There were already many layers of history under the pavement of the small town […]. The stones had been pressed in harder, patched here and there. It looked like a scarred landscape, because there wasn’t much to mend. […]
The fresh furrows and the mistakes of the past were pressed under the beautiful pavement that was trodden down until everything was flat again.
Anne Rabe: Die Möglichkeit von Glück, S. 333.
Deindustrialization and the structural changes linked to it are incisive long-term processes due to which not only the economic basis, but also social, cultural, and spatial constellations in the Ruhr Area and the Rust Belt are subjected to major changes. Worldwide, heavy industry has led to the emergence of landscapes re-shaped and molded by humans1 and its decline continued to form new landscapes. The area-specific concentration of hard coal mining and steel production as well as other big industries in the two regions that the volume sets out to examine has had a crucial impact on their regional culture. Especially in the Ruhr Area, measures were taken to foster the development of a post-industrial memoryscape meaning an aestheticization of the industrial heritage as a way of cultural valorization whose realization depended on civic commitment, financial support, and institutional procedures. However, politicians and city planners in the Rust Belt were relying on different survival strategies and future scenarios. Cities like Chicago, Cleveland or Pittsburgh set out to reinvent themselves and establish a new image detached from heavy industry. The publicly articulated and displayed culture of those two regions appears to be dependent on an industrially marked identity repertoire to varying degrees.
The landscapes of industrial heritage have different impacts on the representation of regional identities. In artistic engagement, these landscapes are often negotiated in (nostalgic) reference to their predecessors, namely the lost industrial spaces. The single chapters in Urban Layers investigate and comparatively examine these relations between spaces, identities, and representations, which are marked by many reciprocations, but also by demarcations, over-determinations, translations, and transformations, by negation, repetition, and most of all layering.
Regions as Constructs
The volume frames the Ruhr Area and the Rust Belt as regions–which is at least in a sociocultural regard no new approach, since–from the outside–both of these living spaces are mainly thematized as regions. Imaginations, connotations, and images that are evoked in the constitution of regions are being analyzed. The two–real or diegetic–spaces serve as comparative objects of a transatlantic research perspective–not only due to the constant reference of their single components to (the respective) regions but also because both spaces are significantly constituted as socio-cultural entities through the topics of labor, industry, deindustrialization, and creative potential, hence, via economic correlations.
The term ‘region’ functions similar to that of ‘labor’ or ‘industrial cultural landscape’ as it is often used without being clearly defined. Terminologically, the concept is a collective name for a variety of things. Firstly, it can be understood as an analytical term, which is open in regard to its spatial reference, or, as Carl-Hans Hauptmeyer put it: “A region is a changing socio-spatial unit, which pictures an exemplary similar action and impact of a human society. However, different spatializations emerge according to the researcher’s cognitive interest, the processing of material, and the ways of representation.”2 The sociologist Detlev Ipsen understands ‘region’, following the definition of geographer Gerhard Hard, as a construct that only becomes effective once it is integrated into social communication and that mirrors predominant lifestyles, ethical conduct, and a connection between the population and its living environment: “A ‘region’ is the output of an action which one could call ‘to regionalize’. ‘To regionalize’ means to produce terms and images of regions and integrating them more or less successfully into social communication.”3
Based on these considerations, concrete research questions arise: How are certain images, phenomena, and motifs regionalized through the artificial construction of spaces? And how are conceptions of industrial heritage and images integrated into social and artistic communication? As a constructed space of signification, the region is in a sense an “objectification and naturalization of past and present social conditions”4, which can be identified in layers. A look at their aesthetics opens up a new approach to the consideration of these two regions in the process of deindustrialization.
The Principle of Layers
In his Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik [Lectures on Aesthetics] (1770–1831), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel engages, among other things, with the potential that different forms of art have in terms of portraying and reflecting upon space and the spatial in time, and ultimately proposes a hierarchization in this context. According to him, architecture is the ‘least spiritual’ and therefore lowest form of art, followed by plastic art or sculpting. The third-lowest level is occupied by painting; on the penultimate position he sees music. The ‘highest’ of arts in Hegel’s hierarchization is literature (in Hegelian terms: poetics). According to him, this is especially true due to literature’s ability to transfer representations of the objective into the subjective world of imagination at the possibly lowest material stake due to its trisection into epos, lyric, and drama. Other ‘imperfect arts’, as he calls them, such as gardening or dancing, are entirely disregarded in his further considerations.5 Urban Layers departs from this Hegelian hierarchization which, even though criticizable, has maintained an impact well into the 20th century and can surely be understood as an aesthetic layering if applied to the same object of study.6 Departing from Hegel’s ‘layering’ of the arts, the volume asks how phenomena of the municipal, the urban, or the city (hence, phenomena that are constantly in movement) are staged and negotiated in different artistic and medial forms by examining two industrial regions: the Ruhr Area and the Rust Belt.
In this endeavor, space and the spatial do not only serve as categories that are employed to differentiate the representational potential of different art forms (as it is the case in Hegel, but also in Lessing, Goethe, Schlegel, Novalis, Schelling, and even still in Adorno). Rather, by examining the two industrial regions, it is possible to emblematically, yet pointedly, carve out how landscapes, architecture, social constellations, materiality and/or immateriality are subjected to ceaseless processes of transformation–especially with regard to (their) textually reflected or captured aesthetics.
In the introduction to their co-edited 1995 volume Mythos Metropole, the urban researchers and theologists Gotthard Fuchs and Bernard Noltmann have stated that in urban spaces history is present in a peculiar way, and that it is important to once again read the ‘face’ of the city and to uncover the traces of the past, which are partially buried and partially hidden behind the familiar.7 While these formulations implicitly raise the claim to archaeologically penetrate into buried depths and thereby indirectly excavate an origin, Urban Layers rather assumes that layers are to be understood at least in a threefold way. Therefore, they are capable to call into question regionality and regional similarities in a multidirectional fashion. Stemming from geology, the term firstly refers to sedimentations which form specific or characteristic structures. This structural term however also becomes interesting from a sociological perspective, insofar as it is also connected to structures within certain strata or layers. This has been pointed out as early as 1932 by sociologist Theodor Geiger in his book Soziale Schichtung des deutschen Volkes, in a recourse to a geological term, borrowed from miners’ language; and it also resonates throughout Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. However, Bourdieu’s Distinction is also where a criticism concerning a homogenizing image of society sets in; a criticism, which emphasizes that an identity can be allocated to different layers. From this, taken together with an aesthetics that hierarchically negotiates arts and therefore layers them, emerges an interesting constellation, which on the one hand assumes that something consolidates and integrates itself hierarchically, but that, on the other hand, this something is marked by a mobility embedded in different positionalities and dynamics.
The volume moves these dynamics to the center by the means of urban and regional formations in order to examine them as (partial) aspects of layerings; especially also in their non-material nature, such as in the form of individual or collective memories, affects, perceptions, moods, impressions, but also in the case of virtual realities. Layering therefore becomes a concept that points in two directions: On the one hand, it can be referred to the temporal, spatial, historical, sociocultural structures, developments and conditions of city-space-structures. On the other hand, however, following the Hegelian model, it can also be applied to the representation of these structures in different arts, media, and media formats.
Concrete Research Questions and Topics
The single chapters of this volume bring together different disciplinary perspectives in order to answer and examine the following questions and research subjects: How are both regions constructed and aesthetically produced. Which function is ascribed to processes of layering? How are these layerings aesthetically constructed, framed through language, and linguistically re-shaped? How are they (contemporarily and in retrospect) narrated, staged, conceptualized or produced in different social and cultural environments and in different historical times of change? Which constellations of layerings can be observed, and which forms of realization and appearance of the urban do they induce? Which do they suppress or inhibit? How are the layerings reflected and represented in textual, artistic or social practices and how do these practices connect to specific aesthetics? What power balances and tensions can be deduced from the specific layerings (e.g. gentrification, diversity, relocation, impoverishment, erosion)?
Those were the initial questions at the opening of our two conferences Urban Layers. Rust Belt and the Ruhr Area in November of 2019 in Dortmund and in February of 2020 in Cincinnati. And it is with these questions that we open this volume that holds some answers four years later.
We want to thank all those who have contributed to this volume for the good and reliable collaboration, those who provided input into discussions at the two conferences and especially those who helped with the organization of the conferences and the preparation of the manuscript: Kimberly Becker, Janneke Eggert, Anna Kemperdiek, Rosie Shackleton and Simon Hlawatsch on the part of the Fritz-Hüser-Institute, and Barbara Besendorfer, Mareike Lange, and Anna Senuysal on the part of the University of Cincinnati. We would like to thank the DAAD and the Taft Research Center of the University of Cincinnati for their financial support of the conference.
Works Cited
Fuchs, Gotthard und Bernhard Noltmann: „Mythen der Stadt“, in: Mythos Metropole, ed. by id. and Walter Pigge, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995, S. 9–19.
Hartmann, Nicolai: Ästhetik, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1953.
Hauptmeyer, Carl-Hans: “Zu Theorien und Anwendungen der Regionalgeschichte”, in: Jahrbuch für Regionalgeschichte und Landeskunde 21 (1997/1998), pp. 121–130.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik II, in: Id.: Werke, ed. by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, Vol. 14, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999, pp. 256–261.
Ipsen, Detlev: “Region zwischen System und Lebenswelt”, in: Region und Regionsbildung in Europa: Konzeptionen der Forschung und empirische Befunde, ed. by Gerhard Brunn, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1996, pp. 112–118.
Maxwill, Arnold (ed.): Leben in der Arbeitslandschaft. Narrationen des Ruhrbergbaus, Paderborn: Fink, 2021.
Achim Prossek: Bild-Raum Ruhrgebiet. Zur symbolischen Produktion der Region, Detmold: Rohn, 2009.
Rabe, Anne: Die Möglichkeit von Glück, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2023.
Schmitz, Walter: “‘Gedachte Ordnung’ – ‘erlebte Ordnung’: Region als Sinnraum. Thesen und mitteleuropäische Beispiele”, in: Konstruktionsprozesse der Region in europäischer Perspektive. Kulturelle Raumprägungen der Moderne, ed. by Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann, Essen: Klartext, 2010, pp. 23–44.
Cf. Arnold Maxwill (ed.): Leben in der Arbeitslandschaft. Narrationen des Ruhrbergbaus, Paderborn: Fink, 2021.
Carl-Hans Hauptmeyer: “Zu Theorien und Anwendungen der Regionalgeschichte”, in: Jahrbuch für Regionalgeschichte und Landeskunde 21 (1997/1998), pp. 121–130, here p. 123. All translations in this introduction by Anna Maria Senuysal unless otherwise indicated.
Detlev Ipsen: “Region zwischen System und Lebenswelt”, in: Region und Regionsbildung in Europa: Konzeptionen der Forschung und empirische Befunde, ed. by Gerhard Brunn, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1996, pp. 112–118, here p. 112.
Walter Schmitz: “‘Gedachte Ordnung’ – ‘erlebte Ordnung’: Region als Sinnraum. Thesen und mitteleuropäische Beispiele”, in: Konstruktionsprozesse der Region in europäischer Perspektive. Kulturelle Raumprägungen der Moderne, ed. by Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann, Essen: Klartext, 2010, pp. 23–44, here p. 30.
Cf. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik II, in: Id.: Werke, ed. by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, Vol. 14, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999, pp. 256–261.
In 1953, the philosopher Nicolai Hartmann designed a model of layering in his aesthetics that, however, rather negotiates the Schichtenfolge in den einzelnen Künsten (second part in the Ästhetik) than the Hegelian hierarchization of the arts: Nicolai Hartmann: Ästhetik, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1953.
Cf. Gotthard Fuchs und Bernhard Noltmann: “Mythen der Stadt”, in: Mythos Metropole, ed. by. id. and Walter Pigge, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995, pp. 9–19, here p. 12.