Cities act as both “repositories of history — and, alternatively, as places constantly
in the remaking."
Murray Mckenzie and Thomas Hutton, Culture-led Regeneration in the Post-industrial Built Environment: Complements and Contradictions in Victory Square, Vancouver
The question of who cities are being made for remains open, active and highly contested.
For several years now, this question has informed my work, my academic research and significantly filled my leisure time. I am fascinated by how cities have and continue to evolve and how politics and economics shape our physical environment. I’m also interested in how our physical and natural environments shape, and are shaped by, culture and social connections.
I am particularly interested in how these relationships play out in the context of former industrial sites: What happens to deindustrialized landscapes that are transformed from sites of production into sites of leisure and consumption? Whose interests are being served in the redevelopment process?
photos above:
Battersea Power Station
heritage photo 1934
credit: Andy Dingley (scanner) scan from Forward by E. Royston Pike (1938) Our Generation, London:
Waverley Book Company, Public Domain.
It is shocking how little serious research is underway on the continuing relationship between industrial heritage sites and nearby working-class communities.
High and Burill 2018, Industrial Heritage as Agent of Gentrification
Restoring formerly working industrial landscapes goes a long way in preserving built heritage, creating myriad new uses and generating new economic opportunities. However, the transformation and adaptive reuse of these sites has often accelerated the process and pressures of
gentrification, reinforcing class barriers and separations and contributed to the socio-spatial and economic displacement of working-class communities that lived and worked there. My PhD research ultimately asks:
What approaches would best enable the redevelopment of formerly industrial sites to create new opportunities for all, address inequities and that make meaningful and lasting contributions to creating more inclusive cities?
Shared throughout this website is the beginning of my research journey into this topic.