Post-Industrial Landscape Scars

A. Storm

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137025999
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Post-industrial landscape scars are traces of 20th century utopian visions of society; they relate to fear and resistance expressed by popular movements and to relations between industrial workers and those in power. The metaphor of the scar pinpoints the inherent ambiguity of memory work by signifying both positive and negative experiences, as well as the contemporary challenges of living with these physical and mental marks. In this book, Anna Storm explores post-industrial landscape scars caused by nuclear power production, mining, and iron and steel industry in Malmberget, Kiruna, Barsebäck and Avesta in Sweden; Ignalina and Visaginas/Snie?kus in Lithuania/former Soviet Union; and Duisburg in the Ruhr district of Germany. The scars are shaped by time and geographical scale; they carry the vestiges of life and work, of community spirit and hope, of betrayed dreams and repressive hierarchical structures. What is critical, Storm concludes, is the search for a legitimate politics of memory. The meanings of the scars must be acknowledged. Past and present experiences must be shared in order shape new understandings of old places.

Chapter 1

Introduction

I am sure you have seen them—post-industrial landscape scars. It might be a mountain irrevocably turned into an open-pit mine, surrounded by slag heaps. It could be polluted ground, abandoned, overgrown, and perhaps forgotten. It may be a dilapidated factory in a fading mono-industrial town, or in the midst of an otherwise bustling urban area, presenting a dangerous but attractive playground (figure 1.1). Post-industrial landscape scars are marks of sorrow and betrayal, of the abuse of power and latent hazards. At the same time, they bear tales of communities and dreams, of achievements and resistance. In short, the scars in the landscape, caused by industrial activity, constitute the flipside to the history of our modern society—integrated by necessity, yet not acknowledged accordingly.

A scar is a reminder, the trace of a wound. It is often ugly and stands for the pains of the past. Spontaneously, a scar is always understood as negative. However, some bodily wounds and scars are chosen, self-inflicted or at least positively laden. Caesarian section operation scars, Mensur scars, or body ornamentation through so-called scarification, carry different meanings and connotations, but they all have one thing in common—they are physical reminders of something of at least personal significance. A scar can be a hallmark for the veteran or the fictional hero. In a similar manner, the scar on the post-industrial landscape often conveys ambiguous and complex pasts about injustice and fear, along with survival, resilience, and courage. The story of a scar never concerns indifference; the narrative potential of the scar is a possibility and a promise we ought to embrace.

The metaphor of a scar here denotes a physical reality as well as a mental one—a mine or a factory, but also the associated narratives, experiences, and memories. Furthermore, the word “scar” is not only a noun but also a verb, implying a process or action taken. We can scar or become scarred, and scarring can take place. There is somebody behind the existence of a scar, responsibility and choices are involved, and in a scarring process, the open wound turns into a scab on its way to finally becoming a scar. The intermediate stage of a scab signifies a situation of undefined shapes and unsettled meanings, a liminal condition that is decisive for understanding the people and the places that will appear in the following chapters. While the scar often remains ambiguous, the scab is even more open to interpretation in a multitude of ways; here struggles over hierarchies of significance become particularly overt and discernible. Some wounds remain as scabs for a long time, because there is no room for healing and recovery.

Figure 1.1 A former Soviet military shipyard in Karosta, Latvia, raises questions about imperial dreams and hard work, lost jobs and vanished communities, as well as about contamination, new economies, and aestheticizing industrial romanticism. Photo: Anna Storm, 2001.

This book will focus on the tight interrelation between our understanding of significant shared pasts and the physical structures that remind us of these pasts. I will argue for the importance of recognizing these understandings and physical structures in contemporary politics and in processes of reconciliation and search for future hope. Accentuating post-industrial landscape scars as an important, yet underinvestigated category, the aim of this book is to explore the potential of the scar metaphor as an analytical tool in order to influence the contemporary heritage debate and practice, in order to draw more thorough attention to the ambiguous, painful, and damaging pasts, as well as to possible healing processes.

Temporality and Significance

The process of healing, from wound to scar, is neither linear nor automatic. Instead, as in individual psychological healing, the process may be cyclical, can happen in stages, and even demand active work. It brings difficult pasts to the fore as often as it leads away from them, and old wounds may reopen.¹ Thus, while a scar bears the potential capacity to heal, recover, and reconcile, this is not a self-evident outcome, especially since the metaphorical scar applies to processes of healing in the social, cultural, and political spheres, rather than the biological one.²

Furthermore, the scar metaphor offers a way to overcome the many dichotomies of change—before and after, winners and losers, progress and decline—and create integrality instead. It is organic and created on the basis of past significances entangled with present standpoints. Because of this integrative perspective, and because it acknowledges nonlinear temporalities, the scar can be regarded as an alternative to a palimpsestual approach.³

A palimpsest is a handwritten manuscript on parchment or papyrus, on which one text has been scraped away and replaced by a new one. This recycling practice of Antiquity and the Middle Ages was often used repeatedly in order to make use of valuable parchment, even though it was sometimes possible to discern the erased text behind the new addition. In postmodern contexts, the word has been used metaphorically to describe the different layers of significance that make up heritage.⁴ New layers are continuously added as time goes by, like new texts inscribed on a scraped, cleaned parchment. However, this metaphorical use of the palimpsest is misleading if one wishes to emphasize the interconnectedness, the linked relevance, between the different layers. If heritage consists of a multitude of parallel or successive stories and perspectives, all contributing to one another and to an overall picture, the palimpsest is a poor choice of metaphor, since the palimpsest in the original sense implies that new texts are added without regard or connection to those previously erased, and thus the end result is a picture made up of fragments and additions without any mutuality or interrelated content.

Besides these metaphorical complications and diverging temporal approaches, the idea of landscape scars challenges a layered understanding of heritage per se. Instead of trying to uncover and acknowledge manifold layered stories of the past, the scar metaphor suggests that heritage is an integrated and crucial part of human living with all its inherent contradictions and ambiguities. It is a perspective that attempts to discern wholeness out of complexity and divergences. This is not to say that ambiguity is always and inherently good or liberating, but rather, as human geographer Shiloh Krupar pointed out, that “ambiguity is what must be explored to contest routinized recitations of evidence and established truths.”⁵ Even if the scar itself could be understood as dead, nonsensory skin, where the normal skin layers have been replaced by a dense new scar tissue, it forms a part of the living body. The scar is not a palimpsest.

Scars, Wounds, and Related Metaphors

Scars, wounds and other organic metaphors have been used in heritage or societal contexts before, primarily to describe large-scale transformations of natural landscapes, like hydropower plant dams, or traces of painful events like bombings.⁶ There are also concepts that resemble the idea of landscape scars, but with a more explicit indication of the fact that affluence inevitably comes at a cost, that is, concepts that denote something exclusively negative. Among these could be mentioned “sacrifice zones,” environments that have been deliberately damaged for industrial purposes in order to generate economic profit elsewhere; and “shadowed ground,” landscapes reminiscent of events of violence and tragedy.⁷

The empirical characteristics associated with sacrifice zones, shadowed grounds, and several previous uses of the scar as a metaphor, such as negative environmental impacts and invisibility in wider public imaginations, also apply to post-industrial scars. However, while the scar metaphor used in this book certainly emphasizes pains of the past, this pain can be mixed and intertwined with bright, positive experiences.

The metaphors of scars and wounds have been employed by architects and artists dealing with reconstruction or memorial projects. The Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg, for example, won the competition to design a public memorial commemorating the 2011 Utøya massacre in Norway. The general idea of Dahlberg’s proposal is to create a wound or a cut in nature by taking away a “slice” of a narrow cape at Utøya. This three-and-a-half-meter void, or artificial sound, will make it impossible to reach the end of the cape; it will interrupt visitors’ movement in order to “acknowledge what is forever irreplaceable.”⁸

Another example is the American architect Lebbeus Woods, who has designed several projects for places marked by different kinds of crisis. His best-known proposals are for Sarajevo after the Balkan War, a project to combat Havana’s deterioration after decades of an ongoing trade embargo, and for San Francisco after the 1989 earthquake.⁹ His overall approach in these three places is termed “radical reconstruction,” emanating from proposals called “scabs,” “tissues,” and “scars.”¹⁰ In many ways the architecture does resemble organic texture and form; it interplays with existing—damaged—buildings and sites, by means of contrast, mirroring, and outgrowth. In an essay, Woods articulates his ideas about this set of metaphors. He denotes a scab as “a first layer of reconstruction, shielding an exposed interior space or void, protecting it during its transformation.” A scar is a “deeper level of reconstruction that fuses the new and the old . . . a mark of pride and of honor, both for what has been lost and what has been gained. It cannot be erased . . . To accept a scar is to accept existence.”¹¹ In line with Woods’ description, I believe the scar metaphor highlights a potential process toward the reconciliation or acceptance of past events, closely related to perspectives developed within the field of heritage.

Heritage and Scars

The concept of heritage is often used to signify something, usually an object, that our predecessors consciously passed on to us, or that happened to be left over from bygone days. It is also sometimes used to focus on a gift or a burden that we carry, light-hearted and proud or with difficulty and shame, to potentially hand over to our descendants. Lately, however, this conceptualization of the heritage “object” has proved to be insufficient to capture the complex interactions between humans and their physical artifacts and surroundings. Many scholars like, for example, human geographer Brian J. Graham and heritage scholar Peter Howard consider heritage as continuously changing, as an activity and a process centered primarily in the human mind rather than in the material world.¹² Heritage is defined and redefined by the present-day articulation and negotiation of values—connected to stories, places, actions, and events. This implies that heritage is a highly time-subjective activity, drawing on the past and affected by tradition and customs, but nevertheless firmly based in the current situation.

In general, heritage tends to be understood primarily as something positive. Heritage processes are seen as enriching our lives “with depth and purpose” or even to partly replace religious longings for immortality in secular societies.¹³ In the best of worlds, heritage is conceived as providing a form for critical engagement in society, a way to give perceptions and identities meaning.¹⁴ However, “difficult” or “dark” heritage, for example, in connection to postconflict situations, has recently been recognized and analyzed as well, among others by anthropologist Sharon Macdonald, geographer Dietrich Soyez, and heritage scholars William Stewart Logan, Keir Reeves, and John Giblin.¹⁵ In fact, the understanding of heritage as something only positive has been complemented by a perspective that regards it as inherently conflictual or dissonant, since the heritage process most often defines groups of people as superior or secondary, as victims or offenders; indeed, sometimes even new conflicts arise as a consequence of the narrative selection implied by heritage.¹⁶ In line with Giblin, I concur with the view that heritage essentially represents something neither positive nor negative, but forms an element and expression of intensified cultural negotiation.¹⁷

The argument of this book—to better articulate ambiguous pasts and possible processes of healing within a heritage discourse—thus conn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Unstable Mountain
• Chapter 3 Distance of Fear
• Chapter 4 Lost Utopia
• Chapter 5 Industrial Nature
• Chapter 6 Enduring Spirit
• Chapter 7 Prospective Scars Unfolding
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index