Introduction: 'Industrial Cities-History and Future'

Clemens Zimmermann

Preliminary remarks

In 2012 Frankfurt am Main celebrated the jubilee of its Eastern harbor, which-a hundred years ago-secured the metropolis' ascendancy as industrial city that it remains until today despite the importance of financial services. What was built then were not just port facilities; big plants and workshops settled around it and Riederwald estate, too, is a 'child of the Eastern harbor'. Even today, 8,000 people work there, although the real estate sector 'is eager to grab the area' (Riebsamen 2012). Currently, the production of Opel's Astra model in the near-by Rüsselsheim (Zimmermann 2014) looses out and in the long run, the existence of the traditional automobile production is in jeopardy. Yet today, the car city Rüsselsheim is already more dependent on the jobs provided by Frankfurt Airport than on those provided by Opel. Both the Eastern harbor in Frankfurt and Opel as well as the airport imply the dangerous potential of industrial jobs and their situation in cities and regions. Frankfurt itself and its metropolitan region stand par excellence for contemporary urban spaces that feature mixed economic functions. Jobs are not just provided by the financial sector and logistics companies, but also by both traditional and knowledge sector industries. At the same time, the area features individual classic, previously mono-structural industrial cities, such as Rüsselsheim that is drudgingly asserting its position and has to deal with the general structural transition and constant sales slumps of Opel in a globalized automobile market. In the meantime, the structural transition equally progresses for example in the Saar region. Whilst the once determining coal extraction came to a halt last year, steel production continues and the Saar region has developed into a location of the automotive industry (Freitag 2012).

The number of scientific publications on the industry city is great. In the southwestern German library catalogue, there are 422 publications to be found under the entry 'industry city', in the National Union catalogue, the key word 'industrial town' comes up with 526 entries and 'industrial city' with 3,456. And these are only monographs that are categorized under history, social and spatial sciences, to a somewhat lesser degree under literary studies and urban studies and even more rarely under architecture. The fact that there is a certain consensus in all these disciplines over what characterizes 'industry city' is due to three circumstances: Firstly, the development of the industry city was in general tightly related to industrialization and social modernization in general, which presented decisive paradigms of the historical and social sciences disciplines. Secondly, throughout the period of urban boom, the growth of industry cities was a strong focus: 'urban and urbanization history' in Germany, urban history and urban studies in Anglophone contexts. Admittedly we know today that cities such as Brighton and London did not primarily grow from an industrial basis, equally Vienna and Berlin were characterized by a rather mixed structure and strong central and cultural functions. Industrialization and urbanization were tightly interrelated, yet not as tightly as it was conceptualized until recently. Contemporary mega cities such as Lagos, Bangkok and Mexico City are a point in case (Osterhammel 2010, 366-464).

Furthermore, research into industry cities was strongly tied to migration and protest research. Thirdly, common imaginations of industry cities were based upon-and are still based on-contemporary discourses, on works of painters and writers. They passed on to us external and internal imaginations: of dynamic, chaos, apocalyptic insecurity, dirt, dark living conditions, strong and intense protest and desperation of the individual. These highly charged, negative images-especially of cities with heavy industry and regions of coal extraction-had strong impacts and reached deep into the 20th century. The 19th century left us with 'coke town' where 'dangerous classes' seemed to question the bourgeois order (Reif 2012). Over the course of the 20th century, new images were created: of disciplined workers at the furnaces, of heroic construction efforts in the socialist industry cities that can also be considered as company towns, of social and council estates of the post war era and the model kindergartens there. The industry cities of the 20th century were in every respect the places of modernity, of rationalization with an abundance of certainty about the future and even utopian optimism, as in Magnitogorsk, Zlín and Wolfsburg. Not much later, however, this posed the questions whether work remains in the cities, what demands it made to people and what new spatial regimes would emerge. Furthermore, it was questioned how a future of industry cities could be envisioned in an increasingly European and globalized economy and in the face of the growing importance of the tertiary sector: is their perspective to develop knowledge industries or should they, albeit as late-comers, subordinate themselves under the trend of a tertiary economy?

Existing research

Until the 1990s, this field of research explained the demographic dynamic of the mutually reinforcing and asynchronous processes of industrialization and urbanization, the emergence of particular industrial types of cities (cities of the textile industry such as Manchester or Mühlhausen) and of a new type of industrial agglomeration. It was also concerned with hygienic and social living conditions, with economic cycles as well as housing construction and housing reform (Reulecke 1997), with processes of class formation, actors of urban reform and with the image and the discourses of 'coke town', Sheffield the 'Steel City' and the major industrial cities. Since the 1990s, the still expanding urban and urbanization research turned to a plethora of themes on the basis of changing methodological approaches. This category is comprised of different non-industrial types of cities such as the rural towns, questions regarding perceptions of the urban, the formation of boroughs and quarters, relationships between formations of citizenship and urban publics and the question concerning the character of the city of the 20th century shaped by mediatization, urbanization and the emergence of a third sector on the one hand and by peripheralization and de-concentration on the other. In particular, the question of planning processes and the characteristics of the 'European city' emerged (Lenger and Tenfelde 2006; Bohn 2008). Social historical approaches, however, always remained crucial grounds for research into the Western European city and urbanization (Zimmermann 2011).