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published online 27 November 2012Prog Hum GeogrCaitlin DeSilvey and Tim Edensor

Reckoning with ruins  

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Article

Reckoning with ruins

Caitlin DeSilveyUniversity of Exeter, UK

Tim EdensorManchester Metropolitan University, UK

AbstractScholarly interest in ruins and derelict spaces has intensified over the last decade. We assess a broad selectionof the resulting literature and identify several key themes. We focus on how ruins may be used to criticallyexamine capitalist and state manifestations of power; we consider the way in which ruins may challengedominant ways of relating to the past; and we look at how ruins may complicate strategies for practically andontologically ordering space. We speculate about the motivations for this surge of current academic interest,draw out resonances with current trends in geographical thinking, and suggest directions for future research.

Keywordscultural value, dereliction, materiality, memory, ruins

I Introduction

A decade ago, the curious researcher on a search

for scholarship about 20th-century ruins – the

structural fallout produced by rapid cycles of

industrialization and abandonment, develop-

ment and depopulation, conflict and reconcilia-

tion – would have found relatively little to work

with. Ten years on, the same search reveals an

extraordinary intensification of academic and

popular interest in the ruins of the recent past

and associated realms of dereliction. We seem

to be in the midst of a contemporary Ruinenlust,

which carries strange echoes of earlier obses-

sions with ruination and decay. While there has

been focused attention on this topic in anthropol-

ogy (Dawdy, 2010; Stoler, 2008), archaeology

(Gordon, 2010; www.ruinmemories.org) and lit-

erary studies (Hell and Schonle, 2010), there has

been no sustained analysis from within human

geography. In this paper, we identify emergent

themes among academic approaches to ruin-

scholarship, speculate about the attractions and

intensities that underlie the current eruption of

interest, and suggest that human geography is

uniquely positioned to offer essential critical

resources and perspectives to future study.

The ruined form is one of the most enduring

and complex representational devices in west-

ern tradition, and contemporary perspectives are

inevitably inflected with traces of earlier

engagements. During the Renaissance, the ruin

was emblematic of ‘a sundered past’ (Dillon,

2005/2006); the break with Roman civilization

was filtered through Christian iconography that

transposed classical fragments with mortal

Corresponding author:Caitlin DeSilvey, University of Exeter, Tremough Campus,Penryn TR10 9EZ, UKEmail: C.O.Desilvey@exeter.ac.uk

Progress in Human Geography1–21

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human bodies. The Baroque imagination cast

the ruin more ambiguously, mining its allegori-

cal possibilities while dwelling on the melan-

cholic power of transience and decay (Stead,

2003). The 18th century witnessed the emer-

gence of Germanic Ruinenlust (indexed in

cultural products such as the paintings of Caspar

David Friedrich and the writings of Goethe) and

the decidedly more English pursuit of the pictur-

esque (Cosgrove and Daniels, 1989). Ruined

hermitages and crumbled faux-Classical

temples appeared in formal gardens, designed

to provoke a particular set of emotions in

the observer and encourage musing on the

aesthetics of pleasurable decay (Lowenthal,

1985; Roth et al., 1997). This Romanticism

foregrounded the symbolic aspects of the ruin,

and materialized emerging ideas about the har-

monic balance of nature and culture (Simmel,

1965; Woodward, 2002). Ruin-gazing became

the preserve of an elevated aesthetic sensibility,

a mark of sophistication and sensitivity (Zucker,

1961). But the Romantic conception of the ruin

was shaken in the 20th century by the scale and

brutality of destruction: it was no longer accep-

table to playfully frame intact buildings as ruins,

a future equivalent to the classical ruins of anti-

quity – a favourite conceptual game for artists

and architects from Michael Gandy to Albert

Speer (Yablon, 2010). ‘New ruins’, as McCauley

branded them in her post-Second World War

study, still ‘smell of fire and mortality’, and sen-

sitivity to this devastation required that ‘ruin

pleasure must be at one remove, softened by art’

(1953: 454). Over the following decades, scho-

lars primarily focused their ruin-scholarship

around this aesthetic axis, with art historians,

historical geographers and others generating

important insights into the perception and

reception of classical and Romantic ruins

(Cosgrove and Daniels, 1989; Lowenthal,

1985; Roth et al., 1997).

With the turn of the century, the ruin gaze

suddenly broadened, and the ruins of the recent

past, dynamic and unsettled, became the focus

of cross-disciplinary study. Sites recently inves-

tigated by researchers are geographically dispa-

rate and typologically diverse: factories,

foundries and mills (Barndt, 2010; Edensor,

2005a; High and Lewis, 2007; Mah, 2010);

military installations and Cold War remnants

(Davis, 2008; Strange and Walley, 2007); post-

Socialist state-built architecture (Andreassen

et al., 2010; Lahusen, 2006; Pusca, 2010;

van der Hoorn, 2003); abandoned rural settle-

ments (Armstrong, 2010; DeSilvey, 2007a;

Gonzalez-Ruibal, 2005); urban wastelands and

edgelands (Farley and Roberts, 2011; Franck

and Stevens, 2007; Hudson, 2010); derelict rail

and transportation networks (Qvistrom, 2012;

Rosa, 2011); maritime relics (Gordillo, 2011;

Gorst, 2011; Schneekloth, 2007); and even the

abandoned island site of a reality TV show

(Lorimer and MacDonald, 2002). As we write

this paper, the pace of publication seems to

accelerate, ‘wreckage upon wreckage’ piling

up on our desks more quickly than we can keep

up (Benjamin, 1999: 249). A parallel trend is

playing out in popular and artistic contexts,

much of it indexed on the internet.1

We focus our attention on these ‘new ruins’,

and draw out critical themes from research that

has engaged with them. The sheer quantity of

work in this area requires that we set some

boundaries for our analysis. The term ‘ruin’ has

a nuanced meaning, and can refer to both object

and process (Hell and Schonle, 2010: 6) – ‘a

ruin’ (noun) and ‘to ruin’ (verb). While we use

the term in both senses in this paper, most of the

research discussed concerns sites where process

is primary, and where agencies of decay and

deterioration are still active and formative.

These are sites where the ‘absence of order’

(Somers-Hall, 2009) and maintenance leads to

a state of continual transformation. Lucas’s

(forthcoming) distinction between ‘fast’ and

‘slow’ ruins has relevance here: while ‘fast’

ruins occur as a result of an abrupt transition –

through wartime devastation (Bevan, 2006) or

natural disaster (Wilford, 2008) – ‘slow’ ruins

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slip into ruination more gradually, sidelined by

social or economic transitions, or incrementally

abandoned. Most of the work discussed here

concerns ruins of the ‘slow’ variety, though

we include discussion of sites where fast

destruction has been succeeded by slow decay.

The sense of working across temporal scales is

mirrored by attention to the physical scale and

substance of the object of study. Much of the

work we address is pitched at the scale of ruined

– but still recognizable – structures, but we also

examine how processes of ruination operate on

a finer grain, and may eventually produce

absences, such as vacant lots and gaps in infra-

structure. All of the studies we consider deal

with structures and places that have been classi-

fied (by someone, at some time) as residual or

unproductive, but equally most of these sites

remain open to appropriation and recuperation.

Finally, there is a cultural specificity to this

project: most of the work we gather here repre-

sents a distinctly western perspective, though

we do refer to work which indicates that the

current fascination with ruins and decay is of

global significance.

In this paper, we draw out key themes from

the scholarship in an attempt to understand

something of the power and potency of ruins –

particularly those produced within living mem-

ory. We consider research that explores how

ruins are used to do particular kinds of cultural

and aesthetic work, producing different mean-

ings and modes of encounter. We also look at

how ruins are conscripted to do certain kinds

of intellectual labour. As Schonle notes: ‘Some-

how we cannot leave ruins alone and let them

simply exist in their mute materiality. We need

to make them speak and militate for our the-

ories’ (2006: 652). In the first section, we focus

on how ruins may be used as sites from which to

examine and undermine capitalist and state

manifestations of power; in the second, we

consider the way ruins may be used to challenge

dominant ways of relating to the past; and, in

the third, we look at how ruins may force a

reconsideration of conventional strategies for

practically and ontologically ordering space.

These three themes, while by no means the only

way of organizing this material, emerged from

our analysis as the most relevant and pervasive

tropes in recent ruin scholarship. Within each

theme we work to draw out tensions and

ambiguities between different approaches. A

particular recurrent tension emerges between

assertions about the potential for ruins to chal-

lenge and critique normative social and mate-

rial formations and counter-claims about their

potential associations with regressive politics

and aestheticized passivity. Attitudes to ruins

and ruination reveal social and cultural values

and commitments that become legible through

the different narratives that ruins are asked

to carry.

As we review the current trends in the inter-

disciplinary study of ruins, we identify gaps and

limitations in these studies that geographical

scholarship may be uniquely positioned to

address. While recent ruin studies suggest new

interpretive frameworks, attentive to context

and contingency, there is still a persistent ten-

dency to privilege visual concerns, and a preoc-

cupation with making the ruin illustrate

particular aesthetic or philosophical constructs

(Garrett, 2011a; Ginsberg, 2004; Morgan,

2011). Such preoccupations neglect the ruin’s

non-representational power to activate memory

and sensation and downplay the significance

of the lived presence of ruined spaces and

places. Within each section, we explore how

geographical scholarship – with its attention

to the relational, material, spectral and (non-

)representational qualities of space and experi-

ence – is well positioned to cast a conceptual

net over this slippery subject.

II Counter-sites: resistance andregression

We begin with a review of recent scholarship

that charts the critical relationship between

DeSilvey and Edensor 3

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ruins and political and economic orders. We

introduce research on how ruins are used to

critique the structures of global capitalism,

colonialism and coercive state power, but we

move on to consider how the fundamental

semiotic instability of ruins may allow them to

be mobilized to affirm and memorialize these

same structures. An investigation of the ambig-

uous critical position generated by photographic

representations of ruined spaces follows, which

leads on to a discussion of the contemporary

context and potential directions for future work.

Many of the accounts presented in this

section are influenced by Benjamin’s mobiliza-

tion of derelict sites and outmoded material

culture to unmask the illusions of capitalism

as progress. Rather than conceiving of history

as a progressive, linear sequence of events,

Benjamin regarded modernity as a repetitive

cycle of ruin and devastation; in his elaboration

of Klee’s emblematic ‘Angel of History’, he

writes: ‘Where we perceive a chain of events,

he sees one single catastrophe which keeps

piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in

front of his feet’ (Benjamin, 1999: 249). Yet, for

Benjamin, rapid obsolescence – what Stallabrass

(1996) calls an ‘accelerated archaeology’ – held

a redemptive, emancipatory dimension, for the

process of ruination revealed the ‘truth content’

of a place or object, ‘the critical, utopian

moments buried within it’ (Gilloch, 1997:

110). The ruin indexes both the hope and hubris

of the futures that never came to pass – whether

early capitalism’s promise of abundance and

ease, or socialism’s vision of collective labour

and equality.

The echo of Benjamin’s ideas can be detected

in recent work on the pervasive dereliction gen-

erated by mobile capital. Cycles of ruination,

demolition and reclamation have spatially

uneven effects: certain buildings are left to

decay whereas others are rapidly demolished

and replaced; others are left as ‘devalued

capital’, presently disused but ripe for future

accumulation (Harvey, 1985). Paradoxically,

the ruin emerges through this process as a sym-

bol of both failure (of local industry) and of

growth (elsewhere, usually overseas). Scholars

exploring these processes draw on the notion

of ‘creative destruction’ – through which capit-

alism organizes the destruction and reconfigur-

ing of economic orders to clear the way for the

creation of new wealth (Schumpeter, 1994).

Cowie and Heathcott describe how the flight

of capital from Detroit – led by the automobile

industry – precipitated the gutting of commu-

nities and state structures, and the onset of wide-

spread dereliction: ‘(T)he very set of political

rules that created the industrial order that we

once took to be permanent provided the means

by which corporations could dismantle that

order’ (2003: 15). In the landscapes and lives

left behind by industry, memory traces – in the

form of ruined factories and abandoned infra-

structure – contain within them the potential to

counter the passive acceptance of economic

decline (High and Lewis, 2007; Storm, 2008).

As Mah shows in her study of the neighbour-

hoods around the former shipyards in Walker,

Newcastle, ruination may be ‘a lived process’

(Mah, 210: 399) in which memory is rooted in

the complex, ongoing experience of industrial

decline, where ‘the present has not moved far

from the past and the future is at best uncertain’

(p. 410). Ruins in these sites may become forces

for mobilizing and materializing collective

anger and resistance; but they may also simply

be painful reminders of loss. Massey (2011),

commenting on her collaboration with film-

maker Patrick Keiller in making the film Robin-

son in Ruins, discusses how the sites depicted in

the film express the anxiety and exclusion cre-

ated by mobile forces of global capital and the

recent economic recession. The ‘ruins’ in Keil-

ler’s film are marginal and insubstantial – bat-

tered hoardings, road verges, disused airfields

– but hold a latent critical power nonetheless.

These perspectives are supplemented by

recent critiques that extend the signification

of ruins beyond an association with volatile

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capitalist processes to consider them as

counter-sites to forces of state violence, totali-

tarianism and colonial repression. Buck-Morss

(2002) discusses the spaces and buildings that

served to project visions of a Communist uto-

pia, and argues that their ruination seems to

herald the dismantling of these ideologies and

the regimes from which they emerged. In a

similar vein, Pusca (2010) discusses how iron-

works in Romania and the Czech Republic

were associated with state-propagated rhetoric,

through which heroic worker, industry and

city were bound together. Accordingly, for the

now detached worker, these ‘industrial hori-

zons became unrecognizable, collapsed in a

pool of dust, regrets, corruption, and, more

important, a sense of self-destruction and futi-

lity that directly challenged discourses of

progress and positive change’ (p. 241). Lahu-

sen (2006) similarly points to the purposeful

ruination of symbolic sites following the

demise of socialist regimes in Russia and east-

ern Europe, but argues that the essential ambi-

guity of these places – through which

unrealized revolutionary potential complicates

their status as emblems of endurance – has

been neglected in the headlong rush to decry

and erase them. The potential power of ruins

as political counter-sites is exemplified by

Szmagalska-Follis’s (2008) discussion of how

Soviet imperial ruins in the borderlands

between the Ukraine and Poland have been

appropriated for use as a commune. The com-

mune, which occupies a derelict nuclear base,

is based on an anarchist self-sufficiency that

responds to the disorder of post-socialist tran-

sitional state, yet uses the unexpectedly dur-

able structures of totalitarian power as an

exercise in recycling. The commune offers a

home to dispossessed and politically marginal

people, and suggests the emergence of a more

egalitarian kind of collectivism, and an alter-

native to the wholesale reform and market

capitalism that defines mainstream post-

socialist reconstruction.

One species of ruin vividly highlights the

current volatility of capitalist production –

half-finished buildings whose construction has

been halted by malign economic conditions.

Such sites include abandoned luxury home

developments in the USA (Yablon, 2010) and

Iceland (Palsson, 2012), ghost estates in Ireland

(Kitchin et al., 2012) and deserted five-star hotel

projects on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula (Gill,

2008), all victims of the collapse of the

subprime mortgage market and the domino

devastation of world financial markets. In

Smithson’s terms, these sites carry ‘the memory

traces of an abandoned set of futures’ (1996: 72)

– in this case the false prosperity promised by

global markets based on smoke and mirrors.

As ‘ruins in reverse’, these ‘buildings don’t fall

into ruin after they are built but rather rise into

ruin before they are built’ (p. 72). Schonle

(2006) discusses how unfinished concrete struc-

tures in Russia still litter the landscape, testify-

ing to architectural hubris or banal

mismanagement. A similar dynamic plays out

in a series of incomplete projects in the liminal

spaces of post-socialist Bucharest, which were

abandoned following the collapse of the totali-

tarian Ceausescu regime (Light and Young,

2010). Of six planned food market and dining

complexes, four were never completed. Reviled

through association with the former regime, the

structures seemingly had no place in the post-

socialist city, yet lingered for years and were

only recently demolished. However, parts of a

monolithic civic centre, also unfinished by

Ceausescu, remain derelict, their presence

materializing the persistent conflict over how

to redevelop such monumental spaces, even as

negative associations become diluted over time.

As all this suggests, the critical power of

ruins is not fixed, but alters with time and con-

text. Steinmetz (2008) draws out this point in his

discussion of post-colonial ruins in Namibia and

post-industrial ruins in Detroit, exploring the

way in which these ruins are used by certain

groups to locate and express nostalgia for the

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colonial and Fordist past. In this example, the

potential critical power of ruins is inverted, and

regressive rather than resistant engagements

move into the foreground. Stoler picks up on

this ambivalence in her analysis of ruins as

‘imperial debris’: ruins may be signs of the

‘aftershocks of empire’ (2008: 194), but they

may also provoke ‘imperial nostalgia’ – as did

the ruins of earlier historical periods which

became ‘icons of a romantic loss’. In Stoler’s

reading, while ruins may provide testimony to

baleful historical processes – ‘a political project

that lays waste to certain peoples and places,

relations, and things’ – they also stand as sym-

bols of ‘consequential histories that open to

differential futures’ (p. 195). Gonzalez-Ruibal

(2008) touches on similar territory in his impas-

sioned discussion of the revelations offered by

relics such as overgrown Spanish civil war

trenches and a rusting Soviet anti-aircraft gun

abandoned in the Ethiopian bush. He argues that

these sites pay testimony to terrible events but

also have the potential to offer a therapeutic rec-

ognition of wrongs suffered, ‘unveiling what the

supermodern power machine does not want to

be shown’ (p. 262). For Gonzalez-Ruibal, ruins

testify to changing regimes of power and econ-

omy, and offer an opportunity to ‘disrupt the

signifying chains of legitimacy built upon

notions of heritage by engaging with matter,

fragments, and spectral traces’ (p. 273).

The potential for the ruined form to signify

perspectives that range from critical resistance

to regressive denial is strikingly evident in the

genre of ruin photography (Kemp, 1990). While

we lack space to address the full range of artistic

engagement with ruins – this topic deserves a

paper of its own – the role of photography is

especially pertinent. The recent debate around

photographic projects in the industrial and resi-

dential ruins of Detroit illustrates some of the

issues at stake. As high-profile international

photographers have turned their gaze on the

spectacle of Detroit’s disintegration

(Marchand and Meffre, 2010; Moore, 2010),

local residents and social critics have accused

them of creating a depopulated ‘ruin porn’ that

privileges the aesthetic charge of ruination,

thereby ignoring the contextual economic and

social devastation and the role of finance and

government in its creation (Finoki, 2009; Leary,

2011; McGraw, 2007; Rosenberg, 2011; Stein-

metz, 2009). Others have argued that the ruin-

image ‘reproduce[s] the viewing subject as a

consumer of dereliction’ (Cunningham, 2011)

and fosters a passive, neutralized position in

relation to the image content, risking what

Benjamin diagnosed as the ‘aestheticization of

politics’ (Stead, 2003). In many ways, ruin-

imagery has become complicit in the logic of

the global marketplace, selling both in glossy

coffee-table books (Dubowitz, 2010; Margaine,

2009; O’Boyle, 2010) and in elaborate advertis-

ing campaigns (Palladium Boots, 2010).

In other projects, however, such as the

longitudinal studies carried out by Camilo

Vergara (1999) in decaying American cities like

Camden, New Jersey, images of derelict and

abandoned urban spaces may frame ‘nostalgia

as an enabling stance for critical realism’

(Blackmar, 2001: 335). Lewandowski further

suggests that Vergara’s photographs expose ‘the

ruinous present of neoliberal ‘‘progress’’’ and

fuse the aesthetic power of images with an ethi-

cal and moral obligation to the urban past’

(2008: 307). Pusca (2010) explores the potential

role for photography to validate the experience

of former workers and create ‘reflective coun-

ter-sites’ in the post-socialist industrial ruins

described above, and Crang (2010), in his anal-

ysis of photographs of the ship-breaking indus-

try, asserts the potential for critical ‘aesthetic

registers’ that ‘depict the wasting processes of

globalized capitalism’ (p. 1084). In China, con-

temporary artists are combining photography

with other media to produce rich critical repre-

sentations which expose the negative impacts

of global capitalism and rapid urban moderniza-

tion on the country’s environment and people

(Chu, 2010). The photographic image – like the

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ruin itself – is multivalent, and open to diverse

interpretations and manipulations.

The work discussed in this section must be

understood as a response to the current historical

moment, in which ruins are used to testify to

what has been left behind by creative destruction

and collapsed regimes with their unfulfilled

dreams. The ongoing drama of the global

economic recession – and the ruination of whole

economies in nations once thought to be

protected from such vicissitudes – will produce

yet more debris, and more opportunities to use

this wreckage to stage critical manoeuvres.

The current period of global economic instability

has accelerated the production of ruins, a trend

that resonates with other historical eras in which

ruins have proliferated, either through the depre-

dations of war and conflict or through the desta-

bilizing effects of economic restructuring, as in

1980s Britain. The current prevalence of ruins

makes them easy targets for symbolic loading,

drawing on the venerable old ruin-gazing themes

of hubris undone and the fall of empire. While

there may be an emergent political sensitivity

in the attention paid to ruins, this is always under-

cut by the potential for other interpretations and

appropriations. As Smith pointed out a decade

and a half ago in his study of a changing New

York City, the ability of the dispossessed to

occupy and reclaim abandoned neighbourhoods

can only hold out for so long against the powerful

forces that work to transform ‘urban dilapidation

into ultra-chic’ (Smith, 1996: 18). Ruin meanings

are continually up for negotiation; as such,

research on the ruins of the recent past requires

a perspective that can straddle economics and

identity politics, urban aesthetics and post-

colonial theory, a perspective that geography is

well placed to provide (Lees, 2012).

III Ruin memory: other times,other histories

This section considers the notion that ruins serve

as emblematic sites at which to re-examine and

recast our relationship with the past, and our

understandings of temporality. Linked themes

include the pluritemporality of the ruin, the con-

vergence of material and personal memory, and

the capacity for alternative, sensual engage-

ments with the past. We further develop an anal-

ysis of ‘how people live with and in ruins’

(Stoler, 2008: 196), and the conditions under

which ruins are abandoned, demolished, reno-

vated, commodified or left as testimony.

Many scholars have mused on the process of

ruination as a metaphor for the erosive, unpre-

dictable aspects of human memory. According

to Stewart, ruins are an ‘embodiment of the pro-

cess of remembering itself’ (1996: 93). As

things acquire potency and significance through

their gradual deterioration, the ruin foregrounds

the futility of aiming to recuperate the past in

any official or exact sense. The alternative is

to celebrate the multi-temporality and indeter-

minacy of the ruined form. Lynch’s contention

that urban materiality is characterized by the

‘accumulation of overlapping traces from suc-

cessive periods, each trace modifying and being

modified by the new additions, to produce

something like a collage of time’ (1972: 171)

has relevance here, as does Crang and Travlou’s

(2001) discussion of Athens as a pluritemporal

landscape in which ‘discordant moments [are]

sustained through a mosaic of sites where quali-

tatively different times interrupt spatialized jux-

tastructures’ (p.173). In the ruin, decay strips

away layers of time and exposes others, reveal-

ing hidden strata and obscured material mem-

ories (Dekkers, 1997; DeSilvey, 2006). As

sites characterized by multiple temporalities,

ruins offer opportunities for constructing alter-

native versions of the past, and for recouping

untold and marginalized stories. As Edensor

argues:

ruins foreground the value of inarticulacy, for

disparate fragments, juxtapositions, traces,

involuntary memories, uncanny impressions,

and peculiar atmospheres cannot be woven

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into an eloquent narrative. Stories can only be

contingently assembled out of a jumble of dis-

connected things, occurrences, and sensations.

(Edensor, 2005c: 846)

The ruin’s contingent stories often emerge at the

interface between personal and collective

memory, as material remains mediate between

history and individual experience. Van der

Hoorn’s (2003) account of the giant National

Socialist holiday complex at Prora examines

how, in their post-war plundering, local resi-

dents bestowed salvaged items with personal

meanings that eclipsed the complex’s Nazi

associations (although post-unification the

same residents lamented the organized

asset-stripping of the site as symptomatic of

free-market greed). The weaving of collective

and personal memory is also explored by

Armstrong (2010), who finds in semi-

abandoned small towns in rural Saskatchewan

‘degrees of translatability and embedded mem-

ory’ that expose the ‘multi-layered and polyvo-

cal’ (p. 277) traces of individual lives lived in a

harsh landscape, like ‘a collection of ragged

knots with no clear beginning or end’ (p. 281).

Similarly, in her excavation of the residual

material culture at a Montana homestead,

DeSilvey explores how a practice of ‘salvage

memory’ unearthed ‘sideways glimpses of the

overlapping terrain between intimate experi-

ence and collective practice’ (2007a: 420).

DeSilvey describes how, faced with the diffi-

culty of narrativizing and curating ‘the sheer

perplexity and promiscuity of the waste things’

found at the homestead, she instead ‘teased out

the shape of an alternative engagement with a

place and its discards’ (2007b: 881) and ‘criti-

cally and playfully examined the way things are

selected, sorted, and preserved in the name of

memory’ (pp. 896–897).

These accounts of the exploration and

appropriation of abandoned spaces highlight

how ruined spaces accommodate, and even

encourage, alternative sensual and imaginative

engagements with the past (Edensor, 2005b,

2008b). In her essay on Orford Ness, Davis

(2008) describes the host of thoughts, impres-

sions and sensations that she experienced as she

moved through the ruined techno-military land-

scape.2 In such places, the researcher’s own

body becomes an instrument for sensing haptic

and sensual aspects of past practice (Edensor,

2008a). In the ‘experiential ruin’, the bodies of

absent others – the people who once inhabited

the now derelict and deserted structures – are

made present through an imaginative ‘embodied

exchange’ with history (Garrett, 2011b: 1057).

Such encounters may generate an appreciation

for the lived experience of others, but they may

also confront the researcher with an unsettling

awareness of the potency of abject materiality

(Buchli and Lucas, 2001). Researchers writing

about such encounters and exchanges often

stress the importance of recognizing the agency

of ‘things’ and material residues, and remain-

ing open to the way that objects themselves may

propose histories that run against the grain of

accepted knowledge (Olsen, 2010). As this

work reveals, ruins may be excessive spaces,

in which material and immaterial traces offer

wide scope for direct engagement and imagina-

tive historical reconstruction.

The unstructured exploration of possible

pasts, and the encounter with involuntary mem-

ories, can perhaps occur more readily in ruins

that remain ‘open’ – managed lightly, if at all,

still caught up in dynamic processes of decay

and unmaking. However, as we have suggested

already, this liminal state is actually a fragile

and ephemeral achievement. In some places,

where economic depression militates against

inward investment, ruins may linger for

decades; in sites of more dynamic social and

economic change, ruined structures are apt to

be swiftly razed, reclaimed or restored. Thirty

years ago, Jackson (1980) wrote about the

essential ‘interval of neglect’ that precedes the

ruin’s reclamation as a symbol of a faded golden

age. Since then, many relics of the industrial

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past have undergone a gradual transformation,

shedding their marginal status (as painful

reminders of economic failure) to be reborn as

restored memorials to past industrial prowess.

‘Consolidation’ (which refers to the stabiliza-

tion of physical structures) is often a direct

corollary of commodification in these sites, as

once redundant relics become anchors for

regional redevelopment and rebranding

schemes. Orange’s (2008) work describes how

this process played out with the designation of

the Cornish Mining UNESCO World Heritage

Site, as people who had lived adjacent to mining

ruins for decades realized that their informal

practices of materials scavenging and fly-

tipping (among other things) would need to give

way to the more narrowly defined encounters

prescribed by the appreciation of these sites as

‘industrial heritage’. The resignification of

these sites – driven by desires to frame their pre-

servation with a singular, legible narrative –

risks the erasure of other, messier, memories

and forms of experience (Edensor, 2005a).

Yet some approaches remain open to expos-

ing the ongoing negotiation between transience

and permanence, even as the ruin is drawn into

other orders of interpretation and recognition. In

the UK, the ambiguous remains of Second

World War and Cold War military infrastruc-

ture often linger in a state of limbo, not allowed

to be demolished but not considered valuable

enough to merit expenditure on stabilization

(Penrose, 2008; Strange and Walley, 2007). The

National Trust’s policy of ‘continued ruination’

(Davis, 2008) for selected structures on Orford

Ness makes a virtue of benign neglect, while

in many of the ghost towns of the western USA

managers aim to maintain a state of apparent

non-intervention, or ‘arrested decay’, in order

to confer an aura of ‘authenticity’ to these sites

(DeLyser, 1999). The landscape parks of Ger-

many’s Ruhr region also incorporate states of

partial ruination, such as at Emscher Park, Duis-

berg, where parts of a disused ironworks com-

plex have been utilized for recreational

purposes while other sections are allowed to

continue to decay and become colonized by

vegetation (Barndt, 2010; Langhorst, 2004). A

similar mobilization of ‘decrepitude as a self-

conscious preservation strategy’ plays out at the

Haus Schwarzenberg in Berlin, where, in the

midst of widespread gentrification and restora-

tion, this multi-purpose building has been left

to rot and crumble in a deliberate act of ‘coun-

ter-preservation’ (Sandler, 2011: 687). As Sand-

ler observes, however, all of these approaches

contain an element of ‘contrivance and intention-

ality’ (p. 691). The potential for a fully non-

interventionist ‘entropic heritage’ practice,

acknowledging processes of ruination without

seeking to manipulate or mediate them, has yet

to be realized (DeSilvey, 2006).

While the restored ruin might close down

certain forms of engagement and experience,

it is impossible to entirely constrain the ruin’s

potential meanings: an element of unruliness

and unpredictability will always remain. Trigg

(2009), in his study of the ruins of the Ausch-

witz gas chamber, explores how this site refuses

to conform to the narrative that is offered to

frame its presence, and instead insists on the

visceral emergence of the past into the present.

At such sites we encounter the ruin as a haunted

space, dense with spectral absences that cannot

be filled, or interpreted rationally. Other sites of

dark history, such as the former SS and Gestapo

headquarters in Berlin, have been deliberately

destroyed in an attempt to exorcise their ghosts,

though the symbolic force of ruins may linger

long after material traces have passed into

oblivion (Till, 2005). Gordillo (2011) describes

how in the late 19th century the remote Rivada-

via district of Argentina was slated for massive

economic development, but siltation of the

Bermejo River, crucial for access and trade, led

to the cessation of development activity and the

stranding of several ships. Although all traces of

these ships have vanished (with the exception of

one ship’s boiler, mounted in a town plaza),

legends persist and the ships continue to be

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invested with mythical stature as symbols of

future prosperity and potential.

To return to the broader questions posed by

this paper: what might be seen to motivate the

recent interest in ruins as sites of counter-

history and alternative engagements with the

past? In an era when heritage has been a key

ingredient in the regeneration of places and the

consolidation of place identity, ruins present

striking opportunities to cast a critical light on

the glorification of some historical sites and the

neglect of others. Ruins may also be attractive

as relic spaces that can provide a material,

unmediated experience of the past in an increas-

ingly dematerialized, digitized world (Boym,

2010). Dawdy has suggested that ‘ruin revival

indexes an emerging fixation on time itself’, and

a desire to scramble temporal orders (2010:

762). All of these theories are plausible, but

none can bear the full burden of explanation.

In fact, the desire to find a singular explanation

that will make sense of the current fixation is

perhaps misguided. What is more important is

finding the critical and creative resources that

will allow researchers to articulate how ruina-

tion opens up undisclosed and often abject

aspects of human experience. Recent work on

‘spectral geographies’ provides some points of

orientation here (Adey and Maddern, 2008;

Degen and Hetherington, 2001; Edensor,

2005c, 2008a; Holloway and Kneale, 2008;

Matless, 2008; Pile, 2005; Wylie, 2007), as does

the work of scholars who engage with psycho-

geography to excavate the uncanny, indetermi-

nate traces that persist in marginal spaces

(Bonnett, 2009; Smith, 2010).

IV Ruin (dis)orders: productivepossibilities

In addition to generating alternative understand-

ings of the past, ruins propose other ways of

ordering and understanding the lived environ-

ment, and this reordering has significant spatial,

ontological and practical implications. In this

section, we consider how ruins create the condi-

tions of possibility for the emergence of alterna-

tive orders and appropriations in ostensibly

regulated urban spaces. We review the work

of scholars who have focused on the creative

potential generated by ruination and dereliction,

discuss how ruins may break down normative

divisions between public and private space, and

suggest hybrid understandings of the entangle-

ments of nature and culture.

In conventional urban planning and political

discourse, the ruined space or structure is con-

ceived of as a problem, a ‘locus horribilis’

which provides a refuge for undesirable beha-

viour. This view is encapsulated by a report of

the British government-sponsored Commission

for Architecture and the Built Environment

(CABE Space, 2003), which represents derelict

sites as ‘blighted’ areas associated with crime

and deviance that threaten the security of chil-

dren and local residents (Jorgensen and Tyle-

cote, 2007). The report calls for design-led

initiatives and the ‘efficient’ management of

‘wasted’ spaces to reduce ‘anti-social’ activities

and reclaim them as productive, public

resources. This managerial, interventionist dis-

course is countered, however, by a growing

body of work that seeks to highlight the poten-

tial functional and philosophical value of these

spaces. Work in this area has generated a bewil-

dering array of neologisms and conceptual tags:

‘unofficial countryside’ (Mabey, 1974), ‘edge-

lands’ (Farley and Roberts, 2011; Shoard,

2000), ‘places on the margin’ (Shields, 1992),

‘terrain vague’ (De Sola Morales, 1995), ‘dead

zones’ (Doron, 2000), ‘anxious landscapes’

(Picon, 2000), ‘parafunctional space’ (Papaster-

giadis, 2002), ‘voids’ (Cupers and Miessen,

2002), ‘landscapes of contempt’ (Girot, 2005),

‘indeterminate spaces’ (Groth and Corijn,

2005), ‘awkward spaces’ (Jones, 2007), ‘found

spaces’ (Rivlin, 2007), ‘ambivalent landscapes’

(Jorgensen and Tylecote, 2007), ‘drosscapes’

(Berger, 2006), ‘loose spaces’ (Franck and Ste-

vens, 2007) and ‘urban interstices’ (Tonnelat,

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2008). Not all of these terms refer to ruins per se,

but all describe places shaped in some way by

processes of ruination.

Many of the scholars working in this area use

ruination and dereliction strategically to level tar-

geted critiques at what they perceive to be the

rigid and restrictive mechanisms that attempt to

manage and control access to the contemporary

urban environment. This work focuses on ‘ill

defined spaces that are not officially or defini-

tively occupied . . . ambiguous, unclear and not

predestined for a specific use’ (Cupers and Mies-

sen, 2002: 129), interstices existing ‘between a

functional past and future’ (Tonnelat: 2008:

293). In contrast to single-purpose spaces that

provide separated and discrete experiences in the

urban landscape (Neilsen, 2002), ruined and

derelict realms are argued to ‘exist outside the

city’s effective circuits and productive struc-

tures’ (De Sola-Morales, 1995: 120). In this

work, ruins are thus often mobilized to critique

normative ideas about productive and unproduc-

tive space, and confound visions of urban order

promoted by city marketers. De Sola-Morales

(1995) suggests that ‘terrain vague’ is latent

space in which the absence of formal use can cre-

ate a sense of possibility and freedom. Nefs con-

curs in regarding such spaces as ‘playgrounds of

urbanistic innovation and cultural breeding

grounds’ (2006: 50). Papadopoulos (2009)

asserts that they are sites of multiplicity with gen-

erative capacities, while Papastergiadis suggests

that they are ‘zones in which creative, informal

and unintended uses overtake the officially des-

ignated functions’ (2002: 45). Jorgensen and

Tylecote argue that, instead of conceiving of

such realms as terra nullius, ‘their intricate topo-

graphy of human structures and artefacts, natural

growth and decay, could be treated as the basis

for future site planning and design’, opening up

‘new possibilities in urban landscape planning

and design’ that might critically question ‘the

relentless production, reproduction, consumption

(and destruction) of over-programmed urban

environments’ (2007: 460).

The celebratory, iconoclastic tone of these

arguments can nonetheless risk overstatement.

Ruins may present the potential for alternative

orderings and engagements, but they also con-

tain other, more negative possibilities. The dark

side of ruination and dereliction – danger, depri-

vation, fear and anxiety – is not erased by their

latent creative potential. Cupers and Miessen

(2002) acknowledge that while the ‘void’ can

be considered a ‘domain of unfulfilled promise

and unlimited opportunity’ (p. 83) it may also be

associated with ‘an existential and sociological

experience of loss’ (p. 80). These informal,

indeterminate sites may indeed be utilized by

a non-hierarchical, hybrid collection of actors

who debate and experiment in search of new

ways of urban thinking (Groth and Corijn,

2005), but to others ruins are symbols of failure

and abandonment, evidence of municipal indif-

ference and social stagnation. For instance,

Lynch makes a distinction between ‘waste-

lands’ – rich with latent potential and the invita-

tion to free exploration and appropriation – and

spaces that are functionally barren, ‘empty of

life and movement’ (1990: 26).

If the celebratory tone adopted by those call-

ing for a positive revaluation of ruins suggests

one point of potential critique, it is also worth

noting that many of these writers are prone to

excessive abstraction, and in their work ruined

or derelict space often functions as a foil, rather

than an actual physical location. However, the

multiple potentials of derelict sites and ruins are

not merely theoretical, for they are experienced

via a myriad of other informal and unofficial

practices. As the economic use-value of these

places fades, other uses and values emerge as

an alternative to, or in the absence of, other

provision. Abandoned buildings are widely

used by homeless people for shelter and may

be ‘transformed by squatters into places of

living, creating and performing’ (Doron, 2000:

253; see also Chatterton, 2002; Tonnelat,

2008). Opportunistic salvage practices are

undertaken by entrepreneurial informal

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demolition workers who asset-strip metals and

materials from ruined buildings, trading these

for cash or assembling them as second-hand

building materials (Hudson, 2012). Ruination

creates spaces for people to grow vegetables

(Moon, 2009; Solnit, 2007), walk (Tonnelat,

2008) and dispose of unwanted material.

Ruins also provide spaces for unstructured

play, exploration and experimentation, serving

as unofficial playgrounds where children can

imaginatively appropriate loose material to

invent adventurous and risky games, and

develop skills of balance and improvisation

(Ward, 1978). The absence of surveillance

allows children to ‘live out their otherness to

adult ordering and adult expectations’ and to

actively occupy, control and manipulate these

environments (Cloke and Jones, 2005: 330;

Edensor et al., 2011). Ruins provide spaces for

adult play as well, including adventure sports,

musical events (such as the notorious ware-

house raves of the early 1990s), commercial and

non-commercial sex, alcohol and drug use, and

graffiti composition. The phenomenon of

‘urban exploration’ represents a relatively

high-profile instance of adult play, with adven-

tures featured on the ‘site reports’ of Urbex

websites. Urban explorers highlight the gender-

ing of exploration, with attendant perceptions of

risk and the masculinist reimagination of the

intrepid explorer in forbidden or perilous space.

Yet, as a loose gathering of non-hierarchical

groups that accommodate diverse desires and

motivations, the urban exploration movement

is depicted by Garrett (2010, 2011b) as a radical

reaction against the escalating securitization,

spectacularization and commodification of

everyday urban experience.

Other transient functions of ruined space are

explored by artists and others who initiate

improvisational, experimental projects that

transform disused sites and structures into con-

vivial and playful social environments (Lang,

2007; Petrescu, 2005; Urban Catalyst, 2007).

Ruins have been used as temporary art galleries

(Groth and Corijn, 2005; Webb, 2003), film sets

(Finoki, 2009), settings for TV drama (Farley

and Roberts, 2011) and venues for programmes

of cultural events (Steinmetz, 2011). These art

practices and cultural representations often

foreground the contrast between the disruptive

and disordered sensations that can be experi-

enced in ruined space with those available in the

more orderly, regulated city. An engagement

with ruined space can enliven the body and

coerce it into unfamiliar manoeuvres, and

through this unfamiliar interaction critically

interrogate the overcoded and over-regulated

production in other realms of the city (Edensor,

2007). This disordering of normative urban sen-

sation is provoked by the peculiar affordances

available in ruined and marginal space: a ‘world

of objects and surfaces proposing themselves to

be seen, accessible to perception’ (Tonnelat,

2008: 304) offers multiple possibilities for

action and experience. In ruins, things usually

assigned to specific functions become jumbled,

and the absence of any ordering imperative

allows for a more unscripted and loose engage-

ment with space and materiality. Emergent sen-

sual, material and aesthetic qualities reveal the

inherent vitalism of all matter, its ‘liveliness’

(Bennett, 2010).

These vital and lively properties become gra-

dually more legible as the process of ruination

takes its course. Qvistrom (2012) discusses a

disused railway network around the Swedish

city of Lund as a complex assemblage of rela-

tions, now characterized by absences, disconti-

nuities and broken connections. Certain parts

of the network have been erased, while some

have been reutilized as cycle paths and green

spaces, and others are devolving into de facto

wild space. Qvistrom’s acknowledgement of

such incomplete dismantling offers a complex

appreciation of the heterogeneous materialities,

temporalities and spatialities involved in the

redundancy of a network, and the subsequent

enrolment of other actors: ‘ruins do not simply

crumble, but are dismantled, reassembled and

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reinterpreted’ (Qvistrom, 2012: 273). Similarly,

Adiv (2011) shows how the abandonment of a

Californian railway generated a semi-derelict

landscape of industries and facilities, still loosely

linked, though now by desire lines, forms of play

and utility, and post-industrial ecologies.

These rewilding landscapes fundamentally

challenge distinctions between ‘natural’ and

‘cultural’ orders (Cronon, 2003). A rich ‘recom-

binant ecology’ (Barker, 2000) emerges in these

sites, as the material remnants of industry

become host to a range of colonizing species,

both animal and vegetable. Such spaces are

perhaps best understood as ‘ecological cofabrica-

tions’, where a unique ‘politics of conviviality’

accommodates both human and non-human

agency (Hinchliffe et al., 2005). Qvistrom argues

that dereliction is an essentially transgressive

state: ‘Every place has a past and a former order,

and if abandoned it will disintegrate into ruins

or become ruderal . . . two closely related terms

describing the transgression of the divide

between nature and culture’ (2007: 271). Sev-

eral research studies have focused on the biodi-

verse ecologies that thrive in brownfields and

post-industrial spaces. Lorimer’s discussion of

brownfield sites and living roofs develops a

‘fluid biogeography [that] draws attention to the

cosmopolitanism of the nonhuman realm and

the diverse communities that inhabit and claim

to speak for it’ (2008: 2057). Llanelli’s disused

steelworks and abandoned fuel-ash lagoons are

wildlife ‘hotspots’ and botanical refuges, and

adjacent to Canvey Island town a substrate of

dredged silt (deposited as the base for an oil ter-

minal which was never built) supports a rich

community of plant life and provides a nation-

ally important refuge for rare insects (Castree,

2005). Yet this diversity is often overlooked

because it does not fit within ‘the standardiza-

tion of ecological knowledge and its stabiliza-

tion through a typology of wildlife

communities’ (Harrison and Davies, 2002:

106). Jorgensen and Tylecote argue that such

‘interstitial wildernesses’:

are evolving landscapes which re-connect our

natural-cultural selves in the context of our

urban existence. Their ambivalence and

ambiguity should not be seen as a failing but

as a reservoir of meanings, which may be con-

stantly elaborated and explored. (Jorgensen

and Tylecote, 2007: 458)

The same recombinant processes that produce

the rich ecologies of brownfield sites occur

within remnant structures, and indeed these

processes are responsible for generating much

of the aesthetic attraction of ruins as discussed

in previous sections. As soon as buildings have

been abandoned, they start to fall apart, revealing

the unheralded centrality of the continuous,

ongoing maintenance and repair of the material

world (DeSilvey, 2012; Edensor, 2011; Graham

and Thrift, 2007; Gregson et al., 2009; Lofgren,

2005; Spelman, 2002; Wilford, 2008). The

texture and appearance of decaying objects fore-

grounds an emergent aesthetics, as function

becomes subservient to form and substance

(Edensor, 2005c). Numerous agents – moisture,

bacteria, chemicals, rodents, birds, wind – trans-

form the qualities of matter, exposing what

Smithson regarded as the myth that things are

enduring, discrete entities. Instead, he argues,

‘solids are particles built up around flux, they are

objective illusions supporting grit, a collection of

surfaces ready to be cracked’ (Smithson, 1996:

107). Ruination presents the possibility of rene-

gotiating the porous border between social and

ecological ontological orderings, and ‘interro-

gates dichotomies between . . . human and

non-human, self and other’ (Palsson, 2013). Such

a shifted perspective, however, must guard

against indulging in a haze of ‘naturalized entro-

pic drift and dissolution’ (Cunningham, 2011)

that loses sight of the very real economic and

social processes that led to abandonment in the

first place.

The intensification of recent scholarship on

ruins and dereliction may be seen as a reaction

to the proliferation of managed and structured

public spaces, and the desire for unmanaged and

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formless spaces to act as a kind of alternative

public realm. As city centres are redesigned and

transformed into aesthetically coded shopping

and entertainment venues, festival market

places, cultural quarters, malls and heritage dis-

tricts, the lively conviviality and heterogeneity

championed by the likes of Jacobs (1961) and

Sennett (1970) is displaced and devalued.

Exchange value replaces social value, and

opportunities for interaction and sensory stimu-

lation are edged out as rigorous maintenance

and surveillance restricts the movements of

things and people conceived as ‘out of place’

(Cresswell, 1996). Derelict spaces are proffered

as sites that, by contrast, are replete with latent

possibilities and greater scope for conviviality,

experimentation and expression. Ruin enthu-

siasts and scholars critique the proliferation of

single-purpose spaces and particular kinds of

design orthodoxies, but their arguments often

have a historical echo in the proponents of the

picturesque, who similarly used their privileged

and enlightened positions to challenge prevail-

ing ideas about regimented landscape forms and

to celebrate unruly vegetation, ruined structures

and the potential for imaginative engagement

these spaces offered (Zucker, 1961). The work

discussed in this section is perhaps most useful

in informing a more critical and creative

perspective on the embedded ambiguities and

oddities of all space, rather than restricting its

focus to those spaces deemed (by someone) to

be outside the pale.

V Attractions/directions

No doubt much recent writing can be criticized

for its somewhat romantic celebration of the

alterity of ruins. Many of the approaches that

we have discussed here conceive of ruins as

symbols of ‘nostalgia for modernity’ and the

failed promises of the industrial age (Huyssen,

2006). Casting a critical eye on this situation,

film-maker Patrick Keiller glumly suggests that,

because ‘we no longer have the power or

energy to imagine a better world, we now poe-

ticize dilapidation’ (in Worpole, 2011: 47), and

Cunningham (2011) similarly critiques the

hyperbolic aestheticization of decay: ‘In the

image world of hopefully ‘‘late’’ capitalism

the industrial ruin has acquired a fair amount

of cultural capital, and such over-determination

is a major reason for ennui with corroded con-

crete’. Daniels concurs, suggesting that ruins

and other marginal sites have become banal,

having been ‘colonized by deep topographers,

new nature writers, literary cartographers and

psychogeographers’, rendering them ‘increas-

ingly conventional, more central than periph-

eral to the cultural imagination’ (2011: 44).

He implies that the ‘edgy’ and ‘oppositional’

aspects of ruins have been so thoroughly exam-

ined and appropriated that these sites have

become ‘liminal zones passing into landscape

scenery’ (p. 44), part of an emergent orthodoxy.

As Dawdy points out, however, romantic

ruin fixation usually co-exists with a dystopic

dark side, the two approaches distinguishable

as ‘alternating currents in the discourse of

modernity’ (2010: 762). Within an apocalyptic

frame, these places are premonitions of a deva-

stated future – post peak-oil, post-capitalism,

sometimes even post-human (Weisman,

2007). Yablon (2010: 4) points out that recon-

sidering ruins as portending future debilitation

is not necessarily pessimistic or nihilistic, but

may be motivated by the pursuit of ‘pleasur-

able melancholy or sublime terror’. This

delight is rarely innocent, however, focusing

as it usually does upon devastated spaces, lost

livelihoods and homes. The current fascination

with ruins may thus be part of a broader aes-

thetic premised on sensationalism and antici-

pation; we are attracted to ruins to play out

possible futures (and pasts), including violence

and devastation, but also pleasure and excite-

ment. This may be why many accounts that cir-

culate around ruins articulate notions of

disenchantment and re-enchantment (Bennett,

2001; Picon, 2000).

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Yet, as the many accounts featured above

demonstrate, the contemporary hunger for ruins

transcends a simple romantic/dystopic dichot-

omy, and speaks also to urgent desires to expe-

rience and conceive of space otherwise. These

desires may come into conflict (or co-exist) with

other forces that attempt to label and control

these spaces, whether in the numerous attempts

to name urban disorder, in heritage strategies

to arrest decay, or in the regeneration and reuse

of industrial structures. However, because

most ruined forms are inherently unstable and

indeterminate, such inscriptions tend to be

temporary and contingent (Boym, 2010). While

we have identified a host of ways in which ruins

can be appropriated for various aesthetic,

political or intellectual projects, we have also

emphasized how the ruin’s ‘fundamental ambi-

guity’ (Huyssen, 2006) repels interpretive fix-

ing. The ruin ‘derives its power and promise

from its refusal to be assimilated in the

surrounding symbolic order’ (Schonle, 2006:

654). Ruins merrily transgress and collapse a

whole set of binaries: transience/persistence,

nature/culture, attraction/repulsion, power/

vulnerability, potential/purposelessness, aban-

donment/appropriation, presence/absence,

aestheticization/abjection. Their oscillating

identities ensure that no stabilized meaning can

endure unchallenged, as long as the process of

ruination continues. One person sees a derelict

lot, another sees wildlife habitat. One sees a

painful reminder of a colonial past, another sees

affirmation of a glorious history. An artist sees

abstract beauty while a resident sees painful aban-

donment. A squatter sees a home whereas a

neighbour sees an eyesore. There are multiple

ways of making sense and use of these sites; in

this paper we have drawn out a host of contradic-

tory impulses, attractions and evocations.

Although the critical power of ruins is fragile

and tenuous, open to subversion and dilution,

the desires explored in this paper – for resensua-

lization, adventure, playfulness, contingency,

the fleeting, the ephemeral and the

incommensurable – testify to a gathering surge

of resistance against the logics of commerce and

bureaucracy that often seem to suffuse contem-

porary space and close off other possibilities. It

is primarily their potential to offer a critical per-

spective on the contemporary production of

space, we contend, that explains why ruins of

the recent past have become such attractive

objects of scholarship and contemplation.

The research discussed in this paper draws on

a diverse range of methodological approaches –

archival to experiential, analytical to embodied,

visual to visceral. Ruins rarely lend themselves

to representation in seamless narratives and, as

we have inferred throughout, their indetermi-

nacy and openness invites the testing of playful

and experimental methods which attempt to

articulate their complexity, and treat the ruined

space both as a ‘way of seeing’ (Harbison, 1993)

and as a material site for practice and action.

Innovative methods for further investigation of

ruins might include multi-sensory ethnogra-

phies which pinpoint the diverse and changing

qualities of particular sites, or forms of action

research which prompt participating groups to

devise temporary practices in derelict space,

expanding their potential uses and meanings.

Alternatively, the accounts of botanists, tem-

porary dwellers, former workers and urban

explorers could be collected to form composi-

tions of multivocal narratives which capture

the fluid meanings that circulate around partic-

ular ruins and foreground the multiplicity of

these places.

Many of the preoccupations and critical

approaches already evident in ruin scholarship

intersect with current geographical research,

which, by virtue of its embrace of conceptual

hybridity and border-crossing methodologies,

has the potential to unlock critical synergies

across diverse areas of disciplinary interest. A

host of geographical approaches might be used

to extend ruin analysis, and here we cite four

possibilities. First, emerging approaches in

historical and cultural geography offer critical

DeSilvey and Edensor 15

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tools for situating ruins in their particular

spatial, historical and cultural contexts, and

understanding their symbolic and allegorical

significance as a material and social effect. As

we have seen above, the interpretation and

appropriation of specific sites depends on their

location within settings ranging from the post-

industrial to the post-colonial, and from the

post-socialist to the post-military. Second,

geography’s interest in temporality and materi-

ality might be brought to bear on theorizing the

process of ruination, and exploring the unstable

and fluid entities that make and unmake the

ruined form. As sites where material vitalism

is accelerated and highly visible, ruins provide

exemplary opportunities for study of the contin-

ual, dynamic transformation of matter and the

contingent constitution of place. Third, an

emphasis on the processual opens up scope for

non-representational investigations of ruins,

which, by drawing on current research into

embodied geographies, might moderate the

overriding focus on the visual in ruin scholar-

ship and focus attention on the ways in which

the material qualities of ruins afford particular

sensual and affective experiences. Fourth,

research could develop a more sustained under-

standing of how ruins are incorporated into

networks and assemblages, by exploring, for

example, the relational transformations that

delink sites from dissolving infrastructures, and

the ways in which derelict space becomes

enrolled into new networks.

Beyond an exclusive focus on ruins and ruin-

scholarship, the key themes identified in this

paper chime with broader critical geographical

concerns: about accelerating processes of eco-

nomic restructuring and creative destruction,

in a world where terra firma seems less secure

than ever; about how we might respond to such

transformations in composing historical narra-

tives and organizing memories that complement

and challenge official accounts; about the pro-

cesses that produce aestheticized, commodified

and tightly regulated urban spaces and

undermine attempts to practise and imagine the

city otherwise; and about more relational con-

ceptions of urban ecology wherein non-

humans are acknowledged as co-constituents

of the city. Research into ruins, we argue, can

inform and energize critical investigations of

how expressions of power and resistance, and

relegation and recuperation, circulate and

inhere in all spaces.

Acknowledgements

An early version of this paper was presented at a

gathering of the ‘Ruin Memories’ research network

in Reykjavik, Iceland, in November 2010. The paper

benefited from insights shared at this event, from

comments provided by four anonymous reviewers

and from conversation with attendees of a May

2011 research seminar at the University of Exeter-

Cornwall.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any

funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-

for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. Selected websites include: http://www.derelictlondon.

com; http://www.finster-stahlart.de; http://www.28day

slater.co.uk; http://darklythroughalens.wordpress.com;

http://www.detroityes.com; http://my.reddit.com/r/Aban

donedPorn.

2. This embrace of the sensual aspects of ruin exploration

contrasts with the approach of the bunkerologists, dis-

cussed by Luke Bennett (2011), who soberly catalogue

and survey Cold War ruins, carefully itemizing and

classifying objects and types of architecture and

documenting their explorations online, accumulating

authoritative knowledge.

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