Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Centre for Culture and Humanities
Why do we associate children with the future and older people with the past? What happens if we include older people in our imagining of the future?
Why do we associate children with the future and older people with the past? What happens if we include older people in our imagining of the future? Access to ‘bright futures’ is unevenly distributed across European communities and between peoples. And not everyone gets a voice when it comes to imagining the future, with some populations more marginalised and disempowered in future-planning than others. Though Europe has what is often referred to as an ‘ageing population’ the views of older people are frequently delegitimised in future speculation.
Our challenge is to democratise the process of imagining the future with different generations who come from or live in places that journalists, investors, and politicians tend to frame through discourses of decline and abandonment.
The European research sites, spanning four countries, share complex histories of deindustrialisation and disinvestment as well as processes of renewal and regeneration.
The sites: Eisenerz in Austria is a former iron ore-mining community with innovative, intergenerational regeneration strategies. Germany’s Saarland and Scotland’s South Lanarkshire and Glasgow East are populated by ex-mining communities impacted by deindustrialisation. They have often been viewed as sites of ‘urban decline’ but are now undergoing processes of renewal. In Romania, the decline of fishing industries in Sfântu Gheorghe, Caraorman, and Crişan along the Danube Delta poses socio-economic challenges that have seen new economic actors move in to exploit tourism and natural resources.
Waste/Land/Futures gathers intergenerational narratives about change and the future through object/photo elicitation interviews and intergenerational family interviewing. Through creative workshops, that employ utopian and Participatory Action Research methods, the team co-create with participants artistic, intergenerational utopias of the future. Cross-national analysis will uncover how intergenerational pasts, presents, and futures play out in the differing communities across Europe.
Ideas of ageing, abandonment, and utopia are central to the project. Our sites and communities are often framed in a discourse that focuses on the past, decline, and loss. But we seek to ‘re-story’ these spaces together with these communities to co-create new narratives of the future that allow those who are usually excluded from speculation about the future to have a stake in it. The project draws, amongst others, on Critical Future Studies (Godhe and Goode 2018), utopian studies (Levitas 2013), generational time (Woodward 2020), temporal inequalities (Sharma 2014) and sociology of loss (Elliot 2018).
Glasgow is a city of radical change. At its industrial peak, the former ‘Second City of Empire’ produced steel, iron, coal, and textiles. Its merchant traders imported slave-grown tobacco, cotton, and sugar. Its workers made armaments, bridges, railways, and ships. The decline of industry deeply affected Glasgow, especially in communities like Glasgow’s East End that saw scarce investment from industrial and mercantile prosperity.
Around 1950, Glasgow had over a million inhabitants. But by 1980, following mine closures and the decline of industries such as shipbuilding, a third of its population had left or were relocated through post-war slum clearance and new town schemes.
Glasgow’s East End and the bordering South Lanarkshire, home to Scotland’s first new town, East Kilbride, have been targets for resettlement and clearance during the multiple periods of regeneration in the late twentieth and twenty-first century. These sites remain spaces of material change, with business and technological innovation at the forefront of the regeneration agenda. Renewal is even taking place under the ground with heat from wastewater in the now-flooded mines being repurposed to heat homes. The communities here are witnesses to and have uneven access to ongoing processes of renewal. Through utopian re-storying, Waste/Land/Futures asks what desirable futures look like in Glasgow East and South Lanarkshire and how these futures are entangled with materialities and environments.
The 'Hope' statue in the east end of Glasgow
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