Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics, and Materiality

Jones, Robert A.

Technology and Culture, Volume 47, Number 4, October 2006,

pp. 821-822 (Review)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/tech.2006.0232

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tech/summary/v047/47.4jones.html

Access Provided by University of West of Scotland at 03/30/11 11:50AM GMT

 B O O K R E V I E W S

lays all blame for the disaster on the chemical industry while ignoring the
culpability of government agencies. And while Josephson appropriately
criticizes George W. Bush’s dismal environmental record, he might have
commented on the Bush administration’s willful erosion of democratic
pluralism as well. The sheer breadth of the book, moreover, occasionally
results in a scattershot style. But these are mere quibbles. This is a book well
worth reading, and, assuming it gets the wide readership it deserves, it
should generate a valuable discussion among historians interested in tech-
nology, the environment, and the modern state.
JORDAN KLEIMAN
Dr. Kleiman is assistant professor of history at the State University of New York–Geneseo. He
is currently writing a history of the American branch of the appropriate technology movement.

Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics, and Materiality.

By Tim Edensor. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Pp. 208. £50/£16.99.

Tim Edensor’s new book is not the usual tour through the world of mate-
rial-cultural studies and industrial archeology. Instead, it is about industrial
space, how it is socially produced and commodified, and how it can be im-
bued with new meanings that recall original intentions while simultane-
ously allowing people to ascribe their own uses and activities that can stand
in opposition to the original intentions of industrial manufacturing. Eden-
sor celebrates the industrial ruin and tells what such spaces and the artifacts
they contain reveal about ourselves and the ways we occupy space.
The author begins his book with a nostalgic recalling of summers spent
at his grandparents’ cottage in Scotland, where, as a means of whiling away
long afternoons, he took to visiting the “Haunted House”—the residential
ruin of an old industrial baron and its surrounding estate. Although this
episode helps to explain some of the author’s attraction to ruins, it only in-
directly applies to his main thesis. Edensor is not interested in haunted
houses, but rather in industrial ruins, particularly the ruins of twentieth-
century, large-scale manufacturing enterprises with their vast shop floors
and, often, their equally vast open areas that once served as temporary
holding facilities for the automobiles of the workers and their bosses.
Edensor is highly critical of the current tendency to assign such spaces
to the category of “waste,” without material and social value in the post-
industrial urban life of contemporary Western society. Rather, he develops
a postmodern approach that explores the new kinds of space that these
industrial ruins produce—space imbued with meanings and activities that
can stand in juxtaposition to the dominant interpretations of postindus-
trial society. His work, as he puts it, serves “as a celebration of ruinous
spaces which unfolds into a critique of contemporary processes of ordering
urban space” (p. 53). As distinctly messy spaces lacking the sense of order

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they once exuded, these industrial ruins stand in sharp contrast to the reg-
ulated and controlling spaces of the twenty-first-century urban realm.
Yet, Edensor’s work is not only about the space of ruins. He also dis-
cusses the various sorts of objects that inhabit those spaces. The detritus of
former processes of manufacture and commodification are of particular
interest for the ways they become imbued with new meanings. The designa-
OCTOBER
tion of these once-useful objects as “waste” provides a means for their re-
2006 classification as objects with essentially new purposes, such as sculpture,
VOL. 47
playground equipment, historical monument, and so forth. One of the char-
acteristics of power, Edensor argues, “is the ability to make decisions about
what is required, and therefore about what objects get to be produced and
in what form.” The other side of this “decommissioning of space and things
is their reclamation by industries concerned with renovation, recycling and
preservation and by less organized individuals and groups” (p. 105).
The objects found in the space of industrial ruins, far from being waste,
confound our notions about use and exchange value. Through their classi-
fication as ruin and waste, these objects escape “the assignations which pre-
viously delineated their meaning and purpose and so we are able to relate to
them in imaginative, sensual, conjectural and playful fashion—free from
the constraining effects of norms surrounding their value or function” (p.
123). In this sense, an encounter with the industrial ruin is a liberating expe-
rience. It is precisely their fragmentary nature and lack of fixed meaning
that renders industrial ruins more profoundly meaningful.
In all of this there is very little that is new. Edensor draws very heavily on
the work of such seminal thinkers as Henri Lefevbre, Walter Benjamin,
David Harvey, and Arjun Appadurai. It is an intellectual heritage that places
his work solidly within the postmodern turn of human geography. Eden-
sor’s contribution, thus, is illustrative more than groundbreaking. His selec-
tion of industrial ruins does, however, provide an apt illustration of the
“social production of space,” and he draws it in a more clear and readily
understood fashion than some of his predecessors. Additionally, Industrial
Ruins is illustrated throughout with the author’s own eerie black-and-white,
decontextualized photographs. These are well selected and masterfully used
to illuminate the points he makes and the conclusions he draws.
ROBERT A. JONES
Dr. Jones is assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Eastern Michigan University.

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