ASSEMBLY 2025: Huei-Ling Lai, Connecting senses of place, spatial justice, and left-behind places for just industrial transition

The global climate imperative of reaching net zero emissions has prompted many countries to set up net zero ‘cluster’ or ‘hubs’ aiming at decarbonising carbon-intensive industry (e.g. steel and petrochemicals) while rejuvenating declining industrial regions. This approach reflects the ‘place turn’ in regional industrial policymaking and research, especially in the UK and Europe, that is claimed to have higher chances for delivering on a fairer and more democratic industrial and regional transformation. However, such ‘place-based’ approaches for regional industrial decarbonisation have paid limited attention to socio-cultural dimension of place, fair spatial distribution of benefits and costs, and community engagement, suggesting insufficient consideration of recognition, distributive, and procedural dimensions of a just transition. This paper proposes to address these gaps by linking three highly relevant yet under-connected geographical concepts – sense of place, spatial justice, and left-behind places. With empirical evidence drawn from three UK industrial clusters and three associated industrial communities, this paper argues that engaging sense of place – especially those held by host communities – is vital to fully enact the ‘democratic’ and ‘levelling-up’ potential of a place-based approach for industrial decarbonisation and to support the delivery of a just low-carbon transition of declining industrial places. At the end of the presentation, I will also ponder over the implications of this approach to different settings, like Taiwan, where ‘place-based’ approaches for industrial decarbonisation are seemingly missing.

Brief Introduction of the presenter

Huei-Ling Lai (Lynn) is a political ecologist and human geographer trained in the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) at Erasmus University Rotterdam. With her PhD research, she had published on various topics regarding the place-making dynamics and community-based energy and agricultural projects in Taiwan, covering issues of indigenous rights, environmental justice, land grabbing, and rural development. In 2022 and 2023, she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter with Prof. Patrick Devine-Wright and Dr. Jo Hamilton on two UKRI-funded research projects of the Industrial Decarbonisation Research and Innovation Centre (IDRIC): the “Net Zero Sense of Place” project (https://idric.org/project/mip-3-4/) and the ‘Delivering A Place-based Just Transition in Industrial Clusters’ project (https://idric.org/project/ia-3-1-delivering-a-place-based-just-transition-in-industrial-clusters/). She is an assistant professor in the Institute of Social Innovation, National Sun Yat-Sen University in Taiwan since 2024. Her current research is about the nexus of sense of place, spatial justice, and left-behind places in industrial decarbonisation in Taiwan, focusing on marginalised communities adjacent to huge petrochemical industrial complexes.