Urban post-industrialism's long shadow and lasting spell

Abstract

The commentaries introduce some important challenges to our provocation, and in other ways, take our critique even further and in new directions. Rather than addressing each commentary sequentially, we structure our response to the commentaries around a few key critical themes that emerged across the group. These are: a) The need to retain post-industrialism as a conceptual framework for understanding urban processes, spaces, lives and change; b) for also differentiating between de-industrialisation and post-industrialisation; and c) for carefully deconstructing (and listening to) who, how, and why post-industrialism is used (i.e., whose voices, stories, histories are included or excluded? What political intentions lie behind the use of post-industrial and related terms such as ‘left-behind?’), with specific attention to the structures and experiences of race, class, and gender. In other words, the focus needs to be on the discursive and symbolic power, politics, and cultural sensitivities when the notion of post-industrialism is evoked.