Consuming the Unpalatable: Rhetoric and Rationality in Repurposing Meat Industry Sites

Description

This talk explores the adaptive reuse of former meat industry sites—particularly modern slaughterhouses—as a form of uncomfortable heritage, where reusing buildings with troubling yet not overtly traumatic pasts raise questions about how memory, ethics, and public engagement are negotiated within urban regeneration. Once engineered as machines for killing, these industrial structures are increasingly being reimagined as cultural venues, creative industry hubs, and gastronomic destinations. Yet such transformations often involve a sanitisation of the past, both materially and narratively, with little acknowledgment of their original function or the ethical tensions it entails.

Drawing on converted cases from across the world, the paper investigates how reuse strategies—ranging from the preservation of raw industrial aesthetics to complete internal sanitisation—affect public memory and spatial meaning. The ethical dilemma lies in the tension between reuse and erasure: for whom are these regenerated spaces intended, how are they materially treated, and which aspects of their past are remembered—or suppressed? While some sites retain architectural elements “as found,” others are cleansed, aesthetically enhanced, or stripped of traces that evoke animal slaughter. In most cases, there is minimal on-site interpretation of the sites’ original purposes, revealing a spatial distancing from the visceral realities of industrial slaughter for meat production.

Positioned between adaptive reuse and heritage discourse, the paper argues that reuse should not be understood merely as a design or economic strategy, but as a cultural and ethical act that reshapes civic memory and urban experience. By foregrounding the politics of interpretation and the suppression of discomfort, it calls for a more reflexive and inclusive ethics of reuse—one that recognises the narrative agency of space and supports diverse voices in shaping new meanings for sites of industrial slaughter while engaging with complex pasts in everyday urban life.
 

Period	17 Jul 2025
Event title	Uncomfortable Heritage: Adaptive Reuse and New Narratives
Event type	Workshop
Location	Newcastle, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International