VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages
Abstract
The old bourgeois city of Aviles underwent an unprecedented change in the middle of the 20th century with the establishment of Empresa Nacional Siderurgica S.A. (ENSIDESA). This change refers to the increase in population, which led to a tripling of the number of inhabitants. The economic and social fabric was altered, going from being a bourgeois town with a small fishing port to a centre of heavy industry. This situation had its urbanistic correspondence with the creation of a series of working-class neighbourhoods, located on the fringes of the old part of the city. This gave the city a dual and conflicting idiosyncrasy. In the 1990s, a process of deindustrialisation and reconversion began to take place throughout Europe. Avilés was immersed in this process, causing ENSIDESA to suffer a slow agony, which led to its privatisation, sale of land, demolition and dismantling. The reconversion process will be carried out by the administration, in an attempt to regenerate the right bank of the estuary, based on the well-known “Guggenheim Effect”. In this way, the land formerly occupied by the iron and steel plant is now home to the Niemeyer Cultural Centre. The search to provide the area with a cultural attraction has a double interpretation: tourist attraction and concealment of an uncomfortable industrial past. The significance of the space is linked to the new socio-environmental demands of the population but which erase the workers’ memory and endanger the industrial heritage. Authoritative discourses promoted by elitist movements, once again emphasise the struggle between the two models of the city.
PhD student of the Department of History of Art at the University of Oviedo and member of the research group EstArt. She has participated in the university teaching of the subjects of Industrial Heritage and Museology and Museography. Her main lines of research are the architecture of industrial heritage, the Modern Movement in Avilés, workers’ housing, workers’ paternalism in the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century, gender studies and the history of didactics in the second half of the 20th century. She has published a dozen texts and has participated in various international conferences.