Culture on top: Beyond museification and culture-led regeneration of industrial heritage

This paper intends to critically explore the discourses and practices of regeneration of industrial heritage, examining how and to what extent a variety of notions of industrial heritage have been brought to bear on the plans and the practices enacted in the re-definition of the use of industrial sites. The general context is the one of the move from the industrial to the post-industrial society, entailing a growing abandonment of industrial areas and a parallel increasing awareness of the value of these sites, as testimony of some past material and immaterial culture and as spaces with potential for new forms of contemporary production. The paper thus reconstruct a typology of the main discourses and practices relating to industrial heritage re-uses, and concludes discussing the place of culture in these discourses and practices, the implications of the dominant discourses and practices, together with the need to move onto another view of the place and the shape of culture in and around industrial heritage sites.