Tales of Two Cities: Walking through Industrial Ruins in Milan and Yubari

• In Event: 4154 - Qualitative Methodology

Abstract

In the article we present the results of separate investigations in two post-industrial settings located in different (and far apart) regions of the world: the first area, Lambrate, is one of the ex-industrial peripheries of Milan (Italy); the second, the ex-mining city of Yubari in Hokkaido, northern Japan. The aim of our study is two-fold: the first is to offer a contribution to the literature on the requalification of ex-industrial districts through the analysis of two different strategies of urban transformation, as they emerge from the researchers’ observations and the narrations of the dwellers. The second (methodological) aim is to experiment and finely tune the tactic of walking as a method to capture the atmosphere emanating from the built environment and the memories of the people populating the areas. The perception of this atmosphere is inevitably filtered by the interface body-city created by the embodied presence of the researchers in the space and better described with the use of an affective register, expressing the various degrees of intensity and the feelings of a positive or negative connection between the strolling body and the urban world that each one of us experienced while walking the streets of Lambrate and Yubari. Careful observation of this nature by an observer familiar with the wider socio-cultural context of an area can contribute to a fuller sense of what it means and how it feels to live in a post-industrial urban area targeted for outside intervention.

Authors

• Lucia Ruggerone, Robert Gordon University

• Leslie Mabon, Robert Gordon University