Settlement types, territorial discourse and the symbolic production of the ‘post-industrial town’

Couched in work on territory, discourse and symbolic power, this paper examines how dominant representations and classifications of settlement types are produced by overlapping political, media and academic discourses through an investigation of the ‘post-industrial town.’ The 2016 referendum on European Union (EU) membership and the 2019 General Election thrust England’s deindustrializing towns into the foreground. Viewed as the primary settlement type of the ‘Brexit heartlands’ and the ‘Red Wall’, descriptions, encodings and classifications of the ‘post-industrial town’ have proliferated across media, academic and political discourses. Following, the article draws on Critical Discourse Studies to trace the emergence of the ‘post-industrial town’ as a territorial production. I argue that the ‘post-industrial town’ has been produced by discursive and socio-technical practices invoking symbolic imaginaries of how places look, who lives there and their practices. In the case of ‘post-industrial towns’, a dominant symbolic production has emerged of an older, white, working-class, non-cosmopolitan and socially conservative type of settlement. Moreover, discursive and symbolic territorial productions have led to (un)wilful misrepresentation and misrecognition as places ‘on-the-ground’ are brought into political strategizing and discourse.