Union Houses & Social Factories: Hauntological Successors to Sites of Material Production

Abstract

As manufacturing spaces deindustrialize, and are reabsorbed into the urban fabric, there is an opportunity to interrogate and reassess our collective relationship with work and material productivity. Under the expanding powers of automation, global capitalism, and new digital technologies, industrial zones experience a collapse of meaning before they are reappraised and reconstituted around immaterial activities. Rather than bringing us closer to work equity, the reappraisal of these spaces often contributes to gentrification, erases difficult labour histories, and perpetuates unsustainable narratives of continuous economic growth. This project takes the residential rezoning of Montreal’s Garment District on Rue Chabanel as a case study of a global manufacturing site in transition, and explore how a new program of housing can act upon the site as an act of hauntological critical heritage, that which reveals ruptures in time and space as the global north shifts towards an immaterial labour hegemony.