Industrial areas of the city: strategies for working with the past

The search for ways and mechanisms to optimize the state of industrial areas requires an appeal to their historical past. World and domestic experience shows that the past, including the industrial one, can become one of the main "growth points" of the city, actualizing its new functions and meanings. The latter can be considered from the standpoint of the "symbolic economy", which implies their transformation into material results. This article is an attempt to assess the historical potential of industrial areas in the symbolic and image aspects. The industrial area of Samara, Bezymyanka, was taken as the object of study. The paper identifies and substantiates four basic strategies for working with the past in relation to urban loci. 0n the ways of connecting the subjective and the objective, the real and the "imaginary", the degree of their implementation in relation to the territory under consideration is shown. The empirical base of the study was the results of a survey of residents of Samara (sample - 225 people), as well as secondary data obtained in the course of a study dedicated to Bezymyanka (performers: E.S. Baeva, 0.N. Zaporozhets, sample - 360 people, 2007). The analysis showed that at the moment, due to the predominance of strategies for forgetting history and / or its narrowing, the historical potential of this area from the point of view of the townspeople can be assessed as low. That small layer of "historical", which is declared in the practices of commemoration and which the residents of the city point to, has a military-industrial coloring. And it is clearly not enough to overcome the negative imagery of the area. A strategy based on the principle of inheritance and associated with the implementation of initiatives of various urban communities at the level of urban mentality has not yet received a proper response.