Rethinking the City in the Industrial Aftermath

Drawing on ethnographic studies of two postindustrial cities in Croatia, Sisak and Bakar, the authors analyse how the communities narrate their industrial pasts, address industry-related environmental fallouts and define the potentials of postindustrial urban life. They focus on diverse narrations and practices through which the formerly industrial communities make sense of industrialisation and deindustrialisation. Local understandings of (post)industrial urban life are grasped through the concept of socio-industrial memory. The concept highlights the fact that communities can have different ideas about similar socio-economic processes depending on the ways in which they conceptualise the present and futures of their postindustrial cities, but it also underlines that the process of industrialisation was orchestrated politically as an act of socialist modernisation. The article outlines shared features and investigates disparities of postindustrial city-making and, in doing so, underlines the significance of context-based interpretations of such transformations. In both cities, the shutting down of factories left the inhabitants without major providers of livelihood. In Sisak, deindustrialisation meant long-term unemployment, which triggered postindustrial nostalgia. For citizens of Bakar, socialist industrialisation is an environmental threat and a turn away from tourism-development prospects. The authors conclude that images of the industrial past change their meanings in relation to the present needs and fears of postindustrial communities, as well as their visions of alternative, hopefully brighter futures.