Line #62 Main/IndustrialGhetto


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14	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rsz_ir36gr21x1_9015.jpg]]
15
16	A slum district on the WrongSideOfTheTracks taken over or built around a nearby heavy industry district. The badly polluted air and water has made the inhabitants unhealthy. The low-paid factory workers and the Lumpenproletariat [[note]] Marx's term for swindlers, prostitutes, small-time crooks, etc. [[/note]] that the slums attract live in poverty and subsist on PovertyFood, and the AddledAddict and TheAlcoholic are common. They live in crumbling housing or shacks amidst the [[DownInTheDumps leftover scrap metal and outmoded industrial machinery]], {{Abandoned Warehouse}}s, and shuttered factories.
17
18	A protagonist might try to help the locals escape from living here, but more often it simply serves as another backdrop in a CrapsackWorld or a more technologically advanced [[TheEmpire Empire]], where there is little the protagonists can do but to move on forwards in their adventure. If this is a recurring setting in the story, it's likely the protagonist is an AntiHero who will commit wrongdoings to get farther ahead than the rest, even if it's only going to be slightly better for them.
19
20	Although this is often a {{Dystopia}}, it can be TruthInTelevision, as industrial districts were often unsuitable for dwellings. Industrial districts not only produced pollution, but they were close to ports, railway yards and other transportation hubs, to facilitate bringing in raw materials and moving finished products out. Between the smog and toxic liquids leaching out and the disruption from the ships and trains, quality of life for anyone living there would be poor. Workers clustered near factories to reduce travel time. Most well-off homeowners used [[NotInMyBackyard zoning laws and pressure on city council]] to ensure factories stayed in low-income neighborhoods. {{Cyberpunk}} stories taking place in a modern industrial city's neon-lit, towering spires [[CyberpunkWithAChanceOfRain are going to be rain-soaked]].
21
22	A SisterTrope to WretchedHive, CityNoir, UrbanRuins and UrbanHellscape.
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24	Compare CompanyTown, NightmarishFactory, and PollutedWasteland. When these get really out of hand, they may end up part of an IndustrialWorld.
25
26	Not to be confused with SciFiGhetto.
27	----
28	!!Examples:
29
30	[[foldercontrol]]
31
32	[[folder:Anime & Manga]]
33	* The backdrop mining city in ''Anime/CastleInTheSky''. The place is not exactly polluted, but people do live in squalor and there's not much more than the mining industry around. WordOfGod mentions it's inspired by Welsh mining towns.
34	* ''Anime/PokemonTheSeries'': Gringey City is heavily polluted and nearly abandoned due to the over-construction of seemingly automated factories, with barely any people or Pokémon around. The local Muk and Grimer eventually invaded and overran the power plant, shutting off all the electricity in the city.
35	* In ''Anime/PrincessPrincipal'', London is one. The sky is permanently hazy and smoggy, glowing orange at night; homeless litter the streets, and the city itself is a vast sprawl. Children as young as 6 are out working in factories.
36	[[/folder]]
37
38	[[folder:Comic Books]]
39	* ''ComicBook/{{Batman}}'': Some of Gotham's least pleasant neighborhoods border or overlap with industrial parts of the city. Crime Alley for instance is just west of an industrial park.
40	[[/folder]]
41
42	[[folder:Fan Works]]
43	* ''Fanfic/EquestriaGirlsFriendshipSouls'': The Warrens beneath Las Noches is this, a massive factory overseen by the Tenth Espada, The Smooze, to manufacture luxuries and basic necessities that would otherwise need to be stolen from the living world. [[spoiler:When Smooze goes missing after his battle with Lightning Dust, Chrysalis takes it over.]]
44	[[/folder]]
45
46	[[folder:Film -- Live-Action]]
47	* The city streets in ''Film/BladeRunner''.
48	* The titular city in ''Film/TheCityOfLostChildren'', the industry in question being a huge port.
49	* The setting of ''Film/{{Eraserhead}}''.
50	* Downplayed in ''Film/ThePlagueAtTheKaratasVillage'': Karatas certainly looks like this trope, but it seems to lack any industry save for a busy railway line.
51	* In ''Film/RobinHood2018'', the Sheriff of Nottingham has exiled many of the citizens from Nottingham and into the coal mine city known as 'The Slags' across the river to live and toil in dangerous conditions.
52	* Future Detroit (which is unsettlingly accurate) is like this in ''Franchise/RoboCop''.
53	* In ''Film/SleepDealer'', protagonist Memo travels to Tijuana to find work and winds up living in a shantytown inhabited by other impoverished tele-migrants who work in the city's cybernetic sweatshops.
54	* The town ''Film/Stalker1979'' lives in.
55	[[/folder]]
56
57	[[folder:Literature]]
58	* The Valley of Ashes in ''Literature/TheGreatGatsby''.
59	* Subverted in ''Ruined City'' by Creator/NevilShute; the eponymous city ''used'' to fit the "heavily polluted" part of this trope and wasn't an especially attractive living environment by many standards, but the workers were unionised and the pay and conditions were fairly good. It only became a true ghetto when the Great Depression kicked in and the shipyard went out of business. The protagonist actually notes the lack of pollution, and describes the place as being "clean as a washed corpse".
60	* The Sprawl of the ''Literature/SprawlTrilogy'', officially known as Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, is a massive city on the east coast, running as far north as Boston and as far south as Atlanta.
61	[[/folder]]
62
63	[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
64	* In ''Series/{{Killjoys}}'', the Company has turned the entire moon Westerly into one of this, being the star system's industrial center, but also impoverished and polluted.
65	[[/folder]]
66
67	[[folder:Music]]
68	* "Dirty Old Town", written by Ewan [=MacColl=] about his native Manchester, and covered by many artists including Dubliners and The Pogues. Many covers of the song drop the lone reference to Salford, changing it instead to "sulphured" or "smoky".
69	* "Dirty Water" by ''Music/TheStandells'', about Boston and its polluted Boston Harbor and Charles River
70	* "Keep the Wolves Away," by Uncle Lucius:
71	-->''Took my first breath where the muddy Brazos''\
72	''Spills into the Gulf of Mexico''\
73	''Where the skyline's colored by chemical plants''\
74	''That put bread on the table of the working man''\
75	''[[WorkingClassHero Where the working man does his best to provide]]''\
76	''Safety and shelter for kids and a wife''\
77	''Giving a little of his soul every day''\
78	''Making overtime to keep the wolves away''
79	[[/folder]]
80
81	[[folder:Tabletop Games]]
82	* The vast majority of Salt Lake City in ''TabletopGame/{{Deadlands}}'', to the point it is often called "The City o' Gloom" and the locals wear bandanas and breathing masks to survive. Please note that coal isn't the fuel for these factories, but "Ghost Rock" -- concentrated damned souls that burn hotter and longer than coal. The ever-present soot fog means the town's prime cause of death is lung disease; average life expectancy for those without some form of supernatural protection is five years -- less than a year if they're stupid enough to forego masks.
83	* ''TabletopGame/{{Shadowrun}}'': There are many places that qualify, with the Richmond Barrens on the outskirts of Seattle being the most well-known due to being the one that gets the most focus. There are a lot of dilapidated buildings, more than a few radioactive hotspots, and most of the inhabitants have no documentation and are usually gang members or other criminals.
84	* ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'' has these extended to entire ''planets'' in the form of Forge Worlds, EternalEngine-like factories using mostly backbreaking manual labor to produce an uninterrupted supply of weapons, tanks and armor for the Imperium's trillions-strong armies.
85	[[/folder]]
86
87	[[folder:Video Games]]
88	* {{VideoGame/Arcanum}}'': The east and southeast of Tarant is a complex of factories and warehouses where the criminal element tends to hang out. The upper classes tends to treat factory workers (mostly orcs) and said criminals roughly the same.
89	* ''VideoGame/BioHazardBattle'': [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGcEz9JvK-M Stage 7 is a whole abandoned industrial complex]].
90	* New Coventry from ''VideoGame/{{Bully}}''. A dilapidated, impoverished urban area located near the Blue Sky Industrial Park, it's the turf of the Greasers (1950's style throwbacks seemingly inspired by ''Literature/TheOutsiders'') and the Townies (Non-Bullworth Academy students that bear a grudge against the school and its faculty).
91	* In the ''VideoGame/CityBuildingSeries'' industrial buildings drastically lower the aesthetics of the surrounding land. Because housing evolution factors in aesthetics, a nearby industrial building can keep houses from advancing beyond the simplest, and ugliest, stages.
92	** In ''VideoGame/{{Pharaoh}}'' building these is a necessary evil on some maps. Buildings only recruit within a limited range so isolated industrial areas need a dedicated housing block to recruit from. Due to these locations having low desirability and usually a lack of water, these blocks usually remain crude mud huts (fortunately, a single house is all it takes to access the labor pool).
93	** Downplayed in later games such as ''VideoGame/ZeusMasterOfOlympus'' and ''VideoGame/EmperorRiseOfTheMiddleKingdom'', where recruitment is now automatic- mining complexes and factories can churn out ores and finished goods by the cartload without a single house in the vicinity. The downside is that housing now requires much prettier surroundings to evolve.
94	** ''Emperor'' adds a new twist: the Feng Shui mechanic determines the city's overall harmony (placing a water-attuned building in the desert will lower harmony), which in turn determines city happiness and how efficient the sacrifices to gods are (requiring greater quantities for lower results with bad harmony).
95	* The undercity of Midgar and Junon in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII''.
96	* The entire city of Vector in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVI''.
97	* The ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}'' expansion pack ''The Pitt'' has these, in addition to the NightmarishFactory that is the Mill. While The Pitt (post-War '''Pitt'''sburg) had survived a large portion of the nuclear radiation partially due to the choking smog in the clouds and lack of nearby nuclear strikes but mutagens and radiation still leeched into the ground and water. The Monongahela River and it's shores are now extremely radioactive and quickly kill anyone foolish enough to try to swim out.
98	* Planet Leeds in ''VideoGame/{{Freelancer}}'' is literally capable of emitting entire nebulae of smog from just how much polluting industry has covered the planet. An in-game news article mentions that people in Leeds could actually be fed dog food for years without realizing it wasn't proper Synth Food until a foreigner told them, because they had lost their senses of smell and taste from the pollution alone. This planet-sized industrial hell is what inspired the protagonist Trent to undertake freelancing -- to get out of the rat race, out of the horrendous place that is Leeds, and into the vast expanse of the outer space.
99	* ''VideoGame/LeagueOfLegends'' has Zaun, the [[LayeredMetropolis literal undercity]] to Piltover. While Piltover exists as a clean, thriving ShiningCity on the coastal ports between Runeterra's continents, Zaun was a sister city developed on its underground cliffs as a place where all their dirty production work is shunted down to, with [[MadScience mad science]], [[CorruptCorporateExecutive corrupt opportunists]], and [[DeadlyGas deadly pollution]] being [[CityNoir deeply ingrained with the city's identity]].
100	* ''VideoGame/{{Manhunt}}'': Carcer City, to the point where entire areas of the city have been abandoned to sadistic gangs.
101	* Omega in ''VideoGame/MassEffect2''. It was originally a [[BabyPlanet demi-planet]] full of [[{{Unobtainium}} element zero]] which had cracked open due to an asteroid impact, mining facilities were built on it to harvest the eezo. The expanding facilities were forced to build increasingly outward from the mineral deposits, forcing the construction into [[SkyscraperCity a long spire coming off one side]]. As the easy to access material was exhausted, it became a living and industrial hub for harvesting from other asteroids in its local belt. As those too were exhausted, it became a trading town, with lots of black market deals going on daily.
102	* In ''VideoGame/SepterraCore'', the Junkers of [[WorldShapes Shell 2]] make a living scavenging the scrap dropped by the Chosen of Shell 1.
103	* The Redmond Barrens in ''VideoGame/{{Shadowrun}}'' for the UsefulNotes/SegaGenesis. They are only active because of the local nuclear power plant and the presence of the Yakuza.
104	* This is a very possible outcome of many versions of ''VideoGame/SimCity''. You generally want to avoid placing residential zones next to industrial ones unless you want this to happen.
105	* Chemical Plant Zone in ''VideoGame/{{Sonic The Hedgehog 2}}'' involves polluted water in the factory, with an entire city in a red hazy smog in the background.
106	* ''VideoGame/SpaceQuest 6'' has a planet called Polysorbate LX; it's applied to the whole planet and described as the most polluted planet in the galaxy.
107	* ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'':
108	** Bilgewater Harbor has this feel.
109	** Kezan has it even more. Basically anything the Goblins make or take over will at least start to show signs of this.
110	[[/folder]]
111
112	[[folder:Real Life]]
113	* Back-to-backs, cheap houses which were boxed in on 3 sides, were often found in Victorian Britain in the inner-city near factories. They also had a reputation for being poorly built, poorly ventilated, and where the poorest people live, often just renting out 1 or 2 rooms. It got so bad laws were actually put in place to stop the building of them.
114	* Seattle's Georgetown and South Park neighborhoods are both situated along the highly polluted Duwamish River waterfront, have poor road accessibility due to being surrounded by freeways and industrial zonage, especially the latter, with its main access route being an aging drawbridge that had to be closed from 2010 to 2014, and have notoriously high crime and poverty rates.
115	[[/folder]]

Context Main / IndustrialGhetto