A slum district on the Wrong Side of the Tracks 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 that the slums attract live in poverty and subsist on Poverty Food, and the Addled Addict and The Alcoholic are common. They live in crumbling housing or shacks amidst the leftover scrap metal and outmoded industrial machinery, Abandoned Warehouses, and shuttered factories.
A protagonist might try to help the locals escape from living here, but more often it simply serves as another backdrop in a Crapsack World or a more technologically advanced 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 Anti-Hero who will commit wrongdoings to get farther ahead than the rest, even if it's only going to be slightly better for them.
Although this is often a Dystopia, it can be Truth in Television, 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 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 are going to be rain-soaked.
A Sister Trope to Wretched Hive, City Noir, Urban Ruins and Urban Hellscape.
Compare Company Town, Nightmarish Factory, and Polluted Wasteland. When these get really out of hand, they may end up part of an Industrial World.
Not to be confused with Sci Fi Ghetto.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- The backdrop mining city in Castle in the Sky. The place is not exactly polluted, but people do live in squalor and there's not much more than the mining industry around. Word of God mentions it's inspired by Welsh mining towns.
- Pokémon: The Series: 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.
- In Princess Principal, 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.
Comic Books
- 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.
Fan Works
- Equestria Girls: Friendship Souls: 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. When Smooze goes missing after his battle with Lightning Dust, Chrysalis takes it over.
Film — Live-Action
- The city streets in Blade Runner.
- The titular city in The City of Lost Children, the industry in question being a huge port.
- The setting of Eraserhead.
- Downplayed in The Plague At The Karatas Village: Karatas certainly looks like this trope, but it seems to lack any industry save for a busy railway line.
- In Robin Hood (2018), 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.
- Future Detroit (which is unsettlingly accurate) is like this in RoboCop.
- In Sleep Dealer, 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.
- The town Stalker (1979) lives in.
Literature
- The Valley of Ashes in The Great Gatsby.
- Subverted in Ruined City by Nevil Shute; 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".
- The Sprawl of the Sprawl Trilogy, 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.
Live-Action TV
- In 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.
Music
- "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".
- "Dirty Water" by The Standells, about Boston and its polluted Boston Harbor and Charles River
- "Keep the Wolves Away," by Uncle Lucius:
Took my first breath where the muddy Brazos
Spills into the Gulf of Mexico
Where the skyline's colored by chemical plants
That put bread on the table of the working man
Where the working man does his best to provide
Safety and shelter for kids and a wife
Giving a little of his soul every day
Making overtime to keep the wolves away
Tabletop Games
- The vast majority of Salt Lake City in 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.
- 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.
- Warhammer 40,000 has these extended to entire planets in the form of Forge Worlds, Eternal Engine-like factories using mostly backbreaking manual labor to produce an uninterrupted supply of weapons, tanks and armor for the Imperium's trillions-strong armies.
Video Games
- 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.
- Bio-Hazard Battle: Stage 7 is a whole abandoned industrial complex
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- New Coventry from 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 The Outsiders) and the Townies (Non-Bullworth Academy students that bear a grudge against the school and its faculty).
- In the City-Building Series 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.
- In 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).
- Downplayed in later games such as Zeus: Master of Olympus and Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, 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.
- 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).
- The undercity of Midgar and Junon in Final Fantasy VII.
- The entire city of Vector in Final Fantasy VI.
- The Fallout 3 expansion pack The Pitt has these, in addition to the Nightmarish Factory that is the Mill. While The Pitt (post-War Pittsburg) 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.
- Planet Leeds in 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.
- League of Legends has Zaun, the literal undercity to Piltover. While Piltover exists as a clean, thriving Shining City 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 mad science, corrupt opportunists, and deadly pollution being deeply ingrained with the city's identity.
- Manhunt: Carcer City, to the point where entire areas of the city have been abandoned to sadistic gangs.
- Omega in Mass Effect 2. It was originally a demi-planet full of 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 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.
- In Septerra Core, the Junkers of Shell 2 make a living scavenging the scrap dropped by the Chosen of Shell 1.
- The Redmond Barrens in Shadowrun for the Sega Genesis. They are only active because of the local nuclear power plant and the presence of the Yakuza.
- This is a very possible outcome of many versions of SimCity. You generally want to avoid placing residential zones next to industrial ones unless you want this to happen.
- Chemical Plant Zone in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 involves polluted water in the factory, with an entire city in a red hazy smog in the background.
- Space Quest 6 has a planet called Polysorbate LX; it's applied to the whole planet and described as the most polluted planet in the galaxy.
- World of Warcraft:
- Bilgewater Harbor has this feel.
- Kezan has it even more. Basically anything the Goblins make or take over will at least start to show signs of this.
Real Life
- 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.
- 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.
