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Based on an an ongoing American Studies research project in the University Alliance Ruhr, the seminar aims at the transatlantic study of the "scripts" (understood as the self-descriptions employed by cities in their branding efforts) that explicate and authorize the history, development, and future trajectories of US American and German cities that lost their lifeline industries in the second half of the twentieth century. The loss of industries and the ruination of so called rust belt cities has notoriously been dramatized, fetishized, and powerfully fictionalized in recent political campaigns, most prominently in the 2016 US presidentiall elections. We will examine these postindustrial urban scripts from the explicit vantage point of the Greater Ruhr Region - a region and an academic environment deeply rooted in comparable struggles against deindustrialization and shrinking but diversifying populations - and will assess and critique the narrative, figurative, and medial strategies employed by municipalities, urban developers, and the creative and sustainable industries in efforts to bring about change and craft a better future in the US and in German cities that seek to learn from or avoid American examples (cf. the slogan "We are not Detroit" used in Bochum at the time of the closing of the Opel plant). In these projected and prescribed futures, the city is almost invariably imagined as “creative”, “sustainable", and “socially inclusive”.
A reader containing an initial selection of texts and materials will be available in the copyshop Reckhammerweg from early February onwards. For the first session, please read the two texts by Buchenau/Gurr, which introduce the concept of "scripts", as well as the text by Eckardt. Everyone who has read these texts by the first session is guaranteed a place! |
