In the regions targeted by the European Union’s Just Transition Fund, a pressing need to move towards post-fossil economies meets various aspects of ongoing yet contradictory ruination. The small towns and mining zones of Saxony-Anhalt feature landscapes shaped by agro-industrial use, copper and lignite mines, and vacant late 19th-century factory buildings sitting alongside thriving industries. Ruptures to the social fabric are not a novelty to the region, either: Social structures, biographies and memories have been violently bent if not fractured during the sudden economic and societal transition of the German post-reunification period. What can be learned from such past and present ruinations of biographies, economies, and social structures? Which kinds of ruins and ruinations are being seen, valued, protected, salvaged, restored, reused, and by whom? And which are the allegorical tailings, bulky and impossible to fix, that are left behind – but might still harbor niches for progressive futures? Drawing on a dynamic, relational conceptualization of territorial subjectivities (Schwarz & Streule, 2024), this paper examines ways to investigate the emergence of new collective subjects in ordinary landscapes of multiple ruination. A socio-territorial lens, I argue, may help to expose how asymmetrical power relations are at play in ruinous processes of de- and reterritorialization at multiple scales.
Paper presented by Anke Schwarz at the 2025 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting
Wednesday March 26, 2025 at 2:30 PM, Room 410A, Huntington Place, 1 Washington Blvd, Detroit, MI