'That once romantic now utterly disheartening (former) colliery town': The affective politics of heritage, memory, place and regeneration in Mansfield, UK

Abstract

This article investigates the affective politics of heritage, memory, place and regeneration in Mansfield, UK. Ravaged by workplace closures from the 1980s, Mansfield's local government and cultural partners have supposedly put heritage at the centre of urban regeneration policies. Principal are ambiguous, and forestalled, ambitions to mobilize the industrial past to build urban futures. Yet these heritages, and their attendant memories and histories, are emotionally evocative and highly contested. The affective politics are played out in the material, embodied and atmospheric remains of the industrial past as Mansfield struggles to make sense of its industrial legacies. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis, archival research, observant participation and interview data, this article critiques heritage-based regeneration; examines interrelations between local memory, class, place and history; and interprets tensions between competing imaginaries of what Mansfield is, was and should be. Contributing to work on memory and class in post-industrial towns, the article demonstrates that affect and place should be central to our considerations of heritage-based urban regeneration. In the case of Mansfield, an 'emotional regeneration' will be denied until a shared practice of remembering the affective ruptures of the past is enabled.

After Coal: Affective-Temporal Processes of Belonging and Alienation in the Deindustrializing Nottinghamshire Coalfield, UK

“…Pluralizing forms of temporal processes allows us to consider what histories and historicities are being undeclared or emerge through other forms beyond speech, an undeveloped area of class research, which tends to focus on the clearly apparent and representational (Emery, 2019b ). Coal mining culture and heritage is not as palpable in the Nottinghamshire coalfield as that demonstrated by the villages proudly parading at Durham Miners' Gala, for instance (Emery, 2020 ). Traumatic histories of the 1984–85 Miners' Strike, and its contextualization of subsequent colliery closures, are actively silenced in the Nottinghamshire coalfield resulting in an absence of explanatory frameworks for the industrial ruination experienced by my generation.…”

Mitigating tensions between ethics and aesthetics through community-led adaptive heritage reuse: the case of post-industrial Praga, Warsaw

“…Also Sadowy (2019) notes that the radical change of the character of the district is a threat as many (immaterial) heritage values are disappearing. The pressure of urban developments in Praga can easily lead to consequences such as commodification, touristification, privatization and gentrification, of which many examples can be found in different European cities (see for instance Cizler, 2012; Emery, 2019; Kip and Oevermann, 2022; Stegmeijer and Veldpaus, 2021; Veldpaus and Pendlebury, 2019). All in all, tensions arise between the appropriation and commodification of the aesthetics of heritage and the ethics of urban development with regard to potential displacement of the original inhabitants and growing tensions between old and new residents.…”

“…Especially when the heritage values are preserved for other reasons than improving the living conditions for those living there (e.g. for touristic purposes) – something that can be recognized in many European regeneration projects (Cizler, 2012; Emery, 2019) –, these renovation works can be regarded as an example of unethical urban development.…”

“…When it comes to heritage in the build environment, the practice of its reuse has shifted accordingly; it is no longer just a practice of maintaining the historic, built values of a heritage object, but increasingly also a practice of linking the reuse of heritage buildings to developments in their wider urban context. This kind of heritage reuse, in which the aesthetics of heritage play a leading role, however, often leads to extreme commodification of heritage, place branding, gentrification and the exclusion of many narratives and voices (see for instance Cizler, 2012; De Cesari and Dimova, 2019; Emery, 2019; Pendlebury et al , 2018). On the other hand, more ethical approaches which open up heritage to community-led reuse practices might contribute to social innovation (Fava, 2022) and projects that show more community-oriented trajectories of development (Kip and Oevermann, 2022; Plevoets and Sowińska-Heim, 2018).…”

‘The whole of Shirebrook got put on an ASBO’: The co-production of territorial stigma in a former colliery town

“…There is little known about how territorial stigma operates in ‘post-industrial peripheries and rust-belt regions’ (Nayak, 2019: 928), which is surprising when we consider that ‘broken Britain’ discourses are frequently applied to them. The former coalfields in particular are imagined as ‘pathologically “workless” communities’ (Bright, 2012: 315), associated with high levels of deprivation, poverty and dependency (Bright, 2011; Emery, 2019). Indeed, post-industrial communities were disproportionately affected by the austerity that territorially stigmatising ‘broken Britain’ discourses worked to legitimate.…”