Difficult heritage or historical trash? ‘Critical care’ for industrial legacies in eastern Ukraine, 2014–2022
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article takes up the notion of ‘difficult heritage’ to explore the management of industrial legacies in eastern Ukraine, with a focus on developments between 2014 and 2022. While acknowledging that industrial heritage is not ‘difficult’ in the same way as inherited sites of genocide or internment, I contend that it too was ‘contested and awkward’, unsettling attempts to rebrand and reimagine the region in line with shifts in national memory politics. As the environmentally damaging infrastructural inheritance of empire, which nevertheless also played a community-shaping role in the local context, industrial legacies were present in the landscape in ‘disruptive ways’, opening up social divisions and exposing cultural fractures. In this article, I explore how local artists and activists responded to the condition of state abandonment of this heritage, developing the analytical category of ‘critical care’ to describe processes of community-led preservation and creative repurposing at this time.
Source: Urban History
Author: Victoria Donovan
Institution: University of St Andrews
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W4415269764