Steel & Oil INDUSTRIAL MEMORY ARCHIVE

A peer-contributable, citable evidence base

Steel & Oil: Anshan–Houston Industrial Memory Archive

A shared, citable record of two industrial communities: Anshan, in northeast China, the steel city that broke, and Houston, on the U.S. Gulf Coast, the oil city that so far bends. Researchers cite individual entries as primary-source evidence; scholars, archivists, and family historians add new entries under one sourcing standard. The collection reads both cities against one question: what civic and economic infrastructure has to be in place for an industrial transition to be absorbed by a community rather than collapse it.

Version 0.2 · 94 records · bilingual (English / 简体中文) · Tim Qiao, editor, The Village School, Houston, Texas · companion to the research paper Carbon Technocracy Under Restructuring.

Collection census

94
catalog records
all field-collected in Anshan, 2026; no illustrative or AI-composed records remain
20
oral histories
real voluntary questionnaire responses, transcribed and de-identified
74
artifacts photographed
real material culture from participating families; personal details redacted where present

Measured by records contributed and cited in research, not by page views or downloads — a seed collection, growing in public.

Two cases, one comparison

LOCATOR DIAGRAM · PLOTTED BY COORDINATE Houston, Texas 29.77°N 95.64°W · upstream oil & gas Anshan, Liaoning · 鞍山 41.10°N 122.99°E · integrated steel
The two cases lie roughly 12,500 km apart and run under different political-economic regimes: a state-owned-enterprise architecture in Anshan, a publicly-traded-firm market architecture in Houston. The archive treats them as one comparative case.

The catalog

94 of 94 records shown · every record links to a full catalog page.

Case
Type