Abandoned industrial hinterlands: Tensions and transformations in the postindustrial landscapes of the Catalan Pyrenees

Abstract

This paper examines processes of degradation and eventual transformation of industrial infrastructures that were crucial in modernization processes as well as in the planetary transformations that we now refer to as the Anthropocene. Many past projects and assurances of modernity have degenerated and manifest today in socio-material remnants (Anand et al. 2018; Larkin 2013). Based on empirical research conducted in a postindustrial region of the Catalan Pyrenees (Vaccaro et al. 2015), a historically extractivist periphery where diverse industrial activity was concentrated (Franquesa, 2018), I explore abandoned industrial sites such as ruined factories, excavated stone quarries, deserted mines, unused railways, or a rusting power station. I thus approach the remains of this scarred landscape and critically examine current trends towards patrimonialization. Specifically, I discuss the tensions in the meaning of the past that these restoration processes entail with regard to the ecological impacts, historical territorial dependencies, and social inequalities that this infrastructural legacy encompasses. Attention to the deterioration of infrastructures offers fruitful theoretical and empirical insights to look at the multiple temporal and spatial layers as well as complex social, political, economic, material, and ecological entanglements that shape infrastructures (Howe et al. 2016; Niewöhner 2015). Likewise, the analysis of these industrial remains with their faults and absences can inform a critical approach to present (and latent) futures encapsulated in current debates around ecological and energy transitions and the construction of large new green infrastructures.