as a prerequisite to infrastructural
design and construction, and other forms of development. The
seminal statement on integration, Towards an Urban Agenda in
the European Union (1997), proclaimed that urban policy was to
‘restore the role of Europe's cities as places of social and cultural
integration, as sources of economic prosperity and sustainable
development, and as the bases of democracy:

The term ‘integrated; in Integrated Sustainable Urban De-
velopment, tacitly confronts the disciplinary basis of national
urban policy practices in parochial town- or city-planning tra-
ditions, the hegemonic discourse of ‘planning’ over urban devel-
opment, and with it the domination of traditional civil engineer-

19 European Commission, Towards an Urban Agenda in the European Union
(Brussels: Publications Office of the European Union, 1997), 3.

50

THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION

ing or industrial engineering ways of thinking over planning).
If development emerges from knowledge construction, and not
simply a hoped for ‘effect’ of market forces, then ‘sustainability’
is a means of activating an evolving historicity. Rescued from
the political discourse of energy consumption and taxation so
favored by national governments, ‘sustainability’ is becoming a
marker for a vast realm of academic (and so, policy) ignorance
on the relation between the urban and the natural environment.

It is the visionary document Cities of Tomorrow (2011) that
fleshes some of this out. The document approvingly reproduces
a piece of Berlin graffiti, demanding we ‘stop gentrification, yet
the need for industry and business are no less rigorously un-
derstood. Both are positioned in this policy discourse within
‘advanced social progress, as ‘platforms for democracy, cultural
dialogue and diversity’ and as participating in the creation of
‘places of green, ecological or environmental regeneration.”°
The term ‘smart’ is used frequently (to define specialized re-
search and technology-based innovations), but only in rela-
tion to its social conditions of ‘inclusive’ opportunity and eq-
uity. The European city of tomorrow will exhibit ‘limited urban
sprawl through a strong control of land supply and speculative
development.” It is driven by new political alliances of engaged
independent representation, with legitimate roles for city-based
civil society, NGos and new urban actors. In short, in the Euro-
pean city of tomorrow, the economic — not the urban or cultur-
al—is burdened with the task of defining itself and delivering
on the social and political demands of a new Ev city polity.

My purpose in this chapter was to indicate the changing
complexion and interrelation of cultural policy and urban pol-
icy. The need for re-industrialization has demanded that each
policy framework adopt the lexicon of, and orientation towards,
economic development. This has generated a dilemma for these
European Union policy fields, and this dilemma is manifest in
a significant structural tension. While to define this structural

20 European Commission, Cities of Tomorrow, 10.
21 Ibid., 12.

51

PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE DO IT?

tension in terms of a contradiction would be to collapse our
understanding of a complex process into a reductive choice be-
tween opposites. Rather, the tension is the visible struggle of the
EU policy imaginary that is undergoing a necessary intellectual
as well as political negotiation. This negotiation is between the
raison détre of the historical European democratic polity and
the requirements of prosperity in a market-driven global econ-
omy. It is a quest for an integrated sustainable development and
it is hanging in the balance.

52

Chapter 4

‘Shrimps not Whales’
Building a City of Small Parts as
an Alternative Vision for
Post-Industrial Society

Alison Hulme

I was expecting the necessity of a protracted explanation on my
part as to where exactly I wanted to go, but the taxi driver im-
mediately knew, despite the fact that 798 Art District is way up
in the northeast of Beijing, adjacent to a nondescript business
centre in what was a German military camp enclosure. It is no
longer enclosed. It no longer needs to be. The government has
long ago seen the sense in accessibility and careful encourage-
ment where art is concerned, as strategies to avoid secrecy and
dissent by potentially counter-revolutionary artists and intellec-
tuals.

Passing under the industrial, red iron gatepost into the plain,
wide street, with its red-brick ex-military buildings on either
side, an old, rusting, water-pipe juts out into the pavement,
spluttering and spurting through its seams. It is tempting to
think these industrial remnants have no function whatsoever
and have simply been left to provide the effect of things being
make-shift. The huge iron doors of the gallery spaces, rusting
and squeaking on their hinges, are part of the same visual rheto-
ric, as is the content-less graffiti— all so carefully disheveled.
There is nothing make-shift about 798 any longer, and the price

53

PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

of the food in the various café spaces, complete with their dis-
tressed furniture, is proof that shabby-chic bo-bo' style sells.

Later, a local Beijinger tells me that 798 is one of the most
profitable local neighborhoods of Beijing — not far behind the
central touristic areas containing Tiananmen Square and the
Summer Palace, or the corporate business areas. This is not al-
together surprising; ‘bringing in the artists’ has long been a way
to regenerate run-down urban areas in Western cities and neat-
ly fits the rhetoric surrounding ‘the creative city’ promulgated
by the likes of Richard Florida.? It is also almost immediately
hijackable by neoliberal agendas (if not created with them in
mind from the outset), whose concern is property prices and
ABC1 consumers.? Indeed, the ‘creative city’ has seemingly be-
come the only answer to post-industrial urban stagnancy — re-
industrialization is off the agenda.

In many ways, utilizing the art world or ‘creatives’ to regen-
erate specific areas of a city can be seen as part of what Bren-
ner and Theodore call the ‘embedded-ness of neo-liberalism, by
which they mean the way in which neoliberalism is produced
and defined by inherited frameworks, as opposed to simply us-
ing (allegedly) immutable market forces wherever they decide

1 ‘Bourgeois Bohemian.

2 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming
Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Perseus Book
Group, 2002); R. Florida, Cities and the Creative Class (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2005). Florida’s thesis states that there is a creative class who are a
key driving force for economic development of post-industrial cities in the
us. He breaks the class into a ‘super-creative’ core consisting of science, en-
gineering, education, computer programming, research, arts, design and
media workers, and a group of ‘creative professionals’ who are the classic
knowledge-based workers, including those in healthcare, business and fi-
nance, the legal sector and education.

3 This relates to the first three categories of the accepted social grade defini-
tions used by the market and social research industry in the uk. They aim
to measure and classify people by income and earnings levels. The full scale
of definitions runs from A to E, A being higher managerial, administrative
or professional workers, and E being casual or lowest-grade workers.

54

“SHRIMPS NOT WHALES’

to unleash them.* They draw upon the work of Peck and Tickell,
who have emphasized the way in which neoliberalization is a
process — an on-going movement of destruction and creation at
the local, national and global level.» The encouragement of art
districts to gentrify run-down areas is precisely the utilization
of neoliberal logic in order to re-appropriate an often alternative
space into something that fits its own agenda whilst maintaining
the outward appearance of being ‘different’ and ‘independent’ It
is, perhaps without realizing it itself, ‘path-dependent’ in other
words, and that path in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries has seen creative industries usurp traditional manu-
facturing as part of an increasingly embedded lineage of neo-
liberalism. The question then becomes, how to break the path?

KKK

Far from Beijing 798, lies the ‘small commodities’ city of Yiwu,
in Zhejiang province. Via its prolific manufacturing of low-end
goods (batteries, plastic-wear, decorative trinkets), it has gone
from being a small village to a hugely successful driver of re-
gional growth. The ‘Yiwu model’ has even been copied and ex-
ported to other countries — Dubai, The Netherlands and Swe-
den, for example. Its raison détre can most evidently be seen
in its lay-out, which centers around the immense wholesale
markets, housed in giant warehouses and zoned according to
commodity. The Yiwu model was inspired by ‘Zhejiang Vil-
lage’ (Zhejiangcun), a migrant clothing manufacturing area in
the Fengtai district of Beijing. Despite (or perhaps because of)
its success, 1995 saw the complete razing of Zhejiangcun, caus-
ing a mass exodus of around 40,000 migrants. In its place the

4 Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, ‘Cities and the Geographies of “Actually
Existing Neoliberalism”, in Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in
North America and Western Europe, eds. Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore,
2-32 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002).

5 Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell, “Neoliberalising Space’, Antipode 34, no.3

(2002): 380-404, at 380.

55

PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

authorities built an enormous modern plaza— deemed to be a
more ‘suitable’ representation of the new China.

Zhejiangcun was characterized by four key features attrib-
uted to its migrants’ former practices in their native city of
Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, and these characteristics have in-
formed and remained constant in Yiwu. They were: (1) that it
consisted of numerous small-scale private enterprises, (2) that
it specialized in wholesale petty commodity markets, (3) that it
was built on tens of thousands of mobile traders who facilitated
the flow of materials and (4) that it was made possible by vari-
ous forms of non-governmental financial arrangements.° These
characteristics had become known as the ‘Wenzhou model’, a
phrase which was officially announced as a new economic para-
digm for China in 1986. Despite this, versions of the model that
did not have the right ‘look were clearly unacceptable.

The fact that Wenzhou had created the model was not sim-
ply coincidence, but also a result of its historical ties with the
Yongjia school of thought —a movement from Yongjia County
in the Wenzhou region, whose roots lie in the Southern Song
Dynasty. The school contested the view of mainstream Confu-
cianism, arguing that traders (as well as scholars and farmers)
were the backbone of the country. So, unlike in other provinces
where under Confucianism land was valorized and peoples’ at-
tachment to it revered, in Wenzhou commercialism had been
celebrated historically. This all changed of course under Mao,
who was specifically against small-scale enterprises, as he felt
that industry at the level of the family unit was particularly
open to ‘spontaneous capitalistic urges. Deng Xiao Ping, how-
ever, under the rhetoric of re-appropriating neo-Confucianism
to encourage small business start-ups, proclaimed the Wenzhou
model as that which China should adopt. So, after a long and
embattled history, the Wenzhou model gained official accept-
ance — as long, that is, as it cleaned up its act and started to con-

6 Li Zhang, Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social
Networks within China’s Floating Population (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001), 52-53.

56

“SHRIMPS NOT WHALES’

form to the ‘look’ deemed appropriate to a modern ‘civilized’
China.

KKK

My reason for drawing upon these two seemingly unrelated
examples is to underline the way in which different Chinese
authorities are drawing upon very different ‘answers’ — one
borrowed from the West, the other entirely home-grown. The
home-grown Wenzhou model can be seen, in some ways, as a
modus operandi similar to (and this is certainly not to suggest
that it is based on) Britain’s pre- or proto-industrial past. The
798 Art District model is adapted directly from our own cur-
rent practices of urban regeneration. What I am arguing here
is that it may be the model from the past, but in its current
Chinese form it has the most to offer us when we think about
how we can improve our own cities in a manner more able to
avoid the usual neoliberal traps. ‘Returning’ to a form of proto-
industrialization, but one adapted to our current socio-political
needs, has the added benefit of breaking the current processes of
neoliberalization in place. It perhaps provides an answer to my
earlier question — it is a path-breaker.

The feature of the Wenzhou model that is key here is its
small-scale nature — the way in which it is based on numerous
small-scale enterprises, rather than the ‘big capitalism’ we now
have in the West. This is a phenomenon that Chinese entrepre-
neur Jack Ma’ once described as being concerned with ‘shrimps
not whales’ It can usefully be compared to what we in the West

7 Jack Ma is a famous business entrepreneur in China. He owns the highly
successful business-to-business website, Taobao, the Chinese equivalent to
eBay, and is the Alan Sugar figure on China’s version of the television show
The Apprentice. In a 2000 interview for Time Asia magazine he explained
the thinking behind Taobao, saying, ‘American B2B sites are whales. But
85% of the fish in the sea are shrimp-sized. I don’t know anyone who makes
money from whales, but ’'ve seen many making money from shrimp. See
Time staff, ‘Jack Ma, Time (February 28, 2000), http://content.time.com/
time/world/article/0,8599,2054856,00.html.

57

PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

call the ‘cottage industry’. Most importantly, the cottage indus-
try is specifically related to workers operating according to their
own preferences, as independent entities who own their means
of production. The era of the cottage industry, sometimes re-
ferred to as ‘proto-industrialization, soon emerged into an era
of industrialization in Britain, whereas in China it has had a far
more continuous trajectory, finding form in all eras apart from
the Maoist one. In addition, ‘small business’ was never the of-
ficial paradigm in Britain, nor was it given the legitimation of a
cultural tradition such as neo-Confucianism was. Therefore, the
means of organizing witnessed in the proto-industrial phase, i.e.
‘cottage industries, have a greater continuity in China and have
found their way into the economic structures of the twenty-first
century. China is in fact a country where a capitalism of many
small parts exists alongside big capitalism (both domestic and
international).

With this in mind, it may indeed be worth considering re-
industrialization as an answer to the crisis we face in Western
cities, but not re-industrialization as we tend to imagine it. This
re-industrialization would need to be one which, from its incep-
tion and at its philosophical core, was of shrimps not whales. In
order to be a progressive socio-political and economical project
that could operate differently, or outside of, the neoliberal city
as we know it, it would need to be committed to its parts re-
maining small-scale and not requiring high profit margins. Of
course, it would also need to limit its reliance upon wider global
economic machinations, which would probably mean imple-
menting a form of mutual finance amongst those involved. In
addition, it would need to go beyond ‘boutique manufacturing,
using the same logic of production for everyday and creative
(perhaps non-tangible) products. Re-claiming/claiming urban
space would be a huge part of this initiative if the existing struc-
tural order were to be overcome. Mutual systems of space would
be required which would enable life/work situations, both in
run-down areas but also eventually in the centers of cities usu-
ally inaccessible as living spaces to all but the super-rich.

58

“SHRIMPS NOT WHALES’

It is the re-ordering of space and structures which makes a
Western urban version of the Wenzhou model attractive. It is,
indeed, a new model, not simply a creative industry being en-
couraged within the parameters of existing neoliberal capital-
ism. It can be seen as a re-invention of a form of production
from our own past, but one that in learning from the Wenzhou
model is able to operate in a way that does not mean we must re-
gress to the kinds of jobs and working situations associated with
earlier forms of manufacturing economy. Crucially, though, it
must be able to exist contemporaneously with big capitalism.
This will require some impressive tactics and a stoic resistance
on the part of those adopting the model if they are to prove
that an alternative model of ‘shrimps not whales’ can affectively
function in twenty-first-century industrialized cities.

59

Chapter 5

‘Der Arbeiter’
(Re-)Industrialization as
Universalism?

Krzysztof Nawratek

In the first chapter of The Urban Revolution, Henri Lefebvre
shows the evolution of the city — from the political city, through
the mercantile and industrial city, to its final form, the true ‘ur-
ban city. For Lefebvre, industry is something that wasn’t born
in the city.

He asks: “Was industry associated with the city?? And an-
swers: ‘One would assume it to be associated with the non-city,
the absence or rupture of urban reality.’ It was the industry that
came to the city, lured by the scent of money, and the sweat and
blood of its inhabitants. However, Lefevbre’s attitude towards
the industrial city is dialectical. The industrial city destroyed the
remnants of the mercantile city and the political city, but it was
a ‘creative destruction, which, in fact, elevated the city to a high-
er level of development, setting the stage for Lefebvre's ‘critical
zone, the predicted moment in history in which urbanity be-
comes a meta-narrative aligning all other stories, and therefore
also includes the politics and economics of the city.

1 Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 2013), 13.

61

PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

Chris Evans? describes life in Merthryr Tydfil in the nine-
teenth century at the beginning of the industrial revolution,
where the first workers’ strike broke out. Merthryr Tydfil was
almost completely devoid of anything that is usually associat-
ed with the city —its only public building was a church, street
lighting was installed only in the second half of the nineteenth
century and the availability of goods and services was very poor
(one store to 400 inhabitants, while the norm for British cities
was about one to 100 and better). This un-urban city, which at
that time was the centre of world industrial production, had no
schools and no recreational areas or buildings.

Does the Merthryr Tydfil example (and other cities of the
Industrial Revolution) provide sufficient evidence to support
Henri Lefevbre’s perspective of the non-urban character of in-
dustry? Let's go back to “The Urban Revolution, where he de-
scribes the mechanism of the transition from the political city
to the mercantile city. Trade and traders were kept out of cities
politics; the city was autonomous, and their success was associ-
ated with being seen as ‘free radicals’ with effective mobility.

The position of trade and traders in the city brings to mind
the distinction made by Carl Schmitt between ‘the orders of the
land’ and of ‘the sea? Schmitt associates ‘the order of the sea
with liberal-democratic capitalism, mainly in the American edi-
tion, which involves both the freedom and the a-territoriality of
trade, but even more so with the contemporary free movement
of speculative capital.

Industry, which colonized and transformed the city, can be
seen then as a free radical; however its existence was strongly
associated with a particular spatial location. In a similar way, he
mercantile city was founded when the trade was ‘grounded’ and
traders became the townspeople/bourgeoisie). Industry and the

2 C. Evans, ‘Merthryr Tyndif in the Eighteenth Century: Urban by Default; in
Industry and Urbanization in Eighteenth-century England, eds. P. Clark and
P. Corfield, 11-18 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1994).

3 S. Legg (ed.), Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geography of the No-
mos (London: Routledge, 2011).

62

‘DER ARBEITER

industrial city are (were) then a spatial entity, belonging to the
land order.

This implies that the industrial city was conservative, but
its conservatism is understood here as a kind of slow develop-
ment, providing predictability and a strengthening of the social
structures, such as family or local community. This is the con-
servatism of Fordism and the welfare state (and thus the con-
servatism of Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, but
not the radical — especially contemporary — neoliberal right).
This is the same conservatism which was first dismantled by
the New Left movements growing from the heritage of the May
68 movement (Henri Lefevbre’s The Urban Revolution is obvi-
ously the result of May ’68 and an important part of its legacy),
and then by the conservative revolution of the 1980s and the
excesses of neoliberalism. But let’s go back to the first half of the
twentieth century, to the time when the industrial city seemed
to be the triumphant revolutionary change. Let’s follow a guide
to this imaginary and never-realized world: Ernst Jiinger’s Der
Arbeiter.*

Der Arbeiter is an extraordinary book— one aspect of its
uniqueness, for example, is the fact that it was never translated
in full into English. Reading Der Arbeiter one may feel slight-
ly confused — on the one hand, this book is considered to be
a prophetic vision of modern society; on the other hand, it is
difficult to forget that it was published a year before the Nazis
came to power and that Jiinger himself was associated with the
intellectual circles of the German ‘conservative revolution’ of the
Weimar Republic.

Despite the fact that it is difficult to directly associate the au-
thor with the Nazi regime, it is also not easy to consider him as a
declared anti-fascist. It is important, though, to considerJtinger’s
relationship with fringes of fascist ideas in the context of the

4 Ernst Jiinger, Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (Hamburg: Hanseatische
Verlagsanstalt, 1941 [1932]). I have been using Polish edition: E. Jiinger, Ro-
botnik: Panowanie i forma bytu (Warsaw: PwN, 2010). All quotations refer
to this edition.

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PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

industrial city, because the specificity of the economic structure
of the Third Reich highlights crucial aspects of the industrial-
city phenomenon. It shows that in fact it doesn’t matter in what
system the industrial city existed, whether it was the capitalist
America or the communist Soviet Union. What distinguishes
the industrial city is a kind of ‘transcendent organicity.

In his classic work, “The structure of Nazi economy, Maxime
Y. Sweezy > shows a fully capitalist economic structure, which
could even be described as neoliberal. The Nazi economy was
focused on the strengthening of the private capital (the ‘Nazi
privatization as a prototype for contemporary neoliberal poli-
cies is described by Germa Bel),° and on the development of
large-scale industry and agriculture at the expense of small fam-
ily farms and businesses.

In the context of Der Arbeiter, Gehrard Schultz’s opinion, ex-
pressed in the book Die nationalsozialistiche Machtergreifung is
crucial: ‘Instead of a number of economic objectives, the state
has adopted one —a total mobilization of the entire nation for
the total war’? “Total mobilization is one of the key concepts
thatJiinger introduced to contemporary socio-political thought.
For the purpose of this text, the key observation concerns the
location of the order-making and sense-giving structure to the
industrial city which is external to the industrial city itself. I ar-
gue that the industrial city does not exist through industry only,
but by giving it meaning beyond production.

5 Marine Sweezy, The Structure of the Nazi Economy (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1941).

6 Germa Bel, ‘Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in 1930s Germany,
The Economic History Review 63, no. 1 (2010): 34-55.

7 Quoted in S. Ratner, ‘An Inquiry into the Nazi War Economy, Review of
Design for Total War: Arms and Economics in The Third Reich, by Bernice A.
Carroll} Comparative Studies in Society and History 12, no. 4 (1970): 466-72.

8 Ernst Jiinger, “Total Mobilisation, in Krieg und Krieger (Berlin: Junker und
Dunnhaupt, 1930). Polish translation in: Wojciech Kunicki, Rewolucja kon-
serwatywna w Niemczech 1918-1933 (Poznan: Wydawnictwo Poznanskie,
1999); English translation available from: http://anarchistwithoutcontent.
wordpress.com/2010/12/05/junger-total-mobilization/.

64

‘DER ARBEITER

It is this ‘transcendent’ sense that constitutes the industrial
city, rather than a mere presence of the industry in the city. This
transcendent order was present in the form of the totalitar-
ian structures of the Third Reich, the communism of war, the
American New Deal and finally in the form of a welfare state as
an attempt to build a truly inclusive and integrated society. The
industrial city — similar to today’s neoliberal city — was a result
of a particular political vision based on certain values and ideas.

Juinger describes modern society as a work society, in which
work is ‘a form of being: There is nothing that is not work, and
there is no one who does not work. Work eliminates all dif-
ferences and hierarchies: ‘All the decisive mobilization orders
do not run from the top down, but emerge as a revolutionary
goal, making it more effective.’ Work eliminates democracy as a
choice and replaces it with democracy as act — ‘Acceptance takes
place through pure participation, and therefore through the
participation in voting, regardless of which party wins”® — and
it challenges the privilege of individual freedom.

Interestingly, Jiinger not only challenges the notion of the in-
dividual but also the mass (as a collection of individuals):

The movements of the masses have lost their irresistible
charm wherever they encounter strong resistance — as in two
or three old soldiers behind a working machine gun [who]
were not concerned with a report that they are being charged
by a whole battalion. Mass today is incapable of charging, it
is incapable even of defence.”

The idea of the worker (Arbeiter) seems totalistic, but it is an
inclusive totality (I would like to make a distinction between
‘totalistic’ and ‘totalitaria’ and I would argue that Der Arbe-
iter does not praise totalitarianism): no one is excluded, because
everyone is a part of the great totalistic machinery: ‘Man is the

9 Jiinger, Robotnik, 241.
10 Ibid., 240.
11 Ibid., 109.

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PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

source of natural wealth, and no state plan will ever be perfect
unless it can draw from this source” (in this context, of course,
the Third Reich, with its master race ideology and concentration
camps, is not a realization of Ernst Jiinger’s vision).

The world presented in Der Arbeiter is not the world of class
or nation (although Jiinger sees the Germans as the vanguard
of the world), it is also not the world of profit and exploitation,
asJtinger writes, ‘Private initiative will be acceptable when it ob-
tains a status of a specialized type of work— in other words|,]
when it is controlled within the broader process.” It is a world
of ‘Pla and ‘Higher Purpose’ It is a world in which everything
makes sense — control does not come ‘from above; for there is
no institutional Big Brother or any controlling authority — but
it is through its very own logic of existence that this world gives
itself meaning: ‘Every movement of his hand, even while clean-
ing the stables from manure, has its rank, if it does not feel as
an abstract work, but fits within [a] greater and sensible order?“

Historians such as Hugh Trevor-Roper and Bernice A. Car-
roll (the author of Design for Total War), conclude with sur-
prise the lack of total control in the Third Reich economy, re-
placed by a totalitarian socio-political formation. And it is this
‘external’ control that appears to have the dominant role. So I
agree with Lefevbre’s observation of ‘externality’ of the agent of
change to the city (whether it was trade or industry), but I disa-
gree with the stipulated imminence of the ‘ultimate form of the
city’ as something desirable. To some extent, the existing model
of neoliberal urbanization is a nightmarish version of Lefevbre's
vision. It’s a nightmare because this vision is closed, and there-
fore dead.

Jiinger’s book begins with a discussion of the bourgeois at-
tempt to suppress the Worker by shaping him in a bourgeois
fashion. Der Arbeiter is a song about the world in which the bour-

12 Ibid., 272.

13 Ibid., 275.

14 Ibid., 281-82.

15 Berenice A. Carroll, Design for Total War: Arms and Economics in the Third
Reich (The Hague: Mouton De Gruyter, 1968).

66

‘DER ARBEITER

geoisie lost and the totality of work conquered all other logics.
Our world is obviously not the world predicted byJiinger — on
the contrary, the Bourgeois defeated the Worker, debased and
destroyed him. In this context, we can finally ask the question:
Is the industrial city a dead idea too? Is re-industrialization just
a fantasy of another time and another world?

The discussion about re-industrialization in Western Europe
and the us began only a few years ago, when the 2008 crisis
made obvious the bankruptcy of the model of urban develop-
ment based on property speculation and liquid capitalism. Re-
Industrialization can be defined in many ways and does not nec-
essarily apply only to cities. That is why I would rather talked
about the industrial city 2.0 — the ‘comeback of the industry to
the cities is not crucial in itself; what’s more important is the
empowerment and embedding of the industry in the socio-eco-
nomic structure of the city.

Using New York as an example, Sarah Crean’ indicates the
emerging networks between different actors involved in indus-
trial production— from representatives of the ‘creative class;
like designers and engineers, through producers and finally
consumers. Also, at the institutional level new networks emerge
linking manufacturers, suppliers, distributors and consumers.

This feature of industrial production — creation of relation-
ships— connects in an interesting way with today’s obsession
with networking and the social network. Creating relationships
and systems of mutual dependency is the most important fea-
ture of contemporary thinking about industry and production
based on ‘industrial ecology’ and ‘circular economy.

Production based on the idea of a ‘circular economy’ is not a
simple process and, besides technological innovations, requires
negotiation skills. In a circular economy, not all ideas can be
applied directly without changes to production technology and
the negotiation of legal obstacles. However, the effort seems to
be profitable, and not only for financial reasons, but precisely

16 Sarah Crean, ‘In the Shadow of Real Estate, Linking Designers and Manu-
facturers, Progressive Planning 190 (Winter 2012): 24-26.

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PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

because of forced innovations — technological, social and legal.
But what is most important here is the anti-individualistic and
inclusive perspective, changing not only the work relationship
but, in fact, its power to reconstruct the whole society.

As I tried to show, the industrial city (as opposed to the city
in which industry is merely present) is a coherent socio-eco-
nomic project, reinforcing (or even constituting) the city as a
subject, understood as a coherent narrative binding residents,
institutions, space, activities and everything material in the city.
However, the industrial city cannot exist ‘by itself’; it must be
established and maintained by the outside socio-political and
cultural frame, which is transcendent to the materiality of the
city. I am not necessarily thinking here in terms of the exterior
in the territorial sense (state or supra-state structure), but more
about a vision that exceeds the city and gives it a non-immanent
purpose.

The industrial city 2.0 is the opposite of the contemporary
city, based on the extremely individualistic philosophy of com-
petition. So it is the city based on overcoming selfishness and
on the construction of a new, inclusive community (inclusive,
however, but not necessarily democratic in the sense that we are
used to today). History has not ended, neoliberalism was only
a temporary aberration, everything is still ahead of us — we just
need to think and act to reach beyond here-and-now. Revolu-
tion is always rooted in transcendence.

68

Chapter 6

Whose Re-Industrialization?
Greening the Pit or Taking Over
the Means of Production?

Malcolm Miles

In After London, published in 1885, naturalist Richard Jeffries
describes the city abandoned to nature after an unexplained
catastrophe. Within a year everywhere has become overgrown:
grasses are overwhelmed by docks and thistles in a pseudo-Dar-
winian scenario of survival of the strongest. Brambles hide the
roads, railway embankments are overgrown by trees. A lake cov-
ers much of central England, and London is submerged under a
swamp forty miles long into which its buildings have collapsed:

There exhales from this oozy mass so fatal a vapour that no
animal can endure it. The black water bears a greenish-brown
floating scum, which for ever bubbles up from the putrid
mud of the bottom. When the wind collects the miasma ...
it becomes visible as a low cloud which hangs over the place.
[...] at such times when the vapour is thickest, the very wild-
fowl leave the reeds, and fly from the poison. [...] It is dead.’

1 Richard Jeffries, After London (1885), cited in J. Carey (ed.), The Faber Book
of Utopias, 276-78 (London: Faber, 1999), 278.

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PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

Fig. 1: Herman Prigann, Heaven’ Ladder, Gelsenkirchen, Germany,
1997-2000.

Blue flames shoot periodically from the depths of the mire. Peo-
ple say devils live there. The bodies of the dead have dissolved
into black mud but their skeletal hands still clutch coins. Jeffries
was brought up in rural Wiltshire but moved to Surbiton to earn
a living. He became ill, blamed it on putrid black water and a
lack of proper drains, and wrote After London as his revenge on

7O

WHOSE RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION?

the city.? But the swamp, and the skeletal hands clutching coins,
might equally suggest an image of industrial capitalism, the ef-
fects of which are described by Friedrich Engels after visiting
Manchester in 1844:

Everything which here arouses horror and indignation is of
recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch ... [which] has
built up every spot ... to win a covering for the masses whom
it has conjured hither from the agricultural districts and
from Ireland; the industrial epoch alone enables the owners
of these cattle-sheds to rent them for high prices to human
beings, to plunder the poverty of the workers, to undermine
the health of thousands, to order that they alone, the owners,
may grow rich.

The movement to the towns began with the agricultural revolu-
tion in the eighteenth century (which was also the beginning of
organized labor). As machines replaced workers on farms, so
families were driven from their homes and from the land, first
to seek work at annual hiring fairs or, if unsuccessful, to wander
the roads destitute and malnourished, and later to the towns for
other forms of deprivation for low and often seasonal wages in
the vile living conditions described by Engels.

The scenario was well known among the educated middle
class. Scenes of a lost rural life in the novels of Thomas Hardy,
and Alfred Tennyson's vision of a lost chivalric era, are both, in
their different (realist and romanticized) ways, displacements.
This oblique criticality appealed to the educated, reformist mid-
dle class but has become ingrained in English culture to the ex-
tent, today, that an idyllic countryside is constructed as a foil
to a malodorous and corrupting city. Hence smoke-blackened
terraces and smoking chimneys are the epitome of how indus-

2 Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (London: Vintage, 2002).

3 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1892), cited in James Donald (ed.), Imagining
the Modern City (London: Athlone, 1999), 36.

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PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

trial towns are represented for a mass public, from the novels
of Charles Dickens to nineteenth-century prints and the mid-
twentieth-century paintings of L.S. Lowry. Since all that oc-
curred, industry itself has been encapsulated in the past as ma-
terial production has shifted to the global South to be replaced
in the North by the immaterial production of culture, media,
public relations and financial services.

This move has left new swathes of built and social derelic-
tion. And just as a regression to an imagined rustic life was the
displacing reaction of middle-class readers in the late nine-
teenth century, in the late twentieth century culture has again
been central to the displacement of the concept of making
(manufacturing) and to the histories of organized labor which
occurred in locations such as London’s Docklands. Below the
shiny towers of late capitalism in Docklands, the only visible re-
minder of a past of labor is a bronze likeness of three dockers;
but this, far from celebrating the labor militancy for which the
docks were known, depicts a foreman in a top hat standing over
two workers in cloth caps grappling with a load —a social hier-
archy maintained. But this time, from the 1980s to the financial
services crisis of 2008, culture did not magic a past image but
became the future: cool Britannia as the erasure of work and
its organization, designer-beer in place of solidarity, and — cru-
cially —a depoliticized culture in place of political contestation..

The standard response to urban deindustrialization, then, is
to re-use redundant industrial sites for flagship cultural institu-
tions aimed at attracting tourism and investment (sometimes
called the Bilbao effect). In place of soot and disease, the clean
post-industrial capitalism of the cultural turn re-appropriates
culture’s claim in classical thought to universal value, to replace
urban blight —a term misleadingly likening a range of linked
policy failures to a crop disease — with the new consumer de-
lights of Tate Modern, various Guggenheims, and so forth.
Every city seems to seek a place on the globalized culture map
by building or converting a new museum of contemporary art.

Meanwhile, urban villages — another nostalgic term adopted
now by developers for inner-city gated enclaves — house a cul-

72

WHOSE RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION?

tural class whose lifestyle-consumption feeds malls and art gal-
lery shops in support of the wider project of gentrification. Art,
subsumed in entertainment, is an aspirational commodity, and
Tate a market leader. Esther Leslie writes,

Tate is a brand that niche-markets art experience. Its galleries
are showrooms. However, this is still art and not just busi-
ness. The commodity must not show too glossy a face. The
reclamation of an industrial space that provides the shell for
Tate Modern lends the building a fashionably squatted aspect
[...]. At Tate Modern a former industrial site becomes home
to the new-style ‘accessibility rules’ culture industry.

Faced with the excesses of capitalism, George Monbiot advo-
cates a selective return to a pre-industrial economy: re-wilding,
introducing wild species such as the lynx in forest areas of Brit-
ain, thereby reproducing the nineteenth-century search for a
lost rural idyll (which never existed) in a new, post-industrial
form. This is not to argue against such re-wilding, which Mon-
biot sees as applicable only in some places; more to point out
that it is a response which distances the proposed solution to
urban ills —an over-productive society with excesses of waste
as well as wealth divides, and so forth — to the few more or less
pre-industrial sites which remain. In fact, in any case, most of
those forest and moorland sites are as carefully managed and
protected, as reserves, as urban parks are cultivated for leisure.
It seems, then, that the industrialized city has become an icon
of all that is negative, to be replaced, or mediated by far-away
images of, a new kind of wildness. But was industry bad? Indus-
try’s benefits were mismanaged and unevenly distributed; still,
it produced work and many things which improved our lives.
Factories polluted the atmosphere but were where a class seek-
ing to overcome the abuses of capitalism became organized. As
the workers of an iron-rolling shop said in Russia in 1917:

4 Esther Leslie, “Tate Modern: A Year of Sweet Success, Radical Philosophy
109 (2001): 2-5, at 3.

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PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

Fig. 2: Duisburg Nord Landscape Park, Germany.

If Messrs Capitalists will not pay attention to our demands,
then we ... demand complete control of all branches of in-
dustry by the toiling people. Of you capitalists ... we demand
that you stop crying about devastation that you yourselves
have created. Your cards are on the table. Your game is up.°

Something similar might be said now to bankers, commodity
speculators and the political elite who have turned the nation-
state into an out-sourced provider of governmental services for
trans-national capital. What is to be done? Among responses to
deindustrialization, apart from cultural colonization, are:

- rehabilitation of ex-industrial sites for community purposes;

+ anti-capitalist protest and the evolution of second-hand or
non-money economies;

- grass-roots, localized, pry re-industrialization.

5 Quoted in Stephen A. Smith, The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Intro-
duction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 29.

74

WHOSE RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION?

In the remainder of this chapter I look briefly at each of these
(which are not exclusive options).

Rehabilitation

The Duisburg Nord Landscape Park rehabilitates redundant in-
dustrial structures for leisure purposes for the benefit of local
communities: abseiling on the exterior and diving in the inte-
rior of towers in an old iron works, dog-walking, rambling, sim-
ply passing time (since the end of industry produces a time-rich
class). Landscaping lends these structures the appearance of
the picturesque, but there are also environmental benefits. The
nearby Emscher Park, for instance, involved decontaminating
the river Emscher and the surrounding land, with new plant-
ing and areas left to natural (succession) growth. At Essen, the
Zolverein combined mine, coke plant and power station — once
the most modern facility in Germany, designed by a Bauhaus
architect and opened by Adolf Hitler— houses a design mu-
seum, a museum of regional history, changing art exhibitions,
a café, and a restaurant in the old turbine hall. This is closer to
a cultural project, not least because most of the attractions are
indoors, but retains a strong regional emphasis. Again there are
large areas of succession growth and the return of bird and in-
sect species. Zolverein does not seem to have caused gentrifica-
tion, perhaps because the site is on the city’s outskirts. But nor
have these projects rehabilitated the Ruhr’s economy.*

Taking a different approach, the German artist Herman
Prigann worked in several brownfield sites in the Ruhr and
ex-German Democratic Republic (East Germany in colloquial
terms), again turning residual industrial sites into post-Roman-
tic ruins but emphasizing the role of succession growth. To take
another but subtly different example, at an open-cast brown coal
mine near Cotbus, Prigann employed unemployed workers to

6 Karl Barndt, ‘Memory Traces of an Abandoned Set of Futures: Industrial
Ruins and the Post-Industrial Landscapes of Germany, in Ruins of Moder-
nity, eds. Julia Hell et al., 270-93 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

75

PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

build Die Gelbe Rampe (1993-94). On the edge of the vast exca-
vation, which is being allowed to flood, Prigann constructed a
sloping earthwork topped by a set of concrete slabs as a monu-
ment to industry. And by this he meant a monument to cele-
brate industry and remember it after its passing, not to regret it.
The slope is planted with broom which will, in time, spread to
cover the ramp. Prigann wrote,

Nature is neither a thing nor an accumulation of things. It is

neither external nor internal, it does not surround us, it is not

at our disposition, it cannot be destroyed nor can it be loved.’

He saw natural growth as a collaborating agent (an actor in
Latour’s terms) and intended that it would overtake his work
while, at the same time, his interventions would never be en-
tirely obliterated, some trace remaining in drainage patterns or
visible in aerial photographs. Prigann was emphatic that indus-
try was not bad, and should not be dismissed; hence his use of
discarded industrial material. Although his work is Romantic
in a way (and he often cited German Romanticism in conversa-
tions), it refuses to be judgmental. I find this hopeful and impor-
tant. Perhaps a similar attitude could be applied more widely, for
instance to international modernism as an intellectual salvage
project rather than as a mistake which produced little beyond
failed social housing and ring roads, and should be written off.

Protest

As the welfare state is systematically dismantled and radical arts
groups lose their funding, creative energy turns to refusal in a
growth of artists’ collectives and practices which subvert the art
world from within. For instance, Liberate Tate, a London-based
group linked to the arts, environment and human rights organi-
zation Platform, undertakes projects which could be described

7 Hermann Prigann, ‘Prologue — Thoughts about Nature} in Ecological Aes-
thetics: Art in Environmental Design, Theory and Practice, eds. Heike Stre-
low, Hermann Prigann, and Vera David (Basel: Birkhauser, 2004), 74.

76

WHOSE RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION?

as re-industrializing Tate. To remind Tate’s audiences of the
link between oil—an industry characterized by human rights
abuses and environmental degradation — and the arts through
sponsorship, Liberate Tate organizes free events at Tate’s Lon-
don branches. In 2010 — the year of the Deepwater Horizon spill
in the Gulf of Mexico —at a party celebrating 20 years of BP’s
sponsorship, Toni and Bobbi, posing as guests, allowed an oil-
like substance (molasses) to spill from under their expensive,
flower-patterned skirts and leather handbags. In April 2011, also
at Tate Britain, in The Human Cost, a figure rolled on the floor
of Tate Britain covered again in molasses (perhaps reminiscent
of the direct materiality fused with a conceptual critique which
follows from the work of Joseph Beuys). More recently, Liber-
ate Tate carried a wind turbine blade into the Turbine Hall at
Tate Modern to request that it become part of Tate’s collection.
The offer was refused despite support from many Tate members.
Liberate Tate describes its work as ‘deliberately abject and some-
times foul ... the shadow of an industry the reality of which arts
organizations do not want to see on their doorstep.*

bly re-industrialization

At Skinningrove, County Durham (a village written off in the
County Plan in the 1960s), men have built pigeon lofts in what
resembles an informal settlement on the hillside. They cannot
now afford to keep pigeons — big money moved into the bet-
ting — but use the huts as extra living spaces and for black-
economy production such as fish smoking. Skinningrove needs
no art —an art project there failed to engage the community in
the 1990s — because it already has a distinct culture. This sug-
gests that local, tacit knowledge and skills can be used in a grass-
roots re-industrialization outside the regeneration industry and
its ties to either regional bureaucracies or global capital. Such
cases are always local and small-scale, hence easy to dismiss as

8 Jo Clarke et al. (eds.), Not If But When: Culture Beyond Oil (London: Art
Not Oil, Liberate Tate and Platform, 2011), 8.

77

PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

i“ ae Ay, Y) i) (a ee

Fig. 3: Pigeon lofts, Skinningrove, County Durham, UK.

irrelevant in the big picture, but they are diverse and numerous
as well. At some point, when disillusionment with and anger at
top-down improvement schemes reach a peak, grass-roots re-
industrialization may produce a renewal of small, local and re-
sponsible industries meeting locally identified needs. This may
fit in a wider scenario, too: asked about links between Occupy
and workers’ campaigns, Noam Chomsky said — unexpectedly

78

WHOSE RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION?

perhaps— that he saw Occupy as an episode in a class war: a
concentration of wealth had led to a concentration of political
power and a vicious cycle of anger and frustration.” While An-
dre Gorz argued in the 1980s that the working class had been
co-opted to consumerism,’° Chomsky refers to worker-owned
enterprises in de-industrialized zones as another kind of revolu-
tion, or taking over the residue of late capitalism by (literally)
taking over the management and sites of production. This re-
minds me that French workers took over and occupied factories
in May 1968, following a precedent from the anti-fascist cam-
paigns of the 1930s, not simply to demand better conditions but
to demonstrate in practical ways that they could run the factory
and organize their own welfare services. In effect, this was an
ephemeral taking over of the means of producing society.
Another possibility, also growing, is self-build housing. At
Ashley Vale, Bristol, a disused scaffolding yard was used as a
self-build site, in an area already an enclave of alternative living
with allotments and an urban farm. When the yard closed in
2001 and a developer proposed housing on the site, the land was
acquired instead by a local group. Mortgages were arranged for
first-time buyers, and plots were sold either for complete self-
build or as shells for self-completion. An office block was con-
verted for communal and residential spaces. There are thirty-
one houses in various styles using a timber-frame and cladding
system like that developed by Walter Segal in the 1970s, and
the refurbished office block won the South West Green Energy
Award for housing in 2000. A ‘Vote Green’ sign at the allotment
entrance suggests that green living translates into political in-
tention here. Nearby in Stokes Croft, a supermarket was trashed
in 2011 after local opposition to its opening. Nearby, a Free Shop
denotes a non-money economy. This form of re-industrializa-
tion keeps resources in the local economy and creates a state

9 Noam Chomsky, Occupy (London: Penguin, 2012).
10 André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial So-
cialism (London: Pluto, 1982).

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PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

within the state in which the values of mutual aid and solidarity
are reclaimed amid neoliberal anomie.

Conclusion
Geographer Erik Swyngedouw identifies an insurgent polis:

Rethinking [...] the ‘Right to the City’ as the ‘Right to the
production of urbanisation. Henri Lefebvre’s clarion call [...]
urges us to think of the city as a process of collective codesign
and coproduction.”

Lefebvre'’s theory of moments of liberation comes to mind — the
idea that sudden, unannounced moments of clarity occur for
anyone amid the dulling routines of capitalism — but Lefebvre
wrote during the industrial period, when workers’ solidarity
was a real presence. Today, new kinds of solidarity are needed,
and — as the state is as abandoned to capital's excesses as Jeffries’
London was abandoned to a swamp—a re-possession of the
political and intellectual spaces of the state is necessary, as the
protector of the commonwealth (a wealth produced commonly,
for common use to meet common needs, rather than the wants
manufactured by consumerism): a state of codesign and copro-
duction applied and adapted on a national scale. This may seem
far-fetched, or as Romantic as, say, Tennyson's Arthurian Brit-
ain; yet major changes in social values have occurred in modern
history. Among them were the abolition of slavery throughout
the British Empire in the 1830s, and women’s suffrage in Britain
in the 1920s. Things do change, all the time. The problem is how
to inflect history in the direction of a better world.

u_E. Swyngedouw, Designing the Post-Political City and the Insurgent Polis
(London: Bedford Press, 2011), 53.

80

Chapter 7

Crowdsourced Urbanism?
The Maker Revolution and the
Creative City 2.0

Doreen Jakob

Cutting the ribbon at the opening of the new Shapeway factory,
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg proclaims that the
3-D printing company will form ‘a critical bridge between the
tech and manufacturing centers [... and] help us bring the city’s
industrial sector directly into the twenty-first century.’ He an-
nounces: ‘this is the future of our city. According to Anderson,
today’s maker movement is the newest, third industrial revolu-
tion. Rifkin argues that ‘like every other economic revolution
that preceded it, The Third Industrial [Revolution] will recast
many of our assumptions about how the world works:* Thus
what future and what city does the maker movement create?
This book questions whether urban re-industrialization can be

1 Kelly Faircloth, ‘At a Ribbon-Cutting for Shapeways’ “Factory of the Fu-
ture”, The Observer, October 18, 2012, http://observer.com/2012/10/shape-
ways-grand-opening-factory-long-island-city-michael-bloomberg-may-
or-3d-printing/.

2 Ibid.

3. Chris Anderson, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution (New York: Crown
Business, 2012).

4 Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Trans-
forming Energy, the Economy, and the World (New York: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2011), 189.

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PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

imagined as a progressive socio-political and economical pro-
ject leading to an inclusive and democratic society based on
cooperation and symbiosis. Many of the conference's presenta-
tions offered examples of how to envision urban re-industrial-
ization. In this short chapter, however, I argue that urban re-
industrialization as part of a third industrial revolution is not a
distant futuristic concept but a reality in the making. Driven by
the maker movement, green energy, crowdsourcing and crowd-
funding, the third industrial revolution comes along dressed in
the flowing robes of collaboration, participation, democratized
manufacturing and ‘distributed capitalism’ It iterates the prom-
ises of the ‘Creative City.® Yet unlike its predecessor, it show-
cases tangible, three-dimensional products instead of intangible
soft location factors, crowd financing instead of public-private-
partnerships.” The Creative City 2.0 features applicability and
dispersion. However, its practical and distributive appeal simul-
taneously allows for additional and more effective ways to hide
its entrepreneurial and non-democratic nature. The Creative
City characterizes a form and process of urbanization in which
creativity stands at the forefront.’ However, more commonly it
is seen as a set of policy and planning mechanisms that, once
applied, result in a Creative City. According to Landry, the Crea-
tive City ‘describes a new method of strategic urban planning
and examines how people can think, plan and act creatively in
the city. It explores how we can make our cities more livable and
vital by harnessing people’s imagination and talent’ ? Landry and
Bianchini’® advocate for a more holistic understanding of crea-

5 Jeremy Rifkin, “The Third Industrial Revolution: How the Internet, Green
Electricity, and 3-D Printing are Ushering in a Sustainable Era of Distrib-
uted Capitalism, World Financial Review, 1 (2012): 4052-57.

6 Charles Landry, The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators (London:
Comedia, 2008).

7 Doreen Jakob, ‘Constructing the Creative Neighborhood: Hopes and Limi-
tations of Creative City Policies in Berlin, City, Culture and Society 1 (2010):
193-98.

8 Ibid.

9 Landry, The Creative City, xii.

10 C. Landry and F. Bianchini, The Creative City (London: Demos, 1995).

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CROWDSOURCED URBANISM?

tivity that also includes social and political reform in addition to
artistic and technological innovation. In many ways, their ideas
answer positively to the conference organizers’ question of im-
agining urban re-industrialization ‘beyond the current model
of a neoliberal city: In practice, however, the real ‘creativity’ of
the Creative City model tends to be its ability to reframe and
repackage an entrepreneurial model of urban governance and
development geared towards attracting highly mobile capital
and professional elites with environments to live and work in, as
well as to consume and invest in, that are lively yet safe, diverse
yet controlled, artistic yet profit-driven. While much of the past
Creative City and Creative Class" debates centered on individ-
ualized lifestyles, now comes a second generation of Creative
City-making policies that focuses on shared production: the
Creative City 2.0. Formerly lacking democratic participation,
the Creative City 2.0 features ‘democracy’ and ‘participation in
the form of crowdsourced and crowdfunded urbanism. Often
called ‘Kickstarter urbanism,” in reference to one of the most
prominent crowdfunding companies, Kickstarter, crowdfund-
ing provides an effective appearance of collaborative decision-
making. Overall, there are more than 450 crowdfunding plat-
forms worldwide that supported over 100,000 projects in 2012.
Kickstarter was founded in 2009 in New York City and soon be-
came the ‘world’s largest funding platform for creative projects’
with more than 4.4 million people having funded over 44,000
creative projects with more than us$685 million. The company
provides an online fundraising platform that simultaneously
functions as a marketing as well as opinion-polling tool. It is
often praised by members of the maker community as a ‘game

ul Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming
Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Perseus Book
Group, 2002).

12 A. Lange, ‘Against Kickstarter Urbanism, The Design Observer Group, May
2, 2012, http://designobserver. com/feature/against-kickstarter-urban-
ism/34008/.

13 Brian Boyer and Dan Hill, Brickstarter (Helsinki: Sitra, 2013), http://www.
brickstarter.org/Brickstarter.pdf.

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PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

changer’ * for the development of prototypes and first manu-
facturing runs of design products. Yet, the Kickstarter versus
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)» debate illustrates'® the
company’s success is not without perils and criticism. As I have
pointed out elsewhere, arts and cultural funding in the United
States is much more diverse and dispersed, and characterized
by much lesser relative government support compared to many
European countries.” Hence, the possibility of Kickstarter fund-
ing being equal to or surpassing the NEA not only shows the
strength of the former but also the weakness of the latter. The
main issue, however, is not numbers but the idea that companies
like Kickstarter represent a ‘people’s N.E.A™*

Crowdfunding as currently practiced is not democratic. It
creates an illusion of democracy. Kickstarter staff review all
submitted projects favoring ‘creators who think through the re-
wards for backers, get the word out and engage an audience.
In other words, the process doesnt shape the aesthetic. It is the
aesthetic’. Curatorial emphasis is not on the final product but
on how well its creators will market and sell their fundraising
campaign.

14 Anderson, Makers.

15 The NEA is the us government's federal arts and cultural funding body.

16 E.g., Ian Moss, “Art and Democracy: The NEA, Kickstarter, and Creativity
in America,’ Createquity, April 9, 2012, http://createquity.com/2012/04/art-
and-democracy-the-nea-kickstarter-and-creativity-in-america.html. See
also Carl Franzen, ‘NEA Weighs In On Kickstarter Funding Debate, Talking
Points Memo, February 27, 2012, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/idealab/
nea-weighs-in-on-kickstarter-funding-debate.

17 Doreen Jakob, Beyond Creative Production Networks: The Development of
Intra-Metropolitan Creative Industries Clusters in Berlin and New York City
(Berlin: Rhombos, 2009); D. Jakob, ““To Have and to Need”: Reorganizing
Cultural Policy as Panacea for Berlin’s Urban and Economic Woes, in The
Politics of Urban Cultural Policy: Global Perspectives, eds. C. Grodach and D.
Silvereds, 110-21 (New York: Routledge, 2013).

18 Rob Walker, ‘The Trivialities and Transcendence of Kickstarter, The New
York Times Magazine, August 5, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/
magazine/the-trivialities-and-transcendence-of-kickstarter.html.

19 Ibid.

84

CROWDSOURCED URBANISM?

This is most problematic for urban and neighborhood devel-
opment projects. As Lange writes, with Kickstarter urban devel-
opment loses out to industrial design:

You wouldn't Kickstart a replacement bus line for Brooklyn,
but you might Kickstart an app to tell you when the bus on
another, less convenient line might come. You can’t Kickstart
affordable housing, but the really cool tent for the discussion
thereof. [...] [WJorthy goals have to be dressed up in com-
plex geometries for Kickstarter. [...] [However, t]he park is
going to require a lot more doing than $5 and ‘Great idea!’*°

Many urban development projects are not only more expensive
than the production of a music album or a new video game; they
also require a much larger timeframe from the initial idea to
completion. They are place-specific and fixed, and hence much
more dependent on local support and less able to generate the
broad, worldwide support needed for large capital projects.
Moreover, successfully securing funding does not automatically
mean that projects will pass local zoning regulations and per-
mits. Once a project is approved and on-site development starts,
‘what happens when the project runs over budget, as many capi-
tal projects do? Are donors obligated to chip in for overages?’
Once it is completed, ‘who is responsible for it? Who bears re-
sponsibility in 60 years? Whereas consumer products can be re-
cycled or discarded, it’s not as simple to do the same with pieces
of the city.”

Companies like Kickstarter do not own the final products
that are fundraised for on their websites, nor do the funders.
Kickstarter collects a 5% fee on successfully funded projects.
Supporters receive numerous gifts depending on how much
money they pledge. Now Fundrise, a new urban development

20 Lange, ‘Against Kickstarter Urbanism.

21 Brian Boyer, ‘Pools are Expensive (Thoughts about the Long Tail and
Crowdfunding), Brickstarter, March 26, 2012, http://brickstarter.org/pools-
are-expensive-thoughts-about-the-long-tail-and-crowdfunding/.

22 Boyer and Hill, Brickstarter, 27.

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PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

company, is setting an example to change that system so that
the funding crowds can become real estate investors and collect
returns. Aiming to reform urban financing, Fundrise’s founders
believe they have found a way that is ‘really potentially a radical
transformation of urban planning, of development, of invest-
ment, of local government.* The company utilizes Regulation
A of the US Securities and Exchange Commission that permits
small offerings to unaccredited investors, as well as the April
2012 Jumpstart Our Business Startups (Joss) Act that eases vari-
ous securities regulations. Fundrise has received much attention
within the past few months, including a presentation in front of
the us House subcommittee on finance innovation in June 2013,
and is hailed by supporters as a way to democratize finance and
‘remak[e] the very places where we live.*4

Yet the praise for democratization is treacherous. Surely,
companies like Kickstarter and Fundrise enable project financ-
ing that moves beyond the wealthy patron and foreign real estate
investor, respectively. They provide opportunities for more peo-
ple to finance interesting projects. But more is not everybody,
equally, democratically. Kickstarter’s focus on selling ideas and
designing enticing marketing campaigns makes humble yet
realizable neighborhood development projects bid—and often
lose—against pretentious yet less attainable ideas.* Fundrise’s
projects are not about investing in basic services in disadvan-

23 B. Miller, quoted in E. Badger, “The Real Estate Deal That Could Change the
Future of Everything’ CityLab, November 19, 2012, http://www.citylab.com/
work/2012/11/real-estate-deal-could-change-future-everything/3897/.

24 Ibid.

25 For instance, Lange provides examples of two urban development projects
in the very same neighborhood: the LowLine, a 1.5 acre abandoned trolley
terminal to be turned into an underground park, and the effort to fund
a new Ping-Pong table for an existing (aboveground) neighborhood park.
The first raised Us$155,000, while the latter failed to secure the US$4,200
needed. Yet, the Ping-Pong table could have been set up and useable in
relatively short time; the LowLine Kickstarter financed none but a test of
the skylights that would filter the daylight underground. “The consumable
dream was years and bureaucracies away’: Lange, ‘Against Kickstarter Ur-
banism.

86

CROWDSOURCED URBANISM?

taged neighborhoods, and the renderings and promotion videos
of their H Street, Washington, Dc projects feature white, young
professionals and advertise the street’s ‘thriving social scene.”
Overall, the current most prominent crowdfunding models op-
erate on a form of participation that is nothing more than dif-
fused monetary investments.

The third industrial revolution is, according to Rifkin, char-
acterized by democratized manufacturing and distributed capi-
talism.”” It is a revolution driven by urbanized making.** Yet,
urban re-industrialization, unlike its predecessor, cannot have
a foundation of heavy machinery and gigantic factories em-
ploying hundreds of workers making thousands of products.
Instead, technologies like 3p printing could theoretically enable
everybody to host their very own ‘factory’ on their bedside table
and produce ‘one of a kind’ creations. Beyond the individual,
the maker revolution could feature crowdsourcing and crowd-
funding. Yet, this type of play with ‘distributed capitalism” nev-
er questions the principles of capitalism. Crowdfunded urban
development projects feature a further spectacularization®® and
monetization of neighborhood development. Contemporary
urban re-industrialization in this form is neither a progressive
socio-political and economical project, nor does it lead to an in-
clusive and democratic society based on cooperation and sym-
biosis. The Creative City 2.0 as envisaged in this construct is a
profit-generating machine dressed up in the noble concepts of
democracy and participation.

26 See https://fundrise.com/investments.

27 Rifkin, ‘The Third Industrial Revolution.

28 Anderson, Makers.

29 Rifkin, ‘The Third Industrial Revolution.

30 Doreen Jakob, “The Eventification of Place: Urban Development and Ex-
perience Consumption in Berlin and New York City, European Urban and
Regional Studies 20, no. 4 (2013): 447-59.

87

Chapter 8

Brave New World?!

Tatjana Schneider

This chapter takes its title from Aldous Huxley’s famous novel
of the same name. Set in the very distant future of the year 2540,
the novel outlines a world in which every being’s rank in society
is predetermined at embryo-stage. Once in the world, ranks and
happiness within one’s rank are then managed by a drug with
the name of soma. Highly influential on many levels, the novel
raises interesting philosophical questions around concepts such
as manipulation, design, free will, and liberty and (pre-)deter-
mination amongst others. Given, for example, that the individu-
als in Huxley’s novel have been engineered before birth, are they
truly responsible for their actions or are they merely the tools of
their designers at the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre? And
does the manufacturing process create individuals who are, as
the American philosopher Gary Watson declares, ‘incapable of
effectively envisaging or seeing the significance of certain al-
ternatives, of reflecting on [themselves] and on the origins of
[their] motivations’?

By referring to Huxley’s novel and some of the philosophical
questions around freedom to act or lack thereof, this chapter
explores two interrelated topics. On the one hand, I argue that
despite current society not being engineered in the same way

1 G. Watson, quoted in Kadri Vihvelin, ‘Arguments for Incompatibilism,
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition), ed. Edward N.
Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-arguments/.

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PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

as Huxley’s society, when it comes to the production of space
it seems we are unable to see beyond the current systems and
practices, in particular capitalism. Actions executed with the
best and most radical of intentions are often used and coun-
ter-appropriated to reinforce the current state of affairs. This is
where the exclamation mark after the title comes from. On the
other hand, I also believe that brave and therefore bold actions
are necessary to envisage and also produce alternate futures.
The question mark in the title points, therefore, both to the per-
ceived and real probabilities of a non-capitalist production of
space and its consequences.

The discussion in this chapter loosely follows the broad ques-
tions that were posed by the ‘Re-industrialisation and Progres-
sive Urbanism conference (held at Plymouth University in June
2013) that was the force behind this book. It covers the possibili-
ties of re-industrialization and much more, but before continu-
ing any further I would like to clarify those key questions. In
the call for papers, Dr. Krzysztof Nawratek, invited responses to
questions about the possibility of imagining re-industrialization
as a ‘progressive socio-political and economical project, aiming
to create an inclusive and democratic society based on coopera-
tion and symbiosis that goes way beyond the current model of
a neoliberal city.

My immediate response, from my hopeful half, gave a re-
sounding ‘Yes!’ Yes, of course, re-industrialization could be
imagined as a progressive project — and, even better, there re-
ally is no need for imagining this. Abundant examples of this
exist already — not necessarily related to the issue of re-indus-
trialization, but certainly within the wider spectrum of spatial
productions. There are, my hopeful half insists, plenty of small
and large projects that contribute to the democratic and social
production of space and do indeed challenge increasingly com-
modified and unjust developments.

2 Krzysztof Nawratek, ‘Re-industrialisation and Progressive Urbanism’ con-
ference, School of Architecture, Design and Environment, Plymouth Uni-
versity, June 13, 2013. The call for papers was issued on February 25, 2013.

90

BRAVE NEW WORLD?!

But then, of course, there is also my pessimistic and doubtful
half, which quickly interjects with: “Well, 'm not so sure about
your optimism — it actually does look rather grim at the mo-
ment. We only need to look at the destruction of the welfare
state in the UK and many other European countries, for exam-
ple, which happens within the general promise and premise of
progress, greater participation and inclusion on a local level.
Worst of all, much of this discourse and debate around this
supposedly progressive notion of planning happens under the
auspices of, and using the vocabulary of, the Left— and, even
worse, without too much resistance from the Left, really. At the
same time there is also, and I'm guilty of this too, a retreat into
what you could call ‘the small-scale stuff. A retreat, you could
say, into these little niches that make us believe that the world
can be a better place.

As a citizen I am keen to believe, but maybe I am only led
or even conditioned to believe, that the world would indeed be
a better place if only more of us would do the little things that
matter. Things such as shop locally, recycle, engage in the lo-
cal transition town movement, grow our own vegetables, join
the Green Party and Ecotricity, move my current account to the
Co-operative Bank and my savings account to Triodos, and also,
of course, join the local cohousing group. And so the list goes.

By switching accounts and changing my shopping habits, I
tell myself, 'm not only acting on a hunch. There is real evi-
dence to justify these actions. I only need to look again at Na-
beel Hamdi’s book Small Change in which he argues that ‘intel-
ligent practice builds on the collective wisdom of people and
organizations on the ground — those who think locally and act
locally — which is then rationalized in ways that make a differ-
ence globally.’ Hamdi goes on: ‘Good development practice fa-
cilitates emergence; it builds on what we've got and with it goes
to scale’* And more: ‘in order to do something big—to think

3 Nabeel Hamdi, Small Change: About the Art of Practice and the Limits of
Planning in Cities (London: Earthscan, 2004), xviii.
4 Ibid.

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PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

globally and act globally — one starts with something small, and
one starts where it counts.’

‘Phew!’ my hopeful half goes again. Thinking and acting
locally is precisely what I do. If Hamdi emphasizes the impor-
tance, indeed the necessity, of the local — of each and every one
of us doing what he or she can — not all can be lost.

But then, of course, my doubtful half is quick to point out that
Hamidi is not only talking about the local on its own, by itself. In
fact, he explicitly addresses the elephant in the room — namely
the necessity of scaling up, or more concretely, the interdepend-
ence of the small and the large. Further, he talks about scaling
up not just for the sake of scaling up, but scaling up as a means
to induce wider, arguably social, changes.

Let’s pick this up: social change. Social change is something
that is being talked and written about a lot. ‘Small change’
(which is here used as equivalent to ‘local change’), it is often
argued, leads to social change. Consequently, lots of instances of
small change put together will eventually, but inevitably, change
the way we produce, consume, exchange and also distribute. In
effect, this powerful force of combined small changes will force
the induction of much bigger and systemic change.

The political economist Greg Sharzer is probably one of
the most fervent opponents of this way of thinking. He writes:
‘The localist form of citizenship may empower us, but it can-
not confront capitalism. Against a global network of power
must emerge globalised forms of struggle.® Sharzer doesn't have
any sympathies for localism and localists. In his book No Local:
Why Small-Scale Alternatives Won't Change the World, Sharzer
argues that localists would not choose to be localists if they had,
I quote, ‘a greater understanding of how capitalism works’’

So, how does capitalism work?

5 Ibid., xiv.

6 Greg Sharzer, ‘Local Resistance to Global Austerity: It Will Never Work,
openDemocracy, January 3, 2013, http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourking-
dom/greg-sharzer/local-resistance-to-global-austerity-it-will-never-work.

7 Greg Sharzer, No Local: Why Small-Scale Alternatives Won't Change The
World (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012), 2.

92

BRAVE NEW WORLD?!

Very simply put, capitalism is about the exploitation of wage
labour and the reduction of social relations to commodity ex-
change or a series of commodity exchanges. Capitalist principles
permeate our socio-economic system —on the large and the
small scale. But, if we accept that the basic premise of capitalism
is exploitation, it follows that it can never be fair. And neither
can it be inclusive. Capitalism is effectively undemocratic. As
such, it seems quite unsuited — as a socio-economic model — to
drive any form of development.

Obviously, it is easy to dismiss this critique of capitalism. I
almost understand this possible dismissal. After all, what I am
calling for—or at least what my hopeful half is wishing, but
also calling for—is an overthrow of capitalism. And that, it is
easily argued, is absolutely unrealistic; it is simply not going to
happen. My hopeful half disagrees with this, but I also recog-
nize that a focus on individualized responses to and reactions
against capitalism cannot provide a viable alternative to it. What
is needed is a global, yet localized perspective and response to
this problem. A response that is not set within the capitalistic
framework because —as I said before — it is inherently unjust.
What is needed instead is a new framework that doesnt exploit
but allows or affords equitable development. But, what might
this look like?

In recent years — and in particular since the beginning of the
most recent economic crisis — architecture and design profes-
sionals have become quite vocal about the capability of design to
make a difference to the world. Many publications, exhibitions
and events are investigating the social potential of architecture
or architecture's social production. For many, the mere usage of
the term ‘social’ in relation to architecture or spatial production
seems to conjure up a panacea for a profession whose practice,
as the lawyer and urban planner Peter Marcuse argues, ‘has be-
come a training ground for cutting-edge design, cutting-edge
not in a social sense or in a human sense, but in a sense of a mar-
keting device that will appeal to clients, that will appeal to those

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PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

with the money to hire architects.’ But what is ‘cutting-edge’
social design? Does Marcuse refer to the multitude of participa-
tory programs to develop a local school, collaborative processes
that go into the production of an urban garden with community
space or the sweat equity that goes into the building of a new
housing scheme?

It is easy to see the real difference these projects make and
therefore become submerged in this turn towards, and the ad-
miration of, so-called ‘social architecture. Social architecture
comes with so much promise, so much hope about design’s po-
tential to, after all, truly contribute to society. It focuses and also
cherishes approaches that, in the words of the feminist Donna
Haraway, actively allow for ‘partial, locatable, critical knowledg-
es® and at the same time counter what has been portrayed by
Mike Davis as an ‘unprecedented abyss of economic and social
turmoil that confounds our previous perceptions of historical
risk.°

However, we ought not to lose sight of the bigger picture. Yes,
‘social architecture’ is popular because we can see the real differ-
ence these projects make on a micro-level. But if we are really
honest, most ‘social architectures’ and so-called ‘responsible
actions leave the centre, the predominant socio-economic and
cultural system, unscathed. Doing good but incredibly isolated
things, leads to the reproduction of smaller, but fundamentally
still capitalist, versions of the same thing — and therefore fails to
engage with such fundamental issues like socio-economic ine-
quality. And if you believe in global justice, like my hopeful half
does, spatial development needs to confront capitalism through
organized global socio-spatial movements which are framed

8 P. Marcuse, ‘What Has to Be Done— The Potentials and Failures of Plan-
ning: History, Theory, and Actuality. Lessons from New York, AnArchitek-
tur 14 (March 2005): 36-40.

9 Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism
and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, Feminist Studies 14 (1988): 575-99,
at 584.

10 Mike Davis, ‘us Elections — the New Deal?’ Socialist Review 330 (November
2008), http://www.socialist review.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=10589.

94

BRAVE NEW WORLD?!

by local readings and understandings of culture, practice and
space. So, let’s stop the glorification of ‘social architecture, and
begin to construct, as well as enact, global narratives that will
allow the formation of a wider alliance concerned with the just
production of space. To be very clear, ’'m not talking about the
implementation of a supposedly ‘greener’ or ‘softer’ option of
capitalism, but social forms of production that are not only col-
lectively produced but also socially appropriated.

There is no need to start from scratch. The 1980s squatting
movement in West Berlin highlights the powerful force of col-
lective action, collective production and social appropriation
that led to a change in spatial politics. There also the various
Latin American Residential Organisations, of which some help
to organize and implement the actual construction and man-
agement of housing and others concentrate on training and po-
litical reform. And there are many more.

My doubtful half begins to tell me off again for being op-
timistic. However, and not only because I want to end with a
hopeful note, the two examples mentioned — each on their own
scale and with their obvious limitations — begin to draw atten-
tion to the real possibilities of a different economy and also to
how social production can lead to processes and products that
are transformative on many levels.

95

Chapter 9

The Political Agency of
Geography and the Shrinking City

Jeffrey T. Kruth

Traveling down Chester Road from downtown Cleveland, a
beacon of architectural modernity can be seen reflecting light
off the Norman Foster-designed medical campus, signaling that
one has reached an urbanism vastly different from the one just
traversed. An institutional heterotopia of sorts, the extensive
campus stands in as a symbol for a coherent urban language
amid a decaying landscape of vacant parcels and foreclosed
homes. The region’s largest employer and primary economic
driver since the 1980s, the Cleveland Clinic’s economic impact
is roughly $12.6 billion, and by extension, its employees con-
tribute $5.9 billion to the Ohio economy.’ World renowned for
its healthcare and research contributions, the Clinic and nearby
institutions of the ‘med-ed’ complex — University Hospitals and
Case Western Reserve University — provide an economic stabil-
ity in a city that has struggled to prove itself as resilient for more
than a generation.

In the surrounding neighborhoods of the University Circle
area, there is a 25% unemployment rate and the city as a whole
claims a whopping 33% poverty rate, or approximately 118,000

1 Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland Clinic: A Vital Force in Ohio's Economy (2014),
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/ccf/media/Files/About-Cleveland-Clinic/
economic-impact-report/economic-impact-report-2015-Ohio.pdf?la=en

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PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

of its 396,000 residents. The population in the city proper
has dropped by more than half in recent decades. Peaking at
900,000 residents in the 1950s, the onslaught of de-industriali-
zation in the Midwestern United States leaves Cleveland stand-
ing as one of several poster children cities of the enigmatic ‘Rust
Belt. Additionally, the onset of the financial crisis in the mid-
2000s caused housing prices to drop by roughly 30%.? Specu-
lative investors and poor appraisal practices have only added
to the detrimental effects of a weak housing market. Approxi-
mately 20,000 vacant lots dot the landscape throughout the city,
a testament to the city’s continual decline. Cheap land and taxes
(approximately 36% of vacant land in Cleveland is tax-abated),
push the boundary of development further into more affluent
suburbs, leaving the inner city devoid of critical infrastructure
and a solid economic tax base. The Clinic liberally expands to
the suburbs, creating services in wealthier ones where many of
their patients reside, furthering competition between the City of
Cleveland and other municipalities for the externality benefits
of a Clinic development.

The anchor institutions of the ‘med-ed’ complex benefit from
tax exempt status as non-profit organizations, while its spatial
clout recently expanded through the creation of a special devel-
opment district — labeled the “Health-Tech Corridor’ — along a
4.5-mile stretch between downtown and the University Circle
area.} This area prioritizes development for medical technology
startups as well as the anchor institutions themselves. As the
largest holder of vacant, tax-abated land in the city, the Clinic
also takes advantage of city programs such as the Vacant Prop-
erties Initiative (vp1), which grants loans for the development of
vacant land.* A mere 8% of the city’s revenue comes from prop-
erty taxes, while 55% of it comes from income taxes, which is an

2 A. Friedhoff and S. Kulkarni, ‘Metro Monitor — March 2013; The Brookings
Institution, last modified March 20, 2015.

3 ‘Cleveland Health-Tech Corridor’ http://www.healthtechcorridor.com/.
City of Cleveland Department of Economic Development, Report
to Council 2010, http://www.cdfa.net/cdfa/cdfaweb.nsf/ordredirect.
html?open&id=clevzo1oreport.html.

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THE POLITICAL AGENCY OF GEOGRAPHY AND THE SHRINKING CITY

inverted formula compared to many American cities, starving
Cleveland of a solid tax base.’ Even in comparable Rust Belt cit-
ies like nearby Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, property taxes account
for nearly double the income tax base.°

These spatial and policy tactics are indicative not only of po-
litical mismanagement at the local level, but also a neoliberal
spatial ideology. In an age where financial capital is hardly de-
pendent on geography or even on workers, institutional cam-
puses have become a normative extension of a particular strand
of neoliberal spatial ideology. In order to remain competitive at
a global level, institutions in the ‘med-ed’ model must embark
on a sort of geographic imperialism in order to capitalize on
their suburban as well as their international markets.’ This mod-
el of the local gone global ensures that the Clinic remains com-
petitive at the international level. It is no longer just necessary
to provide ground-breaking work in research or technology, it
is also necessary to embark on a geographic campaign, erecting
new campuses across the globe as a new form of imperialism.
In this way, the Clinic and other anchor institutions fit into Mi-
chael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of Empire, which puts
forth the theory of a new hegemonic global geopolitical order.

As late capitalism expands into what Hardt and Negri refer
to as a bio-political age (taking from Michel Foucault and oth-
ers), the tools for restructuring a critical class-based project ex-
ist within capitalism’s current logic. In the bio-political mode of
production, work expands beyond the factory walls into daily
and social life. Social relations, incessant innovation, knowledge
power and privatization of the commons are central aspects in
this mode of production. The city itself is central to bio-politi-

5 City of Cleveland, City of Cleveland 2012 Budget Book (2012), 57. http://we-
bapp.cleveland-oh.gov/aspnet/docs/get.aspx?id=988&file=2012Budget.pdf

6 Pittsburgh City Council, City of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Budget 2011 (2011),
http://www.city.pittsburgh.pa.us/main/assets/budget/2011/2011-Operating-
Capital-Budget.pdf.

7 McClain Clutter, ‘Cleveland: Medi-Plex City, in Formerly Urban: Projecting
Rust Belt Futures, ed. J. Czerniak, 50-69 (New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 2013).

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PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

cal production, and to some extent explains the movement of
the masses of educated and wealthy classes back to cities in the
United States. Creating a ‘playground’ for social production in
gentrified neighborhoods allows for the constant re-invention
of fads, ideas, technology and marketing strategies, while con-
stant social production further enables a self-disciplining soci-
ety and what Sharon Zukin calls ‘pacification by cappuccino.
The med-ed complex is one type of this system in action.
In the Fordist mode of production, the city was developed for
maximum infrastructural and economic efficiency (moving
from ‘the City Beautiful to ‘the City Practical), putting the
constant process of urbanization at the forefront of a develop-
ment strategy. As industrial production fades into a knowledge
and financially-based speculative economy, Marx’s formulation
of the struggle between immobile property (such as land) and
moveable property such as material commodities resurfaces
as a potential point of political organization.’ As Hardt points
out, ‘Property is becoming a fetter on the capitalist mode of
production [...] the more the common is corralled as property,
the more its productivity is reduced; and yet expansion of the
common undermines the relations of property in a fundamental
and general way’? Following the Hardt and Negri line, capitalist
production is returning to rent-based speculation and market
dominance, as opposed to profitability based on the traditional
means of production. That is, corporations and institutions are
not necessarily seeking to enhance profitability by trimming
workers’ wages, improving production time, or making supply
chain management more efficient. Rather, prices reflect per-
ceived market value. And when a few institutions control a large
share of a particular market, say vacant land, they can artificially
control prices, which can prolong economic distress. This geo-
graphic campaign is, in a sense, central to the long-term stabil-
ity of the anchor institutions to build institutional capacity at

8 Michael Hardt, “The Common in Communism, in The Idea of Communism,
eds. C. Douzinas and S. Zizek, 131-44 (London: Verso, 2010), 133-36.
9 Ibid., 136.

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THE POLITICAL AGENCY OF GEOGRAPHY AND THE SHRINKING CITY

a local and global scale. Not only does cheap land ensure that
more resources can be devoted to the ‘bottom line} it enables
concentrated large-scale development, typically for the ‘creative
class, evidenced by the recent Uptown development by Stanley
Saitowitz near the anchor institutions. In short, it is in the inter-
est of the anchor institutions to keep land prices low to ensure
that development occurs as they see fit —a gross large-scale pri-
vatization of spatial production, enabled by city policy.

Just a short ride from both downtown and the University
Circle area, a large green house containing Green City Growers
occupies a 4.4-acre (1.78-ha) site, holding the country’s largest
urban hydroponic farm. Initiated in 2007, Green City Growers
is one of three worker-owned cooperatives in the city called Ev-
ergreen Cooperatives. Based on the highly successful Mondrag-
on model from the Basque region of Spain, the Evergreen model
offers the ‘one worker, one vote’ principle, with every employee
being a worker-owner of the cooperative. A certain percentage
of each worker's earnings are placed into an internal account,
making $65,000 available as a personal capital account at the
end of eight years. The Evergreen Cooperatives are also putting
in place a formal, centralized financing agency to help finance
other cooperatives’ development.’° Although a for-profit enter-
prise, the cooperatives are worker-owned, sustainably focused
and with the highest-paid employee’s salary capped, typically at
a 3:1 ratio.

Three primary businesses have been started by the Ever-
green Cooperatives and have come online since 2009, including
the Green City Growers who grow hydroponic produce in the
greenhouse, the Ohio Cooperative Solar, which installs photo-
voltaic panels on buildings and Evergreen Laundry, which is a
sustainable laundry facility. The goal is to establish ten coopera-
tives over the next five years, eventually employing 500 people
in living-wage jobs. Far from a grassroots, bottom-up approach,

10 Capital Institute, Field Guide to Investing in a Resilient Economy: Evergreen
Cooperatives Field Study (2012), 6, http://fieldguide.capitalinstitute.org/up-
loads/1/3/9/6/13963161/_fs2-evergreen_8pg.pdf.

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the Mondragon model exercised by the Evergreen Cooperatives
takes the city’s anchor institutions as its starting point, both for
funding and as their client base of their services. The Evergreen
Laundry Cooperative serves both the Clinic and University
Hospitals, cleaning their linens, while the largest client for Ohio
Cooperative Solar has been the Cleveland Clinic’s expanding
complexes.

The Evergreen Land Trust (coupled with the Evergreen Co-
operative Development Fund) was established to work with
banks and local authorities to establish new sites for the devel-
opment of future Evergreen ventures. Assets are primarily di-
rected towards commercial development, structured in a way
such that if the Evergreen business were ever to collapse, the
Evergreen Land Trust would have the residual right to step in
and buy back the building, reducing some of the risk associated
with a new business." Discussions are currently underway to
address issues like affordable housing development, which may
carry fewer risks than commercial development and new busi-
ness startups. Ohio Cooperative Solar is also considering enter-
ing the demolition business for vacant homes in possession of
the land bank to account for times of slow business, providing
workers with further skill sets.

If the Evergreen Cooperatives were to embark on this type
of development venture, then it is here that a potentially coun-
ter-hegemonic political and spatial project resides. As the pro-
duction of space and the city become ever more important in
a bio-political age, an inversion of the single-lot, single-owner
model may provide context for an alternative form of develop-
ment — particularly after the subprime foreclosure crisis. In a
shrinking city with an oversupply of housing stock and vacant
land (the Cleveland Land Bank controls approximately 7,500 of
the 20,000 vacant lots city-wide), an alternative regional narra-
tive could be developed through land ownership, applying the
Evergreen cooperative model of ownership to land at a large

1 Ibid., 18.

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THE POLITICAL AGENCY OF GEOGRAPHY AND THE SHRINKING CITY

scale, expanding political agency to local and perhaps regional
politics.

With this, there is an inherently embedded concern with ac-
tive and productive uses of land, beyond speculative land hold-
ing or the more profitable concentration of development of
cheap housing or shopping malls. Applying the ‘buy-in model
of Mondragon, space can be re-conceived as something which
even persons of low and moderate income may buy into. Over
time, this creates community wealth, a more stable economic
landscape, and communal benefits. As opposed to singular va-
cant lots, which cause devastating effects on otherwise stable
neighborhoods, risk is dispersed amongst multiple owners over
multiple lots. The same ‘one person-one vote’ may likewise ap-
ply to land deals, under a larger umbrella of the Evergreen con-
stituency. The same principles of ‘people over profit’ could also
apply, offering an ideological understanding of land as some-
thing beyond simply a monetized object. Through cooperative
ownership under the umbrella of the Evergreen Cooperatives, a
new production of ‘the commons’ results — offering new forms
of knowledge, worker/owner solidarity, an alternative develop-
ment model and a new class of owners who were formerly ex-
cluded.”

With an already aggressive demolition schedule, the city may
cede some of this work to a newly formed Evergreen business.
Whereas building in the single-lot, single-owner model made
economic sense for financiers and developers, it lacked a spatial,
infrastructural or ecological logic. Through a strategic demoli-
tion schedule and creating property interdependence, building
destruction may become a profitable venture for the Evergreen
cooperatives. That is to say, through strategic planning in coop-
eration with the city, multiple lots may be assembled for owner-
ship by an Evergreen-like cooperative, which in turn densifies
the sites and then creates more tax revenue for the city. The co-
operative owners of the densified sites could be tied remotely

12 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 249-60.

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PART 2: POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

to other hedge spaces that are seeking to be assembled.” This
creates interest for them through a diversified portfolio and pro-
vides incentives for nearby owners to either join the co-op or
sell, as market prices stabilize.

While organizing along traditional progressive lines is im-
portant, it is also about finding a political and economic alter-
native to current capitalist practices through a geographic and
spatial production agenda. As David Harvey and others have
suggested, class struggle is no longer tied to just the workplace
but to almost all facets of life, and we must organize the city
along geographic lines. The factory is no longer the sole site of
capitalist production — it is now the city and everyday urban
life. As public life appears to dissolve in a bio-political age, a
shared cooperative development strategy would necessarily cre-
ate political stakeholders amongst the classes of those typically
excluded from the public process.’* Micro-parcelization strat-
egies in India, increased worker cooperatives of the informal
economy in the favelas of Brazil and public control over infra-
structural and natural resources in Bolivia are beginning to cre-
ate new strategies for organization across the globe. The shrink-
ing cities of the West must likewise embrace the geographic
potential for political organization in the metropolis.

Beyond the simple suggestion of housing cooperatives or in-
stitutional land banking, such an alternative is about the restruc-
turing of a progressive political project on two levels: first, by
placing at the forefront the idea of the commons in a bio-polit-
ical era and second, by appropriating agency to neighborhoods
through social ownership and organizing around the idea of ge-
ography to perpetuate the idea of the ‘right to the city. This is
especially important given the current development paradigms
which solve the problems of the common through traditional
neoliberal spatial fixes such as gentrification, privately owned

13. Keller Easterling, “Take-Away; in Perspecta 45: Agency, eds. H. Evans et al.,
157-60 (Cambridge: mir Press, 2012).

14 David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolu-
tion (London: Verso, 2012), 115-19.

104

THE POLITICAL AGENCY OF GEOGRAPHY AND THE SHRINKING CITY

public space, large scale development for private interests and
the control of vacant land by institutions. The task of architects,
urbanists and progressive policy makers in the coming years
will be to help develop a geographic project for communities in
the twenty-first century using a spatial-economic logic that puts
at the forefront the idea of the commons.

105

Chapter 10

Beyond The Post-Industrial City?
The Third Industrial Revolution,
Digital Manufacturing and the
Transformation of Homes into
Miniature Factories

John R. Bryson, Jennifer Clark and Rachel Mulhall

The late spring 2013 issue of the SkyMall shopping catalogue
heralded the emergence of the next technological or industrial
revolution. The SkyMall catalogue is found on nearly every us
flight and provides travelers with an opportunity to consider
purchasing a range of new and novel products whilst onboard
the aircraft. The late spring issue contains a $1,299 3D printer. 3D
printers can be traced back to 1984, when stereolithography was
developed by Charles Hull. This printing process enables a tan-
gible 3p object to be created from digital data. The SkyMall 3p
printer is described as ‘[s]uper easy and simple to use. It works
by building up plastic material in three dimensions to create a
real object. It’s ideal for home, classroom and office and creates
prototypes, models, toys ... the list is endless’: The reference to
home use highlights the ability of this technology to shift some
manufacturing production from the factory to the home. It is
worth noting that 3p printing can also involve printing with

1 SkyMall, Late Spring Catalogue (Phoenix: SkyMall, 2013), 9.

107

PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

metal powders. Nearly everything can be printed, but there are
restrictions in terms of size. For example, it is a simple process
to print a new cover for a mobile phone at home, but it will
never be practicable to print a complete car. This re-emergence
of home-based manufacturing has important implications for
cities, as it enables new forms of customized manufacturing to
emerge. Home-based manufacturing is not a new process, but
this new industrial revolution has the potential to return manu-
facturing to its roots within the home.

Before the first industrial revolution, manufacturing was
distributed in homes through a system of outworkers or via
a process based on small craft-based production.? In the me-
dieval European city, manufacturing was not isolated from
homes — manufacturing was a home-based activity that was of-
ten undertaken by women and children during the day and men
during the winter. During the nineteenth century the City of
Birmingham, developed as the British Empire’s workshop of the
world, but the history of manufacturing in this city commenced
in homes.’ During the sixteenth century Birmingham was ‘a
village of manufacturers.* Coventry, another important British
manufacturing city, developed as a location for the manufacture
of watches and ribbons, but both were manufactured in homes
rather than in factories. The term ‘manufacturing’ is misleading.

2 Thomas S. Ashton, An Eighteenth-Century Industrialist: Peter Stubs of War-
rington, 1756-1806 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961); W. H.
B. Court, A Concise Economic History of Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1965); Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Marie B. Rowlands, Masters and
Men in the West Midlands Metalware Trades before the Industrial Revolu-
tion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975); Gillian Darley, Fac-
tory (London: Reaktion Books, 2003); John R. Bryson and Michael Taylor,
‘Mutual Dependency, Diversity and Alterity in Production: Cooperatives,
Group Contracting and Factories, in Interrogating Alterity, eds. D. Fuller,
A.E. Jonas, and R. Lee, 75-94 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).

3 J.D. Chambers, The Workshop of the World (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1961); Bryson and Taylor, ‘Mutual Dependency, Diversity and Alter-
ity in Production.

4 Artifex and Opifex, The Causes of Decay in a British Industry (London:
Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 2.

108

BEYOND THE POST-INDUSTRIAL CITY?

It comes with the association of large factories, smoking chim-
neys, conveyor belts and production lines, but actually the term
comes from the Latin ‘manu factum’ or ‘to make by hand. Thus,
‘manufacturing’ has a much more complex meaning than an as-
sociation between the production process and the factory. There
are many ways in which products can be manufactured — from
craft-based production through to the technical complexity of
putting together a robot. Manufacturing also takes place in a
variety of circumstances and contexts, differing widely in scale
from factories to spare bedrooms.

It was only during the latter part of the eighteenth century
that a division began to emerge between the place of work and
the place of residence. This division was driven by a requirement
to control labour, especially as technological developments were
beginning to replace simple home-based machines with much
more complex machine tools.> These new machine tools were
expensive and required access to a source of power (water, char-
coal, coal, etc.) and also a workforce who could be increasingly
managed and controlled to escalate productivity. Gradually,
manufacturing located in cottages and homes was replaced by
small factories often constructed in back gardens, and eventu-
ally these were superseded by the emergence of large specialist
factories.® The exact date of this transfer from manufacturing
in homes to factories varies depending on the industrial sector
and location. In Coventry (UK) the manufacture of ribbons dur-
ing the late nineteenth century was still predominantly a home-
based activity. A typical Coventry weaver’s house, at this time,
consisted of a three- story building with the top story used as
the ‘topshop’ or weaving loft in which there would be two or
three looms.”

The first industrial revolution is associated with the emer-
gence of factory production, and much of this production was

Rowlands, Masters and Men.

6 Darley, Factory.

7 John M. Prest, The Industrial Revolution in Coventry (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1960), 75.

wn

109

PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

located in urban areas close to a source of power and labour. The
second industrial revolution was based on the application of a
spatial division of labour that spread manufacturing around the
world driven by a search for lower production costs. This phase
is associated with the deindustrialization of developed market
economies, the emergence of post-industrial cities and the shift
of production to emerging markets.’ However, there are debates
emerging that posit the start of the ‘third industrial revolution.’
Rifkin’s third industrial revolution is founded upon ‘a new con-
vergence of communication and energy [...] [in which] hun-
dreds of millions of people will produce their own green energy
in their homes, offices, and factories and share it with each other
in an “energy internet”.° There is another important technologi-
cal driver that has the potential to transform manufacturing and
that is leading to a new industrial revolution which has the pos-
sibility to transform the geography of production. These new
technologies include laser cutting and 3p printing or additive
manufacturing, and are associated with the re-emergence of
home-based manufacturing that has the potential to challenge
the dominant post-industrial model. The future of our cities will
be based on knowledge, information and new forms of manu-
facturing, and some of this activity will be undertaken in offices
and factories, and some in homes.

This new technological driver is a key issue in the trans-
formation of manufacturing and includes a number of related
innovations that can all be classified under the term ‘digital

8 J.R. Bryson, P.W. Daniels, and B. Warf, Service Worlds: People, Organisa-
tions, Technologies (London: Routledge, 2004); Barry Bluestone and Ben-
nett Harrison, The Deindustrialisation of America: Plant Closings, Commu-
nity Abandonment, and the Dismantling Of Basic Industry (New York: Basic
Books, 1982); Peter Dicken, Global Shift: Transforming the World Economy
(London: Sage, 2003); John R. Bryson and Grete Rusten, Design Economies
and the Changing World Economy: Innovation, Production and Competitive-
ness (London: Routledge, 2011).

9 Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Trans-
forming Energy, The Economy, and the World (New York: Palgrave MacMil-
lan, 2011).

10 Ibid., 2.

110

BEYOND THE POST-INDUSTRIAL CITY?

manufacturing. These new technologies have the potential to
democratize manufacturing, as it can transfer the design and
manufacture of particular products from monopoly capitalism
to a form of distributed home-based, customized capitalism.
This type of production will never replace the existing factory-
based mass manufacturing, but provides an alternative means
for the production of small, often customized products, as well
as creative art. In this chapter, we explore the emergence of
digital manufacturing with a particular focus on 3D printing or
rapid prototyping, and the impact that this could have on home-
based manufacturing and the post-industrial city.

From subtraction to addition

The history of much manufacturing is based around subtractive
methods in which material is removed by cutting, drilling and
other forms of machining. Subtractive manufacturing has been
supplemented by technological developments that have given
rise to additive manufacturing techniques, rapid prototyping
or 3D printing." Additive manufacturing is a process in which
a three-dimensional solid object is produced by laying down
successive layers of material (liquid, powder or sheet materials)
controlled by a digital file. The digital file can be produced by
3D computer-aided design (CAD), model data, cr and MRI scan
data, and data created from 3p digitizing systems. The devel-
opment of 3p printing means that it is now possible for com-
ponents and products to be developed using cap and printed
using a 3D printer. 3p printing is currently used in the aerospace

u_T. Wohlers, Wohlers Report: Rapid Prototyping & Tooling State of the Indus-
try Annual Worldwide Progress Report (Fort Collins: Wohlers Associates,
2001); Xue Yan and P. Gu, ‘A Review of Rapid Prototyping Technologies
and Systems, Computer-Aided Design 28, no. 4 (1996): 307-18; S. Kumar and
J.P. Kruth, ‘Composites by Rapid Prototyping Technology, Materials and
Design 31 (2010): 850-56; Additive Manufacturing Special Interest Group,
Shaping Our National Competency in Additive Manufacturing: A Technology
Innovation Needs Analysis Conducted by the Additive Manufacturing Special
Interest Group for the Technology Strategy Board (London: Technology Strat-
egy Board, 2012).

111

PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

industry to produce light- weight components, and in the medi-
cal devices industry to create customized dental implants, cus-
tomized insoles that match patients’ feet and also customized
hip replacements.

Unlike many emerging technologies, such as nanotechnolo-
gy and biotechnology, additive manufacturing is associated with
manufacturing processes of both large and small firms. 3p print-
ing has developed as a central process technology in the ‘mak-
er movement’ with its focus on personalized, customized and
craft-based production of consumer items such as jewelry and
household goods. This relationship to the Do-It-Yourself (pry)
movement has connected additive manufacturing to e-retailing
portals for craft-based production such as Etsy and the develop-
ment of ‘maker-spaces, such as those managed by TechWorks.”
TechWorks provides access to manufacturing spaces, including
access to tools and machines for small-scale producers to proto-
type and produce batch items. The emergence of these new, flex-
ible and shared manufacturing spaces in cities, coupled with the
expanding capabilities enabled by digital manufacturing and 3p
printing, are beginning to alter the trajectory of urban manu-
facturing by enabling home-based makers to design new objects
that can be printed either at home or by a specialist 3p printing
company. Central to this new third industrial revolution is the
emergence of distributed manufacturing facilitated by digital
manufacturing and personalized or customized design.

Innovations in additive manufacturing have the potential
to shift manufacturing production away from capital intensive
mass production based in large plants to a network of distribut-
ed manufacturing facilities that would focus on the production
of mass customized products. Additive manufacturing comes
with a number of benefits and these include:

- A decrease in lead times from design to products ready for
market.

12 For more information on Etsy or TechWorks, see www.etsy.com or www.
sktechworks.ca.

112

BEYOND THE POST-INDUSTRIAL CITY?

- A resource-efficient approach with no wastage.

- ‘The ability to customize products.

- No requirement for specialist tooling. This reduces the scale
of capital investment required to manufacture products.

- New developments in additive manufacturing are associated
with rapid production throughputs.

- Limited defective parts.

- Parts and products can be designed to optimism functional-
ity rather than for effective subtractive manufacturing.

- The ability to develop a hybrid manufacturing process that
combines the benefits associated with subtractive and addi-
tive manufacturing.

- ‘The ability to produce parts with the same functionality as
parts produced by subtractive manufacturing, but with fewer
raw materials. These products are much lighter.

- New products that can only be made by additive manufac-
turing. The layer process enables the manufacture of very
complex shapes and there are few geometric limitations
compared to subtractive manufacturing.

There are a number of research challenges that need to be
overcome with additive manufacturing; these include scaling
up the additive manufacturing process and overcoming some
difficulties with the surface finish of products produced by ad-
ditive manufacturing. The cost of 3p printers is declining and
very small firms, individuals, schools and artists are now able
to afford to purchase small 3p printers. The SkyMall 3p printer
is an excellent example of the spread of relatively inexpensive
digital manufacturing technologies to homes and offices. De-
velopments in additive manufacturing have the potential to
transform manufacturing and to produce a new geography of
manufacturing. In theory, additive manufacturing could elimi-
nate the subcomponent section of the supply chain.” Thus, the
emphasis would shift from cost-competition for the subcompo-

13. Jennifer Clark, Working Regions: Reconnecting Innovation and Production in
the Knowledge Economy (London: Routledge, 2013).

113

PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

nents to pre-production elements including: 1) product design,
2) process design (software) and 3) materials (especially quality
and purity). Indeed, this shift would produce a very different
production geography. In fact some manufacturing has already
transferred from factories back to the home and maker spaces,
enabling people to develop new products that can be printed
at home or be printed by a specialist provider of 3p printing
services.

These developments will affect the expiry of key patents, the
formulation of less expensive materials and the creation of ma-
chines that print at fast speeds. 3p printing makes it possible
to produce light-weight structures that are extremely strong
and optimism the relationship between material content and
performance. This should lead to the development of entirely
new businesses and business models. It is possible to argue that
additive manufacturing is the most important technological
development in manufacturing since the introduction of cap.
Developments in additive printing mean that individuals and
small firms will have the capability to develop, design and print
new products. 3D printers are being developed for domestic use,
and it should become possible for an individual to purchase a
product file that enables them to print a product at home.

Contract providers of 3p printing services already exist,
and increasingly individuals and firms will be able to purchase
customized products that are printed locally. Individuals will
be able to download a 3p file linked to a company which will
then print the object. A good example of this type of ‘service’ is
provided by Shapeways (a company based in New York) which
provide 3D printing services on demand. This technological de-
velopment makes it extremely simple to customize products and
to alter the relationship between manufacturing and consumers.
Technically-minded individuals will be able to develop products
that might be tested by companies that specialist in selling prod-
ucts that can be printed at home or by a provider of 3p printing
services. This could lead to warehouse inventory levels being
significantly reduced as more products could be printed close to
the point of consumption. There are also important sustainabil-

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BEYOND THE POST-INDUSTRIAL CITY?

ity and climate change implications associated with 3p printing,
as it makes it possible to localize and customize the production
of many manufactured products. This could lead to the develop-
ment of a much more distributed geography of production, but
with specific centers allocated for their design and development.
In effect, places that retain integrated design and production ca-
pacities will benefit, especially those with experience of absorb-
ing process innovations.“

Conclusion—from the post-industrial city to home-
based manufacturing

The emergence of post-industrial cities or the shift towards a
service world was associated with the transfer of manufacturing
to low-cost locations.» This transformed Western cities as their
economies were increasingly based on property and land specu-
lation, financial services and business and professional servic-
es.© Many of these new economic activities involved the man-
agement of fictitious capital — capital that only existed for these
new service workers on balance sheets and had limited connec-
tions with real people or tangible products. The economic crisis
that commenced in 2008 has challenged the emphasis placed
in Western cities on services and led to a debate regarding the
rebalancing of national economies towards manufacturing.
Technological developments and the emergence of digi-
tal manufacturing provide a new driver that is transforming
manufacturing. This new technology has the potential to con-
vert every home into a miniature factory. There are important
limitations. At the moment, home-based digital fabrication is
focused on the production of small products, toys and artworks.
This still reflects a radical innovation, as before the introduction
of 3D printing it was impossible to produce many of these prod-

14 Bryson and Rusten, Design Economies and the Changing World Economy;
Clark, Working Regions.

15 Bryson, Daniels, and Warf, Service Worlds.

16 John R. Bryson, ‘Obsolescence and the Process of Creative Reconstruction,
Urban Studies 34, no. 9 (1997): 1439-58.

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PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

ucts in a home setting. Digital manufacturing enables people
to design and develop new products at home and to customize
existing products. Products can be created at home and their
digital files sent anywhere over the Web. This offers possibilities
for home-based design and development, but printing would be
undertaken by specialist 3p printing firms. The development of
maker spaces may address this gap by enabling the printing of
products in shared workshop settings located close to the home.
At present, however, they are not widely available.

We are at the start of a new technological era founded on
combining digital fabrication with post-industrial, home-based
workers. These new home-based workers may work elsewhere
during the day but play with creating new products during the
evening and at weekends. There could also be home workers
who specialist in the creation of new digital files and are con-
tracted to companies or working for themselves to produce new
products as well as new art. Additive tooling will not exceed
more traditional machine tools, but could support such tooling
through the development of hybrid manufacturing that blends
subtractive with additive techniques. The start of the ‘third’ in-
dustrial revolution is returning some forms of manufacturing to
the home and to the city. New forms of home work are emerging
that will go hand-in-hand with services and workers who are
currently able to work from home. These changes have impor-
tant implications for the design of our cities and homes — the
home of the future must be digitally connected, but it must also
provide the space to balance living with digital manufacturing.

116

Chapter 11

Conspicuous Production
Valuing the Visibility of Industry
in Urban Re-Industrialisation

Karl Baker

Introduction

A flurry of recent commentary calls for a renewed focus on
wealthy countries ‘making things.’ Such arguments are gener-
ally framed within discourses on national economic growth and
ignore the spatial implications of re-industrialization. However,
treating the promotion of industrial activities as a key compo-
nent of spatially-oriented urban development strategies offers
promises to broaden the range of benefits delivered by a revived
manufacturing sector. In realizing this potential, the built form
supporting industry requires careful consideration. Shifts to-
ward consolidating industry within demarcated zones of utili-

1 Advocates look to the potential for manufacturing to ‘re-balance’ econo-
mies (see Peter Marsh. ‘Hopes for Growth in Manufacturing, The Financial
Times, May 29, 2011, https://next.ft.com/content/9627941a-8a13-11e0-beff-
00144feab49a); revive the fortunes of the ‘hollowed-out’ middle classes (see
Don Peck, ‘Can the Middle Class Be Saved?) The Atlantic, September 2011,
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/can-the-middle-
class-be-saved/308600/); and spur innovation and productivity growth (see
Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: Economic Development in His-
torical Perspective [London: Anthem, 2002]).

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PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

tarian sheds in the urban periphery,* while converting historic
inner-city industrial buildings for the service economy,’ are
problematic manifestations of conventional planning for indus-
try in today’s ‘post-industrial’ city.

In response to inadequate attention to the built environment
supporting emerging urban industry, I argue for a particularly
‘conspicuous’ form of production that values the everyday vis-
ibility of industrial activities. I outline some key benefits from
visible forms of industry and some supportive approaches to the
planning and design of built environments. Firstly, however, it
is worth briefly mentioning potential drivers of contemporary
‘re-industrializatiom in cities to more precisely understand the
types of production that might be made more ‘conspicuous.

Drivers of urban re-industrialization

The revival of industry in post-industrial cities like London,
Barcelona or Philadelphia will not involve a return to the modes
of production or the built environment of nineteenth-century
industrialization. A number of emerging trends suggest various
pathways along which contemporary activities of manufacture,
repair and craft may become more important elements of urban
economies. Firstly, it is conceivable that the geographic disper-
sal of industry, both to rural locations and further afield to glo-
balized facilities distant from consumer markets, may in some
cases be reversed. Recent ‘re-shoring’ of manufacturing in the
United States points in this direction,* with a us$1 billion initia-
tive by General Electric to re-shore household appliance manu-

2 Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Britain (London: Verso, 2010).

3S. Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010); S. Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in
Urban Change (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982).

4 ‘Coming Home; The Economist, January 19, 2013, http://www.economist.
com/news/special-report/21569570-growing-number-american-compa-
nies-are-moving-their-manufacturing-back-united.

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CONSPICUOUS PRODUCTION?

facturing gaining widespread attention.’ Secondly, advanced
manufacturing technologies including ‘3p printing’ and digital
fabrication may facilitate a reorganization of the geography of
production, with cost-effective smaller scale manufacturing fa-
cilities and ‘mass-customization’® encouraging the integration
of production within urban areas closer to consumer markets.’
Finally, growing enthusiasm for craft and artisanal local manu-
facture may contribute to an expanded ‘boutique manufactur-
ing’ sector that deliberately locates in close proximity to inner-
city consumer markets.*

Valuing visible industry

Whether urban re-industrialization means a growing craft sec-
tor or a relocation of mass manufacturing, the quality of the
built environment supporting these activities can strengthen
the benefits resulting from a revived industrial sector. Currently,
urban manufacturing businesses often occupy locations that are

5 Ed Crooks, ‘Gr Takes $1bn Risk in Bringing Jobs Home’ Financial Times,
April 2, 2012, https://next.ft.com/content/21a46546-78f1-11e1-88¢5-
00144feab4ga.

6 ‘Mass customizatiow has gained currency as a concept in business and man-
agement literature since the early 1990s. For instance, see Joseph B. Pine
IL, Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition (Boston:
Harvard Business School Press, 1993). Jane Jacobs makes a much earlier
reference to the idea in Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (London: Jona-
thon Cape, 1969), 245: ‘Mass-production manufacturing will no longer be
regarded as city work. Cities will manufacture even more goods than they
do today, but these will be almost wholly differentiated production goods,
made in relatively small, or very small, organizations.

7 Neil Gershenfeld, ‘How to Make Almost Anything: The Digital Fabrication
Revolution, Foreign Affairs 91, no. 6 (2012): 43-57.

8 Recently formed advocacy organizations in a number of North Ameri-
can cities promote the potential of expanding urban artisanal production
(alongside a broader interest in all forms of urban manufacturing) and in-
clude San Francisco-based SFMade, and Made in nyc. Examples of craft
manufacturing in these cities include inner-city breweries, apparel, jewelry
and furniture producers. See A. Arieff. “The Future of Manufacturing Is Lo-
cal, The New York Times, March 27, 2011, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.
com/2011/03/27/the-future-of-manufacturing-is-local/?_r=o.

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far from ‘conspicuous. While advanced ‘re-shored’ manufac-
turing may return to urban rather than rural areas, it will most
likely occupy sheds in segregated industrial zones. Artisanal
manufacturing may be similarly hidden, using low-cost spaces
in dilapidated remnants of nineteenth-century industrial build-
ings. Against this invisibility, a built environment that explicitly
prioritizes public connections to industry can bring benefits in
raising awareness of production processes, enabling social en-
gagement between producers and the public and enriching eve-
ryday experiences of being in the public spaces of the city.

Awareness

Industry that is publicly visible supports a range of connections
between consumers and producers of manufactured goods. For
example, a furniture maker with its production process open to
a busy street, or even a car factory with manufacturing visible
to passing motorists, can connect passers-by to the processes of
manufacturing. This visual presence of production can prompt
understanding of the human labor,’ mechanical processes and
energy required to produce the often taken-for-granted material
goods of our industrial society.’ Eco-localists refer to the IMBY
(in my back yard) effect of local production in establishing an
everyday awareness of the human and environmental costs of

9 Richard Sennett’s celebration of “The Craftsman’ sees this archetypal figure
as representing ‘the special human condition of being engaged’: Richard
Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 20. The
visibility of the human work and practical skill of the craftsman might be
‘honored’ and ‘acknowledged’ in the public realm.

10 ‘The visibility of local production can help counter the ‘alienation of ur-
ban consumers from distant ‘manufacturing hinterlands’ — somewhat
analogous to the alienation from distant ecological hinterlands obscured
by infrastructural networks for food, energy and water. See Stephen Gra-
ham (ed.), Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails (London: Routledge,
2009); N. Heynen, M. Kaika, and E. Swyngedouw, In the Nature of Cities:
Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism (London:
Routledge, 2006); Maria Kaika, City of Flows: Modernity, Nature and the
City (New York: Routledge, 2005).

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production,” and the possibility of more considered consump-
tion behaviors.” At the same time, more public forms of produc-
tion might act as a form of quality assurance, pressuring busi-
nesses to improve their environmental and social performance.

Social/economic engagement

Beyond establishing a visual awareness of production processes
among urban consumers, some forms of industry can also allow
for social engagement through economic exchanges between
makers and buyers. Small-scale industries supplying local cus-
tomers illustrate the possibilities of these types of relationships.
Referring to ‘Reyd’s Bespoke Tailor Shop’ in London, Suzanne
Hall describes the ‘respect’ that emerges in the direct encounter
between producers and consumers:

This form of respect —the reciprocal recognition between
maker and wearer—of the skill involved in making a be-
spoke garment is not a social relation that can exist in off-
the-peg fashion stores, where the product on display is sepa-
rated from its process of making.¥

These relationships of respect and ‘reciprocal recognition add a
richness to social experiences not possible within conventional
consumer-retailer exchanges based around the sale of goods
made in distant hinterlands. Furthermore, these direct connec-
tions with makers can strengthen local economies by orienting
consumer spending toward local manufacturers rather than
multinational corporations.

u. Fred Curtis, ‘Eco-Localism and Sustainability, Ecological Economics 46
(2003): 83-102, at 93.

12 Colin Hines, Localization: A Manifesto (London: Earthscan, 2000), 35.

13 Suzanne Hall, City, Street and Citizen: The Measure of the Ordinary (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2012), 86.

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Rich and distinctive urban experiences

The visibility and presence of industrial activities in the spaces
of everyday life can provide rich and distinctive experiences for
city dwellers. Stronger connections between productive process-
es and public space can contribute to a fuller sensory experience
of urban life that counters the ‘erosion of the perceptual sphere’
accompanying too much ‘sanitized’ urban re-development.“
The activity of industry, including the noise, smells and rhythms
of human and mechanical production can be celebrated for the
diversity and interest that they bring to city streets. While there
may be conflict over what is treated as ‘nuisance’ or as adding
vitality to the street, recent urbanism may well have gone too
far in attempting to eliminate sensory confrontation. At worst,
current post-industrial spatial conditions involve a sterile mo-
notony of glass office and retail frontages in prime spaces of
the city, and the relegation of industry to equally monotonous
sheds in well-defined suburban industrial parks. A re-industri-
alization that celebrates what Jane Jacobs termed the ‘jumble’ of
the diverse and truly mixed-use street,’ can contribute to more
distinctive and intriguing urban experiences.

Visible forms of urban industry can further make everyday
experiences of being in the city more meaningful by connect-
ing public life with the activities going on ‘behind the scenes’
of building frontages. Connecting the public realm with that
of workplaces is a challenge not only for industrial activities,
but also for the hidden and disconnected work done in offices.
Making work more visible increases the legibility of the city
and might introduce other ways of being in public — or loosely
among others — in ways that are different to dominant modes of
consumption-based public space.’®

14 Mirko Zardini (ed.), Sense of the City: An Alternative Approach to Urbanism
(Baden: Lars Miiller Publishers, 2005), 21.

15 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of American Cities (New York: Modern Li-
brary, 1961).

16 Steven Miles, Spaces for Consumption: Pleasure and Placelessness in the Post-
Industrial City (London: Sage, 2010); Demos, People Make Place: Growing

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CONSPICUOUS PRODUCTION?

Spatial planning and design for visible urban industry

Encouraging the visibility of industry requires a particular ap-
proach to spatial planning and design. It raises questions across
scales about how different spatial arrangements—from the
planning of urban regions to the configuration of rooms in a
building — impact on the everyday visibility of industry. In the
following section, I outline two elements of spatial policy and
design that may support the emergence of a more conspicuous
form of production.

Beyond industrial zones

Urban-planning conventions that emerged from historical re-
sponses to the noxious ‘nuisances’ of nineteenth-century indus-
trialization have resulted in regulating-out particularly pollut-
ing or noisy industries from the densely inhabited parts of cities
in advanced economies.” Zoning regulations have encouraged
remaining industrial activities (even those with limited external
impacts) to locate in demarcated industrial areas, often deliber-
ately segregated from the spaces of everyday urban life. While
this approach continues to make sense for a range of heavy in-
dustries, the type of activities driving contemporary re-indus-
trialization, such as digital fabrication and craft, are relatively
clean and quiet, and their placement in the city should not be
determined by planning approaches based on exclusive land-
use zoning.

Even current urban-planning strategies that encourage ur-
ban industrial activities continue to favor approaches based on
the continuation of segregated industrial zones. In London, for
instance, industrial land is valued by official planning policy, but

the Public Life of Cities (London: Demos, 2005); Susan Christopherson, “The
Fortress City, in Post-Fordism: A Reader, ed. A. Amin, 409-25 (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1995).

17 The amelioration of negative impacts from industry has been central to the
historical development of urban spatial planning practices. See Paul Hall,
Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in
the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).

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policy also attempts to consolidate industry in large-scale de-
marcated areas, predominantly on the outskirts of the city and
less visible to everyday public life. This is despite 60 per cent
of all industrial land being located in small parcels dispersed
throughout the city—behind the high street or in neighbor-
hood workshops.

Alternative spatial policies could encourage dispersed ar-
rangements of small industrial zones throughout the urban re-
gion. Better still, land-use zoning could be relaxed to allow light
industrial activities to co-exist with other uses in more broadly
defined mixed-use zones.” These types of policies could create
a more visible form of industry through integration and mix-
ing with residential and commercial uses.”° Such policies could
bring industry closer to the spaces of urban residents’ everyday
lives, allowing for more accessible connections between con-
sumers and producers, and between people's homes and indus-
trial workplaces.

Transparent factories

Spatial planning at the city scale is essential for allowing new
and existing industrial activities to locate in places closely con-
nected with the public life of the city. Planning at the city scale
is not, by itself, sufficient to ensure the everyday visibility of in-
dustry. The design of individual buildings and the relationship
between industrial activities and the public spaces of the street
are also important for realizing the benefits of conspicuous pro-
duction.

18 Greater London Authority, Supplementary Planning Guidance: Industrial
Capacity (London: Greater London Authority, 2008), 34.

19 A change of industrial-zoning categories and introduction of industrial
mixed-use zones has been recommended in Philadelphia in the United
States. See Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, An Industrial
Market and Land Use Strategy for the City of Philadelphia — Executive Sum-
mary (2010), 17, http://www.pidcphila.com/images/uploads/resource_li-
brary/PIMLUS_Executive_Summary_Final_September_2010.pdf.

20 As documented with some examples from London in Urhahn Urban De-
sign, Industry in the City: A Report for the London Development Agency and
Greater London Authority (Amsterdam: Urhahn Urban Design, 2010).

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CONSPICUOUS PRODUCTION?

Visible industry need not involve extremes of ‘transparent
factories,” but consideration of how industrial activities might
contribute to the public life of the city deserves more attention.
It is rare for current planning policy to place value on the form
of industrial buildings, even in cases where policy pays careful
attention to the provision of industrially-zoned land.”

In imagining contemporary re-industrialization based on
high-tech manufacturing, distributed digital fabrication and
the revival of craft, there are various ways in which these ac-
tivities might be made publicly visible. For instance, a degree of
permeability in the interface between public and private space
is important in connecting interior production spaces with ex-
terior public life. Rather than industrial premises having blank
walls facing streets or being located along back alleys, industry
could be valued for its contribution to achieving conventional
urban design objectives of vibrant streets and active ground-
floor frontages.

It is easy to imagine street-level workshops with open win-
dows and doors allowing glimpses of craft-type activities to pas-
sers-by. Furthermore, hybrid making-selling spaces can provide
an intermediate semi-public retail space that directly links pro-
ducers with consumers. Simple design features at the building
scale can expand the scope for interaction between industrial
producers and the urban public. Open windows, large door-
ways and opportunities for signage are all useful. Likewise, it
is important to prevent careless and inflexible design that often
characterizes ground-floor commercial spaces in contemporary
residential-led ‘mixed-use’ development. Awkward transitions
between public and private spaces created by changes of level,
steps and fences all prevent interaction between building and

21 The name given to Volkswagon’s glass-clad car assembly plant in Dresden,
Germany, constructed in 1992 and open for public tours.

22 See, for example, progressive urban industrialization strategies including
Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, An Industrial Market
and Land Use Strategy, 17; Nisha Mistry, Newark’s Manufacturing Competi-
tiveness (Washington, pc: Brookings Institute, 2013), https://www.brook-
ings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/NewarkManufacturingMay28.pdf.

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street, and reduce the flexibility of spaces for industrial uses.
Exposing larger-scale mechanical, rather than craft, processes
of production may present more challenges and may not offer
businesses the same advantages from direct links with consum-
ers. Nevertheless, heightened visibility of such processes still has
benefits for the legibility of the city, and exposing these types of
activities may offer exciting design opportunities.

Further questions

This chapter has sketched an argument for the importance of
paying attention to the built form that will support any future
urban re-industrialization. Specifically, the concept of ‘conspic-
uous production’ is used to suggest ways in which the spatial
planning of cities and the design of buildings accommodating
industrial uses can support the public visibility and integration
of industry within mixed-use urban environments. A number of
questions emerge from this brief discussion and deserve a men-
tion. Firstly, the benefits of visible industry have in this chapter
been framed primarily around advantages to a ‘consuming pub-
lic. It will be important to further investigate how visibility ben-
efits producers themselves, especially when inconspicuousness
may often be a deliberate strategy for manufacturers who may
wish to avoid public scrutiny. Secondly, in focusing on advan-
tages to the public life of cities, this chapter has not dealt with a
range of other benefits from re-industrialization, including em-
ployment, environmental and energy-use implications, and the
promise of innovation and other economic advantages arising
from urban production. Expanded versions of this chapter will
need to consider how the concept of visibility may complement
these arguments. Finally, while the chapter deliberately focussed
on the reform of spatial and built environment conditions as
a neglected aspect of the re-industrialization argument, a con-
sideration of changes to politico-economic and institutional
conditions will be equally important in realizing the promise of
industry in the city.

126

Chapter 12

Industri[us]
Re/Use, Re/Work, Re/Value

Christina Norton

Intoducing Industri[us]

This chapter explores Industri[us], an initiative that was set up
in early 2011 by ‘Fluid’ (architects and urban strategists) and
collaborators in order to highlight the growing opportunity of
upcycling’ and its uses in urban regeneration and sustainable
development. To begin, I explain the concept of Industri[us],
its motives and its relationship to the theme of re-industriali-
zation and progressive urbanism. I also discuss and present the
‘Festival of Up-Cycling’ in Canning Town which was delivered
from May to September 2012 and was a prototype and test case
for how up-cycling can contribute towards sustainable develop-
ment and have a role in urban regeneration.

The basic premise of Industri[us] is to put a vacant site to cre-
ative interim use in advance of commercial development taking
place. To do this requires collaboration with the growing com-
munity of designers and makers working with waste materials
and needing better access to the market; the resulting network
connects with a supply of waste materials, as well as providing

1 Up-cycling is the making of desirable goods from waste materials —i.e.,
items and materials that people and industries throw away.

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a series of innovation and education programs. This approach
to making use of essentially ‘useless’ and time- limited land is a
reaction to a consideration of what isn’t working in cities today,
in particular looking at high streets and town centers, and con-
sidering how improvements could be made through reflecting
on social, economic and environmental values and transforma-
tions. It is also a response to the increasing loss of industrial
activity from the urban condition and the steady movement
towards a mono-cultural city. The project also seeks to enable
communities to take ownership and control of their environ-
ment, address inequality, move towards self-sufficiency and,
through participation and occupation, foster notions of public
space that are both relevant and successful.

‘Fluid’ works at the threshold between architecture, planning
and creative practice, having been involved in urban projects
since the 1990s and having developed a process of dynamic
planning that is driven by community engagement and partici-
pation. The act of design engages with the social and cultural as
well as the physical and is seen as a service, not just a product.
The work engages with the macro-, meso- and micro-scales,
linking big strategic thinking with small scale-change and in-
tervention, believing that the things that really influence and af-
fect the city are those at the level of infrastructure and human
interaction. Industri[us] signifies an intent that has multiple
readings: the connection with Industry and heritage, the idea
of making and doing, the notion of hard work and the fact that
we do it.

Objectives

Industri[us] is about helping communities to get back on their
feet and thrive. Through injecting short-term activity into an
unused site and creating new businesses and jobs by harnessing
waste as an economic opportunity, it seeks to bring about posi-
tive longer-term social, economic and environmental changes.
As well as setting out to revalue waste materials, Industri[us]
places the provision of training opportunities to help people

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INDUSTRI[US]

into employment and to connect the communities that are at
the centre of its operations. Through this, a lasting skills base
is built, strengthening local networks and raising aspirations. It
is becoming widely accepted that to move towards a more sus-
tainable urban environment, our future high streets and town
centers must be multi-functional social and cultural ‘institu-
tions. To achieve this aim, a variety of changes need to occur
that encourage activity, interaction and a range of experiences
that are rooted in the interests and needs of local people and that
provide opportunities and the infrastructure for local enterprise
to support local institutions and meet the demands for a flex-
ible and innovative move towards change. By encouraging lo-
cal innovation and cultural expression and being a platform for
creating new businesses, Industri[us] aims to directly addresses
these objectives to re-think town centers in an economically
sustainable way, creating a destination for a wider audience. At
the same time, the project strongly promotes the ambitions of a
‘low-carbon economy’ through self-sufficiency and local econo-
mies creating projects entirely from borrowed, used or re-usable
materials.

Value

Industri[us] is a place of work, making, learning, playing, ex-
change, trade and interaction that offers a new model for the
development of existing high streets. The value of ‘meanwhile’ is
an underused resource in planning and development, offering
critical creativity, opportunity and sustainability. Instead of top-
down masterplanning, the ‘meanwhile’ idea involves a more dy-
namic approach, working across disciplines in order to test and
seed change for the long-term legacy of a site. This dynamism
means exploring new forms of practice that cross boundaries
between architecture, planning and art: such a collaborative
method expands to include wider community participation in
order to negotiate the social, economic and cultural aspects of
the site. Investigating and animating vacant sites, the ‘mean-
while idea is as much about the space in between as the time

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in between. More usually, these spaces are located in areas of
transition, which itself generates creative enterprise and experi-
mentation.

One of the ways Industri[us] attempts to engage with vacant
sites and the local community is through The Meanwhile Pro-
ject. The aim of this project is to provide opportunities for de-
sign in its broadest sense, with the architect acting as an agent
of change. It is a narrative and situation-based form of design
where the ordinary can be transformed into the extraordinary.
The process itself is as important as the product, comprised of
illuminating moments of exchange, achievement, insight and
learning, aimed at enabling and empowering communities and
stakeholders.

The Up-cycling context

The scale of waste produced in London is vast. Of the 3,860,000
tonnes generated in 2009 to 2010, 68% went to landfill or for
incineration and just 32% for recycling or reuse. Only 6,000
tonnes of waste were diverted away from landfill by reuse or-
ganizations in 2011; 40,000 tonnes is the Mayor's target for 2015.
A lot needs to be done to raise the profile and practice of reuse
and up-cycling to hit this target.

Neither the current nor the potential value of the up-cycling
market are easy to quantify because, as an emerging industry,
figures are not readily available. However, both the National In-
dustrial Symbiosis Programme (NisP) in the UK and Chicago's
Waste-to-Profit Network are demonstrating the capacity of
waste and reuse to create new enterprises and employment; in-
cluding old tyres turned into playground mats, restaurant cook-
ing oils turned into biodiesel, old uniforms turned into bags
and glass scraps turned into countertops. Despite the economic
downturn, the picture for emerging creative and innovative
businesses looks relatively good.

Meanwhile, the financial gain to manufacturers of putting
their waste to new use is known to be considerable. Established
brands such as Freitag and new brands such as Styling & Sal-

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INDUSTRI[US]

vage have entered the retail mainstream. In addition, there are
an increasing number of high-profile events focusing on fashion
reuse, such as ‘super-swish’ clothes swaps. The emerging market
for up-cycled goods demonstrates that such products can gener-
ate considerable value and that people are buying into the idea
of ‘something created out of nothing’ Industri[us] aims to foster
this creative transformation by providing enterprise opportuni-
ties for existing up-cyclers and facilitating others to enter the
industry. It also creates a ‘hub’ by drawing together like-minded
groups and through this critical mass forming a destination.

An ‘engine of change’

Conceived as a production line in an ‘engine of change, popu-
lated by an evolving coalition of artists, entrepreneurs, social
businesses, mentors and local people who all realize the value of
waste, the concept of Industri[us] in practice is made up of three
elements: the Engine Room, the Makeshift Market and the Spot-
light. The Industri[us] production line begins with the delivery
and collection of materials suitable for reuse — from individu-
als, schools, markets, manufacturers — before they become part
of the conventional waste disposal chain. The Engine Room is
the brain of the Industri[us] operation and home to a range of
innovative producers — from start-ups and those in need of a
launch pad, to existing enterprises looking to expand or to co-
locate with others working in material reuse. Workshop spaces
are provided for carpentry, jewelry-making and other small-
scale fabrication; while training and mentoring are offered for
start-up creative businesses, linked with local professionals and
groups through partnership schemes. Community groups and
schools can come to the Engine Room for hands-on activities
and learning.

Completed products are then delivered to the Makeshift
Market — the Industri[us] ‘shopfront. Here, products from the
Engine Room workshops and other makers are displayed and
sold in an ‘arcade’ —a demountable structure built from reused
materials. Visitors can also learn workshop skills or how to

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PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

‘make-do-and-mend, whilst also enjoying food stalls and out-
door entertainments. A central ‘think space’ provides an ideas
forum and an ad hoc research base for up-cycling, while smaller
spaces are available for themed activities and discussions. By
offering up-cycled fashion, furniture, art and accessories — at
competitive prices — Makeshift attracts a particular but grow-
ing type of consumer. It is a shopping destination, as well as a
beacon of creative enterprise and green innovation, with the
potential to be replicated on other sites. A variety of entertain-
ment events staged at Makeshift attempts to draw in a wider au-
dience and additional revenue, from makers’ fairs and fashion
shows to fun science activities and pry workshops. A weekly,
seasonal and potentially annual calendar of events is the next
stage of development and is established and curated by the local
Industri[us] team.

The final part of the production line involved in Industri[us]
is Spotlight. Spotlight is a place for public spectacle, with large-
scale installations designed to make people think twice about
the nature of ‘waste. A dynamic large-scale installation, Spot-
light acts as a highly visible signpost for Industri[us] and aims
to prompt people to rethink the nature of waste.

The Festival of Up-Cycling

Industri[us] first came to life through the Meanwhile London
‘Festival of Up-Cycling’ in Canning Town in the Olympic sum-
mer of 2012. Developed in collaboration with local organiza-
tions and delivery partners, the Festival provided work experi-
ence and paid training opportunities for young people and the
long-term unemployed. It also supported existing up-cycling
businesses and start-ups, making and selling products from fur-
niture and art to jewelry and fashion in order to create a show-
case and model for enterprise. The project was created entirely
from borrowed, used or reusable materials, including pavers
from the nearby Olympics roadworks to plants, materials and
whole gardens reused from the Chelsea Flower Show. Two tem-
porary public squares were created on the Canning Town site,

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INDUSTRI[US]

along with a street ‘pop-up’ food market and a striking scaffold-
ing pavilion to house an up-cycling market and other associated
events.

Industri[us] at Canning Town had two starting points — the
amount of waste produced by or traveling through the London
Borough of New ham (towards wharves for onward transporta-
tion to landfill sites) and the growing ‘community of interest’ in
up-cycling (both locally and regionally) — turning waste mate-
rials and products into desirable and valuable objects for use
and sale. This dovetailed with the Greater London Authority’s
(GLA’s) vision for a Green Enterprise District, lead by the arrival
of Siemens in the Royal Docks. In 2009 to 2010, only 15 percent
of Newham’s waste went for recycling or reuse. However, the
future looks brighter with the growth of local social enterprises
promoting community recycling and generating employment
through the resale of used products.

The Festival of Up-Cycling gathered together makers, doers,
traders and show people to create a destination through critical
mass. It provided support and links with other green enterprise
initiatives in the area and hosted a Green Pioneers Conference
with the London Borough of Newham, University of East Lon-
don and Happold Consulting. The exchange that occurred at the
festival through training and skilling in studios and workspaces
brought with it the notion of the prosumer and reintroduced the
world of making at the heart of a neighborhood. Newham is one
of the most deprived boroughs in London, with unemployment
rates at double the national average and almost a quarter of the
population without qualifications or workplace skills training.
However, with the ux’s largest population of under-twenty-five-
year-olds,” it was through the staging of the Festival that the op-
portunity to tap into and help train a wealth of dormant talent
was realized.

The Festival of Up-Cycling officially launched on July 27,
2012 and, coinciding with the start of the London 2012 Olympic

2 Figures sourced from NEF report on the 2012 Games and East London, April
2008.

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PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

Games, closed in early September. Located on Silvertown Way
and opposite Canning Town Station, the site fronted onto the
Olympics Spectator Walking Route which led down to ExCel.
By day the Canning Town Giant, constructed entirely from re-
claimed wood from local businesses, and designed and erected
by the Robot Art collective with help from local youth group
Peacock Gym, created a local icon and visual marker for the
project. By night, the Makeshift pavilion became an illuminated
beacon.

A broad audience was sought from those with an interest in
reuse and design, to those who wished to buy their lunch from
the street food market, or to explore the makeshift market and
showcase of up-cycled design and local goods for sale. A num-
ber of live music nights were staged, which attracted audiences
from the local area and further afield. During its time in op-
eration, the Festival supported a number of existing up-cycling
businesses and start-ups, who make and sell products from fur-
niture and art to jewelry and clothing.

Conclusion

Industri[us] is as much about the process of transformation as
about an end result. So its short operational time was not as im-
portant as the fact that ten young local trainees gained employ-
ment following their involvement. Although the makeshift mar-
ket structure was dismantled in September 2012, ‘Fluid’ handed
over the license for the site to their partners, Groundwork uk,
who have continued to operate it as a Reuse Centre, supporting
community events such as car-boot sales and retaining the Gi-
ant Canning Town Robot. In 2013, the site again received plant-
ing and materials from the Chelsea Flower Show continuing the
landscaping of the large site to create a positive public garden
whilst providing training and routes into employment for the
under-skilled and long-term unemployed.

Industri[us] has inspired many other projects and has been
used as a best-practice example for the development of interim-

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INDUSTRI[US]

use strategies as part of regeneration processes, including in-
forming Olympic Legacy projects.

135

Chapter 13

Working with the Neighbors
Cooperative Practices Delivering
Sustainable Benefits

Kate Royston

In our fast-moving, goal-driven society it’s easy to be insular, but
considerable benefits can be gained from talking to, and work-
ing with, the neighbors. This can be particularly true across port
industrial areas. Ports and their related industrial and amenity
areas are critical economic and social components in their re-
gion. As hubs for industry, business, leisure and logistics, they
are also resource-intensive and can pose environmental and so-
cial challenges. In the Netherlands, ports are vital to the national
economy. Faced with increasing growth, limited space and ever-
tightening environmental constraints, innovative collaborative
solutions have had to be developed to support port areas’ inten-
sification. One approach is industrial ecological thinking.

Industrial ecology thinking

Industrial ecology examines the way in which industrial systems
can mimic natural systems, and in so doing reduce their impact
on, and increase their harmony with, the natural environment.
In natural systems, materials are part of closed cycles or circular
systems. Industrial ecology seeks to take a systematic approach

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PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

to the ‘management of materials and energy flows through the
human economy, including beneficial use of waste’

Understanding the materials, energy, water and other re-
sources being consumed to produce products and services is
an important starting point for systematically looking at how
industrial systems and processes can be re-designed, costs re-
duced and new opportunities grasped. Importantly, this could
also support the pro-active management of the risks and vulner-
abilities we face from reducing resource availability.

IE evolution across Dutch Port areas
The practice of IE across Dutch port areas appears to have
evolved from the Rotterdam area facilitated by a history of busi-
ness association (now represented by Deltalinqs), catalyzed in
the late 1990s by government support to extend environmental
improvement beyond mere compliance.

IE and the Port of Rotterdam

A suggestion to test some of the lessons from Kalundborg in
Denmark, where inter-firm co-operation began in the early
1980s, led to the start of the Industrial EcoSystem (INEs) project
in 1994. A long-running project, INEs gave rise to a number of
influential co-operative opportunities which continue to evolve
today. These include the Botlek steam-pipe network, with the

1 Roland Clift, ‘Clean Technology and Industrial Ecology, in Pollution:
Causes, Effects and Control, ed. R.M. Harrison, 411-44 (Cambridge: The
Royal Society of Chemistry, 2001).

2 Renévan Berkel, ‘Regional Resource Synergies for Sustainable Development
in Heavy Industrial Areas: An Overview of Opportunities and Experiences,
2009, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270340749_Regional_Re-
source_Synergies_for_Sustainable_Development_in_Heavy_Industrial
Areas_an_Overview_of_Opportunities_and_Experiences; Frank Boons,
‘Self-Organisation & Sustainability: The Emergence of a Regional Industrial
Ecology, Emergence: Complexity and Organization 10, no. 2 (2008): 40-47,
https://journal.emergentpublications.com/article/self-organization-and-
sustainability-the-emergence-of-a-regional-industrial-ecology/.

138

WORKING WITH THE NEIGHBORS

potential to save 400,000 tonnes of co, per annum and deliver
air-quality improvement, currently under construction

Now considered normal practice across the port industrial
area, IE principles have been incorporated within the design of
Maasvlakte 11, the newest development area of the port, which
will be serviced through the provision of centralized utilities.
Significant benefit is also being derived from the Organic co,
for Assimilation of Plants (OCAP) initiative, supplying 500 hor-
ticultural businesses over 1,600 hectares with residual co, from
Shell Pernis.° The horticulturists benefit from production and
quality improvements and stable supply prices and are able to
save 95 million cubic meters (m3)/per annum (pa) of natural gas
and 170,000 tonnes/pa of co, emissions.°

Port of Moerdijk

The Port of Moerdijk, a leading light in eco-industrial park de-
velopment, has evolved from its beginnings as a petrochemical
cluster. Established in the 1970s to link Shell Moerdijk via pipe-
lines to Shell Pernis (Rotterdam), there are numerous material
flows between Shell and other cluster organizations.

In 1994, a study of environmental practices initiated by the
provincial government led to an action plan to redevelop the
area as an eco-industrial estate, beginning with collaborative en-
vironmental monitoring.” Progress has been supported through

3 Rotterdam Climate Initiative, Full Steam Ahead! Rotterdam Climate Initia-
tive: 2008 Report — Summary (Rotterdam: Rotterdam Climate Initiative,
2009), http://www.rotterdamclimateinitiative.nl/documents/ samenvat-
ting%200p%20Stoom%20EN.pdf; Port of Rotterdam, ‘Port Wants Steam
Pipe For co, Reduction, November 22, 2009, http://www. portofrotterdam.
com/en/News/pressreleases-news/Pages/20091126_01.aspx.

4 Port of Rotterdam, ‘Innovative Use of Space Looking for Environmental
Advantages, 2016, https://www.maasvlakte2.com/en/index/show/id/696/
sustainable-layout.

5 OCAP, co, voor de tuinbouw— Factsheet 2012, 2012, http://www.ocap.nl/
files/Ocap_Factsheet2012_UK.pdf
Ibid.

7 Haven van Moerdijk, ‘Port of Moerdijk; 2016, http://www.havenschapmo-
erdijk.nl/en/. Haven Amsterdam, ‘Port of Amsterdam’; Harmen Veldman,
personal communication to author, August 31, 2011.

139

PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

= Potentie “koppeling" Pele Energie, Wat!
—- Bestaande “koppeling™

o YALA 132ha inbreidingsgebied (cluster the

e. > al
Fig. 1: Sustainable Links at Moerdijk. Source: Moerdijk Port Author-
ity. Key: red dashed line — potential connections for residual heat,
energy, water and co,; white solid line — existing connections; yellow
‘hatched’ area — expansion area (132 ha) for a chemical industry
cluster

a multi-party steering group, with the businesses represented by
their association (BIM). The Port Authority acts as co-ordinator
and facilitator.*

Over time, an increasing number of beneficial relationships
have developed. Shell, the anchor tenant, supports a number
of residual flows, including steam with the co-sited municipal
incineration plant (Afvalverbranding Zuid-Nederland — azn)
and co-generation plant (Essent), and co, is piped to Omya
(a neighbouring business — see fig. 1) where it is used, togeth-
er with co, from Nv Slibverwerking Noord-Brabant’s sewage
sludge incineration, in the production of calcium carbonate.

8 René van Berkel, ‘Regional Resource Synergies’; Haven van Moerdijk, ‘Port
of Moerdijk.

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WORKING WITH THE NEIGHBORS

A further detailed resource-flow assessment across the area
identified more potential linkages and established the ‘Sustain-
able Links Moerdijk (fig. 1) program. Supported by an enabling
agreement and funding instruments, it includes a vision to im-
plement an ‘Energyweb across the area, which is now well un-
derway.

Zeeland Seaports
At Zeeland Seaports, well-established industries such as Dow
Chemicals have capitalized upon their residual resource streams
through symbiotic linkages which have evolved over time; for
example, pipelines have replaced haulage between Cargill and
Nedalco. The importance of these connections was recognized
by Zeeland Seaports and other stakeholders, and Valuepark
Terneuzen (vpT) and Biopark Terneuzen (BPT) were established
in 2007.°

BPT's aim is to attract more agro-industrial businesses sup-
ported by ‘smart links’ to interconnect resource streams (fig.2).”°
This would enable a ‘plug-and-play’ offer to be made to new
businesses, reducing the risk for the new entrant as well as ena-
bling diversification for the port. The feasibility of the deploy-
ment of implementing a Multi-User Provider (mup) pipeline
concept across the whole area is being explored as part of the
EU project Ports Adapting To Change (patcH);” and a pilot joint
venture, Warmco, has been set up to deliver heat and 70,000
tonnes pa of co, to a new development of horticultural produc-

9 Partners include Cargill, Nedalco, Yara, EcoServices, ESV Groep, Heros
Groep, Rosendaal Energy, Valuepark Terneuzen (JV Zeeland Seaports &
Dow Benelux), Gemeente Terneuzen, Provincie Zeeland and Zeeland Sea-
ports Port Authority.

10 D. Engelhardt, ‘Sustainability in the Bio/Agro Industry: A Case Study, In-
stitute of Civil Engineers 163, no. 1 (2010): 3-8, http://www.icevirtuallibrary.
com/doi/pdf/10.1680/warm.2010.163.1.3

u_H. Holt, The Art of Green Patchwork: European Ports Collaborate to Innovate
Ports Adapting To Change (paTcH), GreenPort, 2011; http://www.zeeland-
seaports.nl/nl/download/file:green-patchwork.htm

141

PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

Greenhouse com-
HH
plex

MM Heat

a —— mca:

wed oan \ Cargill IEEE Biomass
+ wT] | mee
~ f f
pant & ] L Nedalcs ] Mil Electricity
HE Steam
@) eseadaatennay” |_| HE Starch

/

Fig. 2: Biopark Terneuzen Smart links. Key: hitte = heat, biomassa =
biomass, electriciteit = electricity, stoom = steam, zetmeel = starch.
Source: Biopark Terneuzen, Benefits for business and the environ-
ment, Biopark Terneuzen, 2012, http://www.bioparkterneuzen.com/
nl/download/file:drieluikfolder-biopark-2012.htm.

ers. The co-operation also extends across the border with the
Ghent Bio Energy Valley in Belgium to form Bio Base Europe.”

Port of Amsterdam

A number of initiatives at the Port of Amsterdam (PoA) have
evolved through its close links with the City government. Indus-
trial ecology is seen as an important component in enabling the
City and PoA to achieve their jointly set targets to reduce co,
emissions by 40 percent by 2025."

12 D. Engelhardt, Sustainability in the Bio/Agro Industry; ‘Bio Base Europe,
2011, http://www.biobaseeurope.eu/.

13 Roselin Dey, ‘Amsterdam — Sustainable City in the Making; Justmeans,
May 26, 2010, http://www.justmeans.com/blogs/amsterdam-sustainable-
city-in-the-making; ‘For a Clean Society, The Amsterdam Energy Company
(AEB), 2016, http://www.aebamsterdam.com.

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WORKING WITH THE NEIGHBORS

The Amsterdam Energy Company

The Amsterdam Energy Company (AzB) is a PoA tenant, op-
erated by the City of Amsterdam." Its two incinerators are co-
located with a waste water treatment plant. Feedstock includes
municipal and commercial waste, and sewage sludge from the
water treatment plant. 1 million MegaWatt Hours (MWh) elec-
tricity is output each year supplying the City, powering its tram
and metro systems, street lighting and several buildings.” Fur-
ther, Westport Warmte (wpw), a joint venture between the City
and an energy company, takes heat from AEB and supplies local
businesses and residents."

Greenmills is also of interest. A partnership of businesses
producing bio-diesel, bio-ethanol and bio-gas have co-located,
taking in residual streams from port area food and animal feed
producers and gaining logistical advantages and efficiency of re-
source use (including heat and water) through collaboration.”
Surplus heat is distributed via a wpw connection, A resource
mapping project called “Waste = Raw Materials in the Amster-
dam harbors region’ sponsored by the City and the Port Author-
ity ’) also identified organic phosphorous which is being used by
1cl Fertilizers.”

Drivers, enablers and barriers

Industrial ecology is clearly an important factor in Dutch port
development, for individual businesses and for the port estate
and wider area as a whole. In Moerdijk, the co-operative prac-
tices have been particularly well-embedded within the area’s

14 ‘Welcome to Amsterdam's Waste and Energy Company.

15 J. Lammers, Seaports as Turntables towards Sustainability: Policy Letter on
Sustainable Seaports, Directoraat-Generaal Luchtvaart en Maritieme Za-
ken, Ministerie van Verkeer en Waterstaat, 2008.

16 Haven van Amsterdam, ‘Port of Amsterdam, 2011, http://www.portofam-
sterdam.nl/smartsite.dws?id=18493.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.; Veldman, personal communication to author.

19 Ibid.; Veldman, personal communication to author.

143

PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

Fig. 3: Felixstowe Skip Trailer. Source: Port of Felixstowe

management and partnership structures. Whilst differences can
be seen in their evolution (timing and approaches) there are a
number of common factors. These were compared to practices
in the uK through a research study across twenty port opera-
tions in Southwest England.” This highlighted that key drivers
are much weaker. The strong Dutch regulatory pressure and
government support to improve environmental conditions are
less evident, whilst barriers are much in evidence. There is lim-
ited contact between businesses, and business associations link-
ing neighbors to common aims are rare. Co-operation around
common interests such as planning and development, through
multi-stakeholder partnerships, is also uncommon, This limits
chances to develop trusting relationships. The limited public
stake in the port realm is also a factor.

There are opportunities, but these need enabling. The role of
facilitators and champions, such as anchor tenants, are essential
to develop and sustain interest; infrastructure for knowledge
sharing and information exchange, technical assistance and,
importantly, an economic business case are also important in-
gredients.

20 K. Royston, Application of Industrial Ecology across Port Areas: The Potential
to Leverage Commercial Advantage and Support Sustainable Development in
SW England (MSc Thesis, University of Surrey, 2011).

144

WORKING WITH THE NEIGHBORS

Deepening collaboration over time

Research and practice show that collaboration can deepen over
time from quick wins to wider co-operation as confidence grows
between businesses. Larger infrastructure projects such as pipe-
line links may develop where the business case makes sense.

Quick wins are important for developing confidence between
parties. They can be facilitated through tools, such as National
Industrial Symbiosis Programme's (NtsP) Quick Wins work-
shops, which bring businesses together in a ‘resource speed-
dating’ exercise. They enable networking between neighbors
and reward attendance through business gain.

The Port of Barcelona's waste collection service is a good
example of wider co-operation.» In place for many years, the
service collects several waste streams from tenants. The waste
collection service is yielding benefits including improved waste
management compliance and reduced waste to landfill. Simi-
larly, the Port of Felixstowe (fig. 3) has developed an innova-
tive skip trailer which enables segregated waste to be collected
from vessels at the quayside.* An email exchange with the port
confirmed that the skip trailer has reduced collection costs and
increased recycling rates.

Longer-term capital infrastructure, such as pipeline systems
like the Botlek steam loop, require considerable investment and
long term co-operative models to support a business case which
may not yield immediate returns.

Not just for big industrial areas
Research and practice also indicate that opportunities do exist

to exploit resources across small-and medium-sized port areas
and their vicinities. This might include provision of shared fa-

21 Jaume Gonzalez, “Waste Management in the Port of Barcelona’ (presenta-
tion at EcoPorts Foundation Conference, Genoa, December 2006).
22 G. Reeve, email exchange with author, 2009.

145

PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

Fig. 4: The Bristol Port Estate area. Source: The Bristol Port Company

cilities, such as waste provision and exchange of resources be-
tween organizations.

What is key is taking the time to gain a working knowledge
and understanding of the businesses and organizations within
the area; sharing information about needs, requirements and re-
sidual resources; understanding the area’s strengths, weakness-
es, opportunities and threats and how these can be countered
and built upon collaboratively.

Fowey Harbour Commissioners provide a good example.”
Recognizing the negative impact of declining china clay exports,
they have joined with local stakeholders to explore options for
utilizing the significant volumes of china clay aggregate (a waste
from quarrying) as a sustainable construction material.

SevernNet

The research undertaken by Kate Royston led to a demonstra-
tion project across the Bristol Port estate area (fig. 4).** From an
initial meeting in 2009 with five pilot businesses, the initiative

23 M. Sutherland, personal communication with author, 2009.
24 Royston, ‘Application of Industrial Ecology across Port Areas.

146

WORKING WITH THE NEIGHBORS

has grown and has engaged with more than 125 businesses and
organizations across the area. Four of the pilot businesses (The
Bristol Port Company, Siniat, ApM Milling and ps Smith Pack-
aging) are core members of the Champions Steering Group.

Many of the businesses involved meet regularly and have
benefitted from learning from and exchanging with each other.
There is a feeling of increased empowerment, for example, to
manage waste resources more effectively, and significant cost
savings have been achieved. Toyota GB Portbury has trans-
formed its waste practices and is close to zero waste to land-
fill. Business-to-business expertise is spreading in a number of
areas —e.g. the deployment of LED lighting which can have a
rapid payback— and there is a recognition that a lot more can
be achieved.

The project is now established as a legal entity, SevernNet,”
managed by a Champions Board. The agenda has been broad-
ened to rebuild and strengthen links between the industrial and
residential communities and to deal with their key challenges,
such as getting more local people into local jobs, securing better
employee travel facilities and supporting more sustainable de-
velopment across the newly designated Avonmouth Severnside
Enterprise Area.

Self-interest to shared interest

The key to the success of SevernNet, and similar initiatives, is

the recognition that more can be achieved from working to-

gether in a spirit of shared interest, rather than just self interest.
The re-establishment of links and co-operation between di-

verse communities of interest is vital in securing a resilient and

effective local economy.

25 ‘SevernNet is a new enterprise bringing together businesses and community
enterprises from Portbury, Avonmouth and Severnside’: www.severnnet.
org.

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PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

In summary

Ports and their cities face increasing pressure to find new ways
of managing the challenges of intensification, congestion and
spiraling resource costs. This also presents a great opportunity
to embrace alternative approaches. Industrial ecology is in-
creasingly being demonstrated across the globe as a practical
response, ideally suited to port city environments, leading to
improved resource effectiveness, reductions in cost and envi-
ronmental impact, and the emergence of ‘greener’ industry and
economic diversification.

To take advantage of these opportunities requires new
ways of thinking and acting for business, getting to know each
other, building trust and working co-operatively and collabo-
ratively. Getting started may not always be easy. It requires
(a) champion(s), a facilitator and willingness for stakeholders
to begin a process of positive engagement. Ideally, reaping the
benefits also necessitates industrial ecology thinking to be em-
bedded within strategic and spatial planning and new develop-
ments.

There is growing interest that the lessons being learnt could
have wider application across Bristol and elsewhere, and oppor-
tunities for Plymouth should be explored as the new Plymouth
Plan is developed!

148

Chapter 14

Low-Carbon (Re-)Industrialization
Lessons from China

Kevin Lo and Mark Wang

Intoduction

The difference between (re-)industrialization in the past and
present is that energy security and climate change now increas-
ingly frame the space in which such processes take place. There-
fore, there is an urgent need to rethink (re-)industrialization
as part of a low-carbon future, rather than as something that
perpetuates the current carbon-intensive mode of production
and consumption. The aim of this chapter is to explore the con-
cept of low-carbon industrialization, which has recently gained
significant traction in China as part of the rethinking process.
More specifically, this chapter seeks to clarify the meaning of
low-carbon industrialization, supported by examples from Chi-
na. The chapter also seeks to transfer lessons from China's expe-
rience with low-carbon industrialization to the context of (re-)
industrialization. To anticipate the conclusion, this paper argues
that both top-down and bottom-up initiatives can be important
in low-carbon (re-)industrialization and that their appropriate-
ness depends on the market structure and technological charac-
teristics of the industry.

Following this short introduction, this chapter discusses en-
ergy security and climate change, which are the key challenges
to (re-)industrialization. Next, it defines low-carbon industriali-

149

PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

zation and illustrates the concept with the development of pho-
tovoltaic, wind turbine and solar water heater industries from
China. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the lessons
learnt from China’s experience with low-carbon industrializa-
tion.

Key challenges of re-industrialization: energy security
and climate change

Improving energy security and tackling climate change are two
of the greatest challenges of the twenty-first century. One of the
key energy security concerns is peak oil, which refers to the
peaking or plateauing of the production of petroleum. Although
the timing of peak oil remains the subject of heated debate,
mainly due to uncertainty over the size of ultimate recoverable
reserves (especially in unconventional, but often controver-
sial places such as the Arctic), there is an increasing consensus
that high-quality, low-cost conventional oils are declining and
beginning to be substituted by low-quality, expensive sources
such as Alberta's tar sands and heavy oils in the Orinoco Delta."
Coupled with the increasing demand from developing coun-
tries, oil prices are more than likely to continue to rise. Another
energy security concern is energy dependency upon politically
unstable territories? Such concern has driven governments to
implement policies to reduce dependency on imported energy
by increasing the domestic supply of energy (which may or may
not be renewable) and reducing demand through energy con-
servation measures.

Climate change refers to significant and long-term changes
in the average weather patterns caused by the emission of green-
house gases (e.g., carbon dioxide and methane), mainly from
the combustion of fossil fuels but also from non-combustion

1 Gavin Bridge. ‘Geographies of Peak Oil: The Other Carbon Problem, Geofo-
rum 41 (2010): 523-30.

2 Erica S. Downs. “The Chinese Energy Security Debate, China Quarterly 177
(2004): 2-41.

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LOW-CARBON (RE-)INDUSTRIALIZATION

sources such as non-energy industrial processes and agriculture,
forest, and other land use (AFOLU). It is now generally accepted
that the adverse effects of climate change include global warm-
ing, an increased likelihood and intensity of extreme weather
events, and rising sea levels.’ The internationally institutional-
ized climate change target, first established by the Copenhagen
Accord (UNECCC, 2009)* and subsequently ratified in the Can-
cun Agreements (UNECCC, 2010),’ is to constrain global temper-
ature change to two degrees above the pre-industrial level. This
temperature target could be achieved by a 450 ppm [parts per
million] co, stabilization level. The long lifetime of greenhouse
gases, particularly co,, means that to achieve this target carbon
emissions need to peak as soon as 2014.°

The two carbon problems are curiously contrasted, as noted
by Bridge (2010), because energy security takes the form of flow
constrictions and resource constraints, whereas climate change
is fundamentally a problem of abundance and unrestrained flow.
Nonetheless, energy security and climate change are connected
by their relationships to the carbon-intensive mode of produc-
tion and consumption. Prima facie, the two carbon problems
appear to have made (re-)industrialization less desirable and
viable as an urban development strategy due to the perceived
energy intensity and carbon intensity of industrial activity. Us-
ing a general equilibrium model developed by the World Bank,

3 J. Houghton. Global Warming: The Complete Briefing (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2004).

4 UNECCC, Conference of the Parties (cop), Report of the Conference of the
Parties on its Fifteenth Session, Held in Copenhagen from 7 to 19 December
2009. Addendum. Part Two: Action Taken by the Conference of the Par-
ties at its Fifteenth Session (Geneva: United Nations Office, 2010), https://
unfccc.int/documentation/documents/advanced_search/items/6911.
php?priref=600005735.

5 UNECCC, Conference of the Parties (cop), Report of the Conference of the
Parties on its Sixteenth Session, Held in Cancun from 29 November to 10 De-
cember 2010. Addendum Part Two: Action Taken by the Conference of the
Parties at its Sixteenth Session (Geneva: United Nations Office, 2010).

6 Chris Huntingford et al., “The Link between a Global 2°C Warming Thresh-
old and Emissions in Years 2020, 2050 and Beyond; Environmental Research
Letters 7 (2012): 014039.

151

PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

Mattot et al. (2011) estimated that even modest carbon control
depresses industrial output by 3 to 3.5 percent and industrial ex-
ports by 5.5 to 7 percent for carbon-intensive countries such as
China and India.” Arguments have been made that developing
countries should bypass industrialization in pursuit of a service-
oriented economy. However, it has also been argued that if the
right path is taken, industrialization can contribute to the build-
ing of a prosperous, low-carbon future. Zhang calls for a re-
thinking of industrialization as part of this future. As the world’s
largest carbon polluters, the concept of low-carbon industriali-
zation is rapidly gaining currency in China as part of the re-
thinking process. This paper now turns to examine this concept.

Low-carbon industrialization in China

There are in fact three meanings of low-carbon industrializa-
tion: (1) the decarbonization of existing carbon-intensive in-
dustries through energy conservation or carbon capture and se-
questration; (2) the development of high-tech, high value-added
and low-emission industries (e.g. biomedicine and information
technology) and (3) the development of industries that manu-
facture low-carbon energy systems and infrastructures, such as
products in energy efficiency (e.g. building insulation materi-
als), renewable energy (photovoltaic and wind turbines) and cli-
mate adaptation. Because of the limitation of space, this chapter
focuses on the third dimension of low-carbon industrialization,
although it acknowledges that all three types are significant and
useful responses to climate change. To further illustrate the level
of complexity and variety even within this narrow definition of
low-carbon industrialization, this chapter divides the abstract
discussion into three examples: the photovoltaic industry, the

7 Aaditya Mattoo et al., ‘Can Global De-Carbonization Inhibit Developing
Country Industrialization?, The World Bank Economic Review 26 (2011):
296-319.

8 Zhang, L.-Y., ‘Is Industrialization Still a Viable Development Strategy for
Developing Countries under Climate Change?, Climate Policy 11 (2011):
1159-76.

152

LOW-CARBON (RE-)INDUSTRIALIZATION

wind turbine industry and the solar water heater industry. These
examples are carefully chosen to demonstrate the diverse path-
ways through which low-carbon industrialization develops and
evolves.

The photovoltaic industry

Photovoltaic (Pv) units convert sunlight into electricity by
means of silicon-based materials. The pv production chain con-
sists of upstream production (i.e. purification of silicon, cast-
ing silicon into ingots, and slicing ingots into wafers), which is
capital- and technology-intensive and downstream production
(i.e. assembling silicon wafers into cells and modules), which
is energy- and labour-intensive.’ Barriers to entry are high in
upstream production but relatively low in downstream produc-
tion, where entire turnkey production lines can be purchased
and run without much prior experience. This provides a suit-
able entry point for Chinese start-ups such as Suntech, Yingli
and Trina, which entered the downstream pv industry in the
early 2000s. These private companies have been able to com-
pete aggressively in the global market on a price basis, and have
very quickly propelled China to be the world’s largest pv cell and
module manufacturer. However, China’s position in upstream
production remained weak until 2007, when China produced
just 2.5 percent of the world’s silicon.’°Recently, Chinese firms
have accumulated sufficient capital and technological know-
how to venture upstream. By 2010, China had gained substantial
market share in almost every step of the pv production chain: 33
percent of silicon processing, 52 percent of ingots and wafers, 50
percent of pv cells, and 28 percent of pv modules.” China's pv
industry is export-oriented, with less than 10 percent of output

9 Arnaud De La Tour et al., Innovation and International Technology Trans-
fer: The Case of the Chinese Photovoltaic Industry, Energy Policy 39 (2011):
761-70.

10 Ibid.

u Alim Bayaliyev et al., China’ Solar Policy: Subsidies, Manufacturing
Overcapacity & Opportunities (Washington, pc: GW School of Public
Policy and Public Administration, 2011), http://solar.gwu.edu/research/

153

PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

absorbed domestically.” The export orientation of the Pv in-
dustry reflects the lack of domestic installation — by the end of
2009, the cumulative installation of pv in China was 300 MW,
equal to 3.3 percent of that in Germany.®

The development of the pv industry in China is largely a bot-
tom-up affair. Until recently, Chinese authorities have done little
to support the industry.* Rather, success is attributed to local
entrepreneurialism, the recruitment of skilled executives from
the Chinese diaspora, low energy and labour costs, and the sub-
sidy of pv in Europe through generous feed-in tariffs.” The 2008
global financial crisis and the reduction in pv feed-in tariff and
installation subsidies among European countries created prob-
lems with overcapacity and diminished profits. In response, the
Chinese government introduced a series of supportive policies
such as subsidized credit from state-owned banks.'® Moreover,
the government introduced direct subsidies and feed-in tariffs
to boost domestic pv installation. Consequently, the cumulative
PV installation in China skyrocketed from 300 MW at the end
of 2009 to 3300 MW at the end of 2011, an increase by a factor of
11 over two years.” In 2012, the government promised to invest a
further 15 billion RMB to increase Pv installation by 5200 MW.*
These policies have been instrumental in protecting the pv in-
dustry in China from collapse.

china%E2%80%99s-solar-policy-subsidies-manufacturing-overcapacity-
opportunities

12 Bernardina Algieri et al., “Going “Green”: Trade Specialisation Dynamics in
the Solar Photovoltaic Sector, Energy Policy 39: 7275-83.

13 Mo-Lin Huo and Dan-Wei Zhang, ‘Lessons from Photovoltaic Policies in
China for Future Development; Energy Policy 51 (2012): 38-45.

14 Dela Tour et al., Innovation and International Technology Transfer’.

15 Ibid.; Bayaliyev et al., China’s Solar Policy.

16 Jailu Liu and Don Goldstein, ‘Understanding China’s Renewable Energy
Technology Exports, Energy Policy 52 (2013): 417-28.

17 Sufang Zhang and Yongxiu He, ‘Analysis on the Development and Policy
of Solar pv Power in China, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 21
(2013): 393-401.

18 Eric Savitz, ‘China Solar Stocks Soar; Chinese Government Vows $2B in
Subsidies, Forbes, December 12, 2012.

154

LOW-CARBON (RE-)INDUSTRIALIZATION

The wind turbine industry

A wind turbine generation system (wTGs) generates electricity
by capturing kinetic energy from wind to power a generator.
Unlike the pv industry, the wrcs industry is vertically integrat-
ed and highly concentrated. In the early 2000s, four companies
from Europe and the United States controlled the wres market:
Vestas, Gamesa, Enercon and GE Wind.” Technical barriers to
entry are high because the production of competitive wTGs re-
quires specialized labour skills and technical know-how.”° China
forayed into the wrcs industry at approximately the same time
as the pv industry, but through very different means. Foreign
direct investment played a crucial role in the early days, with
almost all leading companies investing in China.” Foreign wrcs
makers were attracted to China because of the rapidly growing
wind-power market driven by supportive policies, including
direct subsidies and feed-in tariffs. Moreover, the requirement
that at least 70 percent of the materials be sourced locally to
be eligible for subsidies and feed-in tariffs practically forbade
foreign companies from exporting components and turbines
directly from China.” In short, the government created a condi-
tion that strongly incentivized foreign companies to establish
production lines in China. In contrast to the pv industry, the
wTGs industry in China is domestic-oriented, with very little
export. The growth of the industry is thus inseparable from the
strong, policy-driven growth in the domestic deployment of

19 Liu and Goldstein, ‘Understanding China’s Renewable Energy Technology
Exports.

20 Zhen-Yu Zhao, et al., ‘Comparative Assessment of Performance of Foreign
and Local Wind Turbine Manufacturers in China, Renewable Energy 39
(2012): 424-32.

21 Liu and Goldstein, ‘Understanding China’s Renewable Energy Technology
Exports.

22 Yuanchun Zhou et al., Joint R&D in Low-Carbon Technology Develop-
ment in China: A Case Study of the Wind-turbine Manufacturing Industry,
Energy Policy 46 (2012): 100-108.

155

PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

wtTcs, which became the world’s largest in terms of cumulative
capacity in 2010.¥

Another interesting feature of the wres industry in China
is the rapid rise of domestic manufacturers, which surpassed
foreign-owned companies in Chinas wtcs market share in
2007 and secured a market share of 87 percent in 2010.” Joint
research and development (R&D) projects are a key strategy
of fast-track learning on the part of domestic manufacturers.
Whereas the leading foreign companies invest directly in China
to protect proprietary information, small-scale design and con-
sulting firms usually collaborate with Chinese wres manufac-
turers in joint R&D. The acquisition of human capital is crucial
to the process of technological transfer through joint R&D. For
example, when the Shanghai Electric Company (sEc) and Aero-
dyn collaborated to design two MW wind turbines, sEc sent 30
engineers to Germany to receive professional training for one
year.* Through the training, the engineers obtained a basic
capacity to design wind turbines and gained knowledge about
Aerodyn's technological foundation, such that they can collabo-
rate with Aerodyn experts to design wrcss that would satisfy
local climatic requirements.

Solar water heaters

Solar water heating (swH) is a type of solar thermal technology
used to heat water from direct sunlight. China's swH industry
has grown rapidly in the last decade. The annual swH produc-
tion increased from 6.1 million square meters in 2000 to 42 mil-
lion square meters in 2009, making China by far the largest swH
manufacturer in the world.” A complete production chain has
formed from raw material processing to final product assem-

23 Global Wind Energy Council, Global Wind Report— Annual Market Up-
date (Brussels: Global Wind Energy Council, 2011), http://gwec.net/wp-
content/uploads/2012/06/Annual_report_2011_lowres.pdf.

24 Zhou et al., ‘Joint R&D in Low-Carbon Technology Development in China.

25 Ibid.

26 Hu Rungqing et al., ‘An Overview of the Development of Solar Water Heater
Industry in China, Energy Policy 51 (2012): 46-51.

156

LOW-CARBON (RE-)INDUSTRIALIZATION

bly. Vacuum-tube swu, which relatively is less technologically
intensive, dominates the market. Because the technological bar-
riers are low, the industry is highly fragmented and competi-
tive. There are over 5,000 SWH manufacturers in China, most
of them limited in production capacity and product quality.”
Nevertheless, a batch of large and influential enterprises has
emerged in the sector, including four enterprises with an output
value of 2 billion Rms.

The most striking feature of the development of the swH in-
dustry is that it is an entirely local initiative, with little reliance
on the foreign market (unlike pv), foreign investments (unlike
WTGs) and government intervention (also unlike wres). The
key to success is that the swH industry is able to produce prod-
ucts that can compete with traditional fuel-based water heaters
on a price basis without the help of government subsidies. Using
a life-cycle cost analysis of vacuum-tube sw, Han et al. (2010)
found that a household can save 342-3321 RMB in fuel costs an-
nually, depending on household water use. Considering that
SWHS are approximately 800-1,000 RMB more expensive than
traditional water heaters, their payback period can be as brief as
a few months. This economic competitiveness has led to a large
domestic demand, with a 33 percent average annual growth rate
of sales from 2006 to 2009.”

Conclusions: lessons from China

The key lesson learnt from the present analysis of China’s low-
carbon industrialization is that there are many pathways of de-
velopment. The pv industry was developed using the export-
oriented model, primarily targeting the European market,
which was booming thanks to generous feed-in tariffs. The de-
velopment of the pv industry is mainly a bottom-up initiative,

27 Jingyi Han et al., ‘Solar Water Heaters in China: A New Day Dawning; En-
ergy Policy 38 (2010): 383-91.

28 Runging et al., ‘An Overview of the Development of Solar Water Heater
Industry in China.

29 Ibid.

157

PART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

with little involvement from the government until recently. The
wTcs industry in China was developed with the help of direct
foreign investment, either as wholly foreign-owned companies
or as joint R&D projects. In either case, there has been a suc-
cessful technology transfer to domestic companies, which now
dominate the domestic market. The development of the wrcs
industry is a top-down initiative, as government intervention
is central, particularly in creating the conditions to attract for-
eign companies to China. The swH industry was developed as a
pure bottom-up initiative, with little involvement from foreign
markets, foreign companies and government intervention. The
success of the swH industry lies primarily in its ability to out-
compete traditional water heaters without the help of govern-
ment subsidies.

To conclude, this chapter made two contributions to the
discussion of (re-)industrialization in industrialized countries.
First, it highlighted the imperative of rethinking (re-)industri-
alization in face of the two carbon problems; that of energy se-
curity and climate change. Second, this paper argued that low-
carbon (re-)industrialization can be achieved through multiple
alternative pathways. Both top-down and bottom-up initiatives
can be important, and the appropriateness of the model de-
pends on the market structure and technological characteristics
of the industry.

158

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175

About the Contributors

Editor

Krzysztof Nawratek is a senior lecturer in Architecture at the
School of Architecture, the University of Sheffield, United
Kingdom. Educated as an architect and urban planner, he has
worked as a visiting professor at the Geography Department at
the University of Latvia and as a researcher at National Institute
for Regional and Spatial Analysis, Maynooth, Ireland. He was
a member of the Board of Experts European Prize for Urban
Public Space 2012, 2014 and 2016 and a member of the selec-
tion panel for the Polish contribution to the 13th International
Architecture Biennial in Venice in 2012 and to the 14th in 2014.
Krzysztof Nawratek is an urban theorist, author of City as a
Political Idea (Plymouth, University of Plymouth Press, 2011),
Holes in the Whole: Introduction to the Urban Revolutions (Win-
chester, Zero Books, 2012) and Radical Inclusivity. Architecture
and Urbanism (ed. Barcelona, dpr-barcelona, 2015) several pa-
pers and chapters in edited books.

Contributors

Karl Baker is a consultant in urban and transport planning at
MRCagney, Auckland, New Zealand. He has previously contrib-
uted to architectural and planning strategies that incorporate in-
dustrial workspace in mixed-use developments in London. His
research on urban reindustrialization was initially undertaken
as part of his MSc City Design and Social Science completed at

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the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2011.
He has held positions at the Future Cities Catapult, London, Ls
Cites and the New Zealand Ministry of Transport. His current
work and research interests focus on the political economy of
urban planning policy and economic evaluation of transport
infrastructure.

John R. Bryson is Professor of Enterprise and Competitive-
ness and Director of the City-Region Economic Development
Institute, Birmingham Business School, University of Birming-
ham, UK. He research initially focused on the rise and role of
business and professional services (BPs), but since 2005 has
explored the changing economic geography of manufacturing
in developed market economies. This research has explored the
interactions between Bps and manufacturing and, in particular,
the role design plays in the competitiveness of manufacturing
firms. His books include Service Worlds: People, Organisations,
Technologies (Routledge); Hybrid Manufacturing Systems and
Hybrid Products (tma/ziw & IfU); Design Economies and the
Changing World Economy (Routledge) and Industrial Design,
Competition and Globalization (Palgrave).

Jennifer Clark is an Associate Professor in the School of Pub-
lic Policy and the Director of the Center for Urban Innovation
at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on
regional economic development, manufacturing, industrial dis-
tricts and innovation. Her first book, Remaking Regional Econo-
mies: Power, Labor, and Firm Strategies in the Knowledge Econ-
omy (with Susan Christopherson) won the Best Book Award
from the Regional Studies Association in 2009. Her newest
book, Working Regions: Reconnecting Innovation and Produc-
tion in the Knowledge Economy (2013) focuses on policy models
aimed at rebuilding the links between innovation and manufac-
turing in the us

Michael Edwards is an economist and planner at the Bartlett
School, uct. He works with the Just Space network of activist

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URBAN RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION AS A POLITICAL PROJECT

groups on London Planning and the London economy (http://
justspace.org.uk) and blogs at http://michaeledwards.org.
ukwhere his publications are also listed. Active on Twitter @
michaellondonsf

Alison Hulme is an associate researcher at the Centre for the
Study of the Moral Foundations of Economy and Society at Uni-
versity College Cork, Ireland. She has previously held posts at
Royal Holloway, ux; University of Otago, New Zealand; Univer-
sity College Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of On the Com-
modity Trail (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and various journal
articles. Prior to entering academia, Alison was a radio and Tv
presenter for many years.

Doreen Jakob is an artist and scholar at uNc Chapel Hill, usa
and at the University of Exeter, ux. She has held research posi-
tions at the Centre for an Urban Future in New York City, at the
Urban Research Program at Griffith University, Brisbane, Aus-
tralia, at the Centre for Metropolitan Studies in Berlin, for the
German Research Foundation, for the Emmy Noether Program
and, most recently, with the uk Arts and Humanities Research
Council. Doreen received her PhD from Humboldt University
Berlin.

Jeffrey T. Kruth is an urbanist and educator based at Kent State
University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative (cupc)
where he contributes to the research, design, and teaching as-
pects of the practice. Prior to joining the cupc he practiced in
New Haven, ct, building affordable housing, and worked at the
Yale Urban Design Workshop. His work explores the intersec-
tions of cultural landscapes, economics, politics, & technology.

Karol Kurnicki is an post-doctoral researcher at the Institute
of Sociology, Jagiellonian University, Poland. He currently re-
searches socio-spatial processes of bordering and differentia-
tion in large urban housing estates. He was a visiting researcher
at the Culture Theory Space Research Cluster, University of

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Plymouth (2012) and The Centre for Urban Conflicts Research,
University of Cambridge (2014). He is one of the founders of
Zaktad Ustug Miejskich (Urban Workshop) association. Main
academic interests include urban studies, urban sociology and
critical sociology.

Kevin Lo is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Geog-
raphy, Hong Kong Baptist University. As a human geographer
with a research focus on environmental governance and poli-
tics, Kevin is interested in the relationship between authoritari-
anism and environmentalism, and the development of effective
policy interventions and governance mechanisms to promote
renewable energy and energy efficiency. He has published in
many leading journals, including Renewable and Sustainable
Energy Reviews, Energy Policy, Energy for Sustainable Develop-
ment, Energies, Environmental Science & Policy, Habitat Interna-
tional, and Cities.

Malcolm Miles is author of Limits to Culture (2015), Eco-Aes-
thetics: Art, Literature and Architecture in a Period Of Climate
Change (2014), and Herbert Marcuse: An Aesthetics of Liberation
(London, Pluto Press, 2011). His next book is Cities e Literature
(2017/18); he is researching a future book on radical aesthetics
from Romanticism to contemporary critical art practices, and
maintains an interest in modernist painting and architecture.

Rachel Mulhall is Research Fellow at the Business School, Uni-
versity of Birmingham, ux. Her research interests focus on the
firm, competitiveness and the regional economy. Current work
is focused on understanding the spatial and contractual struc-
ture of supply chains, business adjustment and risk manage-
ment.

Christina Norton a founder and director of Fluid, whose crea-
tive practice has contributed to new attitudes towards architec-
ture, planning and creative practice. The work is founded on
live research and user participation and ranges from large-scale

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regeneration, neighbourhood planning and urban strategies to
hybrid programmes and interventions to one off architectural
projects. In 2007 Christina with fellow director Steve McAdam
established Soundings to offer stand alone public consultation,
acting as an impartial voice in the development process. In 2011
Fluid conceived and delivered Industri[us] an interim use strat-
egy for vacant sites to revalue waste materials, bring back the
economic, social and civic and help communities back on their
feet. Between 1985-2009 Christina taught at the Architectural
Association and London Metropolitan University, she was a
founder of NAT@ the 1980’s avant-guard architecture group.

Kate Royston is an independent researcher, facilitator and advi-
sor now based in south-western England. During 2006/7 she
worked with the EcoPorts Foundation in Amsterdam which
sparked a lasting interest in port areas and finding sustainable
solutions to their environmental challenges. This ongoing re-
search was partly undertaken as her dissertation project in part
fulfilment of the MSc in Sustainable Development (University
of Surrey) completed in 2011.

Tatjana Schneider is a researcher, writer and educator based at
the School of Architecture in Sheffield, ux. She is co-founder
of the research centre ‘Agency’ and was founder member of the
workers cooperative G.L.A.S. (Glasgow Letters on Architecture
and Space), which aimed to construct both a theoretical and
practical critique of the capitalist production and use of the built
environment. Her current work focuses on the changing role of
architects and architecture in contemporary society, (architec-
tural) pedagogy and spatial agency. She has an interest in theo-
retical, methodological and practical approaches that expand
the scope of contemporary architectural debates and discourses
by integrating political and economic frameworks that question
normative ways of thinking, producing and consuming space.
She is the (co)author of Spatial Agency. Other Ways of Doing
Architecture (2011), Flexible Housing (2007), A Right to Build

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(2011), (co)editor of Agency. Working with Uncertain Architec-
tures (2009) and glaspaper (2001-2007).

Myfanwy Taylor is writing her PhD on contested urban econo-
mies at University College London. Her thesis argues that the
rise of concern about affordable workspace in London is creat-
ing common ground for new economic alliances to emerge. It
highlights the importance of the economic evidence base un-
derpinning city strategies and plans as a key site of contesta-
tion, in which emerging economic alliances draw on their own
perspectives and experiences to advance their interests and con-
cerns. Myfanwy pursues a collaborative approach to research
and has been working with a range of community planning net-
works in London including Just Space and groups in Tottenham
and Newham. She is a member of the International Network
of Urban Research and Action (INURA) and the Participatory
Geographies Research Group of the RGS-1BG.

Jonathan Vickery is Associate Professor in the Centre for Cul-
tural Policy Studies, at the University of Warwick, ux. With a
background in contemporary art and design, he has taught and
published on art and architectural history and theory, design,
urbanism and organization studies. He was a co-editor of the
journal Aesthesis, is now Chair of the international Art of Man-
agement and Organization conferences. He was co-director of
the Shanghai City Lab (2013-2015), and is now a founder direc-
tor of the new urban culture initiative Kalejdoskop East-West.
At Warwick he is Director of the masters in Arts, Enterprise and
Development. His most recent book (co-edited with Ian King)
is Experiencing Organisations (Libri: Oxon).

Mark Yaolin Wang is a Professor in the School of Geography at
the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Mega Urban
Regions in China (1998) and the co-author of China’ Transition
to a Global Economy (2002), China’s Urban Space (2007), Old
Industrial Cities Seeking New Road of Reindustrialisation (2013),
Transforming Chinese Cities (2014), and Towards Low Carbon

182

URBAN RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION AS A POLITICAL PROJECT

Cities in China (2014). He is also credited with numerous ar-
ticles in the fields of geography, migration and urban studies.

183

© punctum books

pontaneous acts of scholarly combustion

Urban Re-Industrialization
Nawratek, Krzysztof

punctum books, 2017
ISBN: 9.781947447e+012 9781947447004

https://punctumbooks.com/titles/urban-re-
industrialization/

https://www.doi.org/10.21983/P3.0176.1.00