• A novel analytical approach to unpacking multiple senses of place in industrial decarbonisation. • Complex and ambivalent senses of place could exist in industrial towns other than pride in industry. • Divergent place visions between cluster stakeholders and host communities stem from different ontologies of industrial places. • Growing industry-community disconnection strengthens the need to go beyond job impacts for just transitions. The climate crisis and goals for ‘green growth’ have led governments worldwide to adopt cluster-based approaches to decarbonise carbon-intensive industries (e.g. steel, petrochemicals) and to revive declining industrial regions, a predominant concern for late capitalist societies. Research has begun to investigate the role played by sense of place in sustainability transitions in regions with fossil fuel-intensive industries. However, ways that sense of place may shape just industrial transitions have been underexplored. Adopting a novel analytical approach with the concept of spatial imaginaries, we explore contested senses of place in decarbonising industrial regions and their implications to just transitions. A multi-phase, multi-scalar qualitative methodology was used to investigate ‘net zero senses of place’ held by government and industry stakeholders and host communities in three emerging UK net zero industrial clusters. Our findings reveal an ontological contrast of industrial places existing between stakeholders and host communities. There was a gulf between the top-down, win–win, and hopeful place visions in policy/industry discourses (e.g. the idea of ‘SuperPlaces’) and the more ambivalent socio-cultural imaginaries of industrial places held by host communities, comprising bleak lived experiences of extractive place-industry relations alongside positive examples of community-led resilience. The contrasting senses of place underlay local scepticism about proclaimed benefits and visions of industrial decarbonisation, indicating the stakeholders’ deficiency in recognising local grievance and struggles, in engaging community in cluster development, and in supporting community wellbeing. We conclude by arguing that stakeholders must go beyond a narrow techno-economic ontology to view industrial decarbonisation as a form of inclusive place-making, working with host communities to address local needs and co-produce shared visions of net zero futures.
Lai et al. (Sun,) studied this question.