Grassroots Ecologies of Value: Environmental Conflict and Social Reproduction in Southern Italy

In this article I examine socio-environmental conflicts through the category of value. Drawing from a single case study, an industrial city in southern Italy, I address the revaluation projects underpinning the conflict around socio-ecological arrangements that are considered unfair, unsustainable and detrimental to life. Focusing on the trajectory of local environmentalism and the specific case of a women group, the article shows how the intensification of the socio-ecological crisis prompted the shift of environmental conflicts from the sphere of production to the broader relations of social reproduction. I propose to analyse this shift through the concept of grassroots ecologies of value, which outlines a framework for thinking about how people deal with the socio-environmental contradictions in which they live, and their struggles for dignity and worth.     

The notebook and the laboratory – types of knowledge in German piano-making, 1880–1930

ABSTRACT

Between the second half of the nineteenth century and the 1930s, German piano making changed from a craft to an industry. Nevertheless, piano makers still needed specific working knowledge to produce quality instruments. This knowledge was bound to individuals and transmitted informally from one person to another. The piano makers took working knowledge as the core of their practice. But in the shift to industrial methods of production, the key question was how to translate working knowledge into formal knowledge—to articulate what such knowledge meant and how it might be applied. Using the case study of the German piano making factory Grotrian-Steinweg, I show how the piano maker Kurt Grotrian used his notebooks to grapple with the problem of formalizing his working knowledge. At this company, an acoustic laboratory was established, in whose reports formalized knowledge was stored due to the transition of piano making from a craft to an industry.     

Agroindustrial Soilscapes in the Caribbean: A Geochemical Perspective from Betty’s Hope,Antigua

ABSTRACT

This research examines the chemical impacts to soils caused by the industrialisation (mechanisation and mass production) of sugar and rum manufacturing in the Caribbean during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Soils and sediments excavated from Betty’s Hope sugar plantation (1674?1944) are chemically characterised by mild acid extraction and inductively coupled plasma-mass spectroscopy. These data are integrated with analyses of soil properties, including colour, texture, pH and organic matter, to examine activity patterns in areas associated with a large multi-use building dating to the period of industrialisation. Quantitative analysis of the data employs zero-order and partial linear correlation, multidimensional scaling, principal components analysis and spatial interpolation using semivariogram modelling and Kriging. The results reveal the locations of activity areas inside the building, which aids in understanding its role in sugar and rum production. The research also reveals evidence for soil contamination by heavy metals (lead and mercury), suggesting that plantation sites from this period may be polluted with industrial wastes. These findings have implications for activity reconstruction in the archaeological past as well as environmental and community health issues today.     

The Morphology of a Working Place Linked to the World: The Railway Workshops of Jundiaí (Brazil, 1892–1998)

ABSTRACT

Material sources have done little to contribute to research on Brazilian railway history (except for heritage studies and history of architecture). This interdisciplinary case study focuses on archaeological evidence to reflect on topics not often discussed in Brazil: the physical and functional configuration of the workplaces related to railways; the changing of these spaces through time due to the evolution of technology; and their characterisation as highly globalised sites. In doing so, we take the railway workshops of Jundiaí (São Paulo) as a study sample and analyse it under the light of the expansion of industrialisation from the World's great powers to its outlying economies.     

Place Annihilation and Urban Reconstruction: The Experience of Four Towns in Brittany, 1940 to 1960

Devastation, revival and reconstruction form guiding themes in this discussion of annihilated settlements in north-west France. For reasons of deep-water access and strategic location, the German occupiers decided to construct massive submarine bases at Brest, Lorient and Saint-Nazaire. Allied bombardment devastated the towns that surrounded them during the Second World War, while the heavily defended walled port of Saint-Malo was annihilated in 1944. With peace restored, prisoners of war and local labourers cleared mines, removed debris and installed large quantities of temporary housing. Development plans, drawn up in the interwar years, provided an important starting point for subsequent master plans which shaped postwar reconstruction. Working under the guidance of the Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism, chief planners, architects and reconstruction cooperatives refashioned property units and engineered the rebuilding of Brest, Lorient and Saint-Nazaire along thoroughly modern lines; by contrast, Saint-Malo was rebuilt much as it had been before the war. Many of the buildings of the 1950s now require refurbishment, and urgent initiatives need to be taken to revitalise the local economies of these reconstructed towns, whose role as naval bases, military arsenals and shipbuilding centres has contracted in the wake of political détente and deindustrialisation.     

In Search of Causality: A Regional Approach to Urban Growth in Eighteenth-century England

The simple equation of industrialisation and urbanisation contains much truth: recent national surveys confirm that rapid coal-based industrial growth spawned massive urban development in Britain. And yet at the local level a wide diversity of growth experiences reflect a complex and overlapping nexus of growth stimuli which defy attempts at generalisation. In taking a regional perspective, this paper seeks to occupy a productive middle ground in this ongoing debate. Placing urban growth in north-west England into its real economic and geographical context, it recognises the complexities of urban growth but transcends the narrowness of the particular. In so doing, it challenges some of the certainties of industrial urbanisation, emphasising instead the importance of rural industry, urban commercial functions and inter-place linkages. Most fundamentally, it argues for a more nuanced understanding of the geography of causality.