Mediating the Decline of Industrial Cities

This volume reflects the latest historiographical discussion about the decline, transformation, heritagisation, and re-invention of industrial cities in Europe during the late 20th century.

It argues that the notion of “mediation” as it has been used in the history of technology helps to shed new light on the processes of understanding changes of industrial cities before, during, and after the economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. The contributors investigate how different actor groups, such as scientists, union members, journalists, politicians, artists, and historians, mediated the understanding of decline, the anticipated future, and the heritage of industrial cities. The authors look at a wide range of European cities during different phases of decline and transformation.

The book is aimed at scholars of urban history and industrial history, as well as contemporary European history, the history of technology, and deindustrialisation studies. The contributions also resonate with discussion in neighbouring fields such as urban studies, media studies, cultural studies, sociology, and digital history.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Christoph Brüll is Assistant Professor for Contemporary History at Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH). His research interests include the history of cross-border cooperation in Western Europe. He is the co-editor of Föderalisierung, Strukturwandel, Erwartungshorizonte [Federalisation, Structural Change, Expectations] (2023).

Sebastian Haumann is Professor for Economic, Social, and Environmental History at Paris Lodron University Salzburg. His research interests include the history of raw materials and new methods in the field of Citizen Science. He is the co-editor of Concepts of Urban-Environmental History (2020).

Stefan Krebs is Assistant Professor for Contemporary History at Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH). His research interests include the industrial history of Luxembourg and the history of repair and maintenance. He is the co-editor of The Persistence of Technology (2021) and Deindustrialisierung: Zum sozio-ökonomischen Wandel westeuropäischer Industriegesellschaften seit den 1970er Jahren [Deindustrialization: The Socio-economic Transformation of Western European Industrial Societies Since the 1970s] (forthcoming).

Jens van de Maele is a postdoctoral member of the research group Modernity and Society (1800-2000) at KU Leuven. His research interests include architectural history and urban environmental history. He is the author of Architectures of Bureaucracy: The Politics of Government Office Buildings in Interwar Belgium (2025) and editor of Behind Office Doors: Use and Users in the History of Office Buildings (2026).