Once the ‘motors of national economic development’, epicentres of industrial production, technical and social innovations, (old) industrial regions today are mainly depicted as ‘lagging regions’, ‘smokestack regions’ and ‘losers of structural change’. However, their entity is – especially culturally – strongly dependent on (former) industrial production. In his talk Danko Simic focuses on (old) industrial regions as reservoirs of dynamic, tacit and explicit, industrial knowledge and skills. Thereby he puts (former) industrial workers, who are usually depicted as losers of above-mentioned processes, into a new context. The case study for the empirical work was the former industrial giant – Željezara Sisak – ironworks Sisak, Croatia.
Danko Simić studied ‘Environmental Systems Sciences – Geography’ at the University of Graz and graduated in 2019. Since 2016 he was a project research assistant at the Department of Geography and Regional Science with a focus on (old) industrial regions and waste management in southeast Europe. Since October 2019 he is an university assistant in the research group ‘ComPASS - Commodification in/of Places And SpaceS’ (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Ulrich Ermann).