Article

Progress in Human Geography

37(4) 465–485
Reckoning with ruins ª The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0309132512462271
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Caitlin DeSilvey
University of Exeter, UK

Tim Edensor
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Abstract
Scholarly interest in ruins and derelict spaces has intensified over the last decade. We assess a broad selection
of the resulting literature and identify several key themes. We focus on how ruins may be used to critically
examine capitalist and state manifestations of power; we consider the way in which ruins may challenge
dominant ways of relating to the past; and we look at how ruins may complicate strategies for practically and
ontologically 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.

Keywords
cultural value, dereliction, materiality, memory, ruins

I Introduction themes among academic approaches to ruin-

scholarship, speculate about the attractions and
A decade ago, the curious researcher on a search
intensities that underlie the current eruption of
for scholarship about 20th-century ruins – the
interest, and suggest that human geography is
structural fallout produced by rapid cycles of
uniquely positioned to offer essential critical
industrialization and abandonment, develop-
resources and perspectives to future study.
ment and depopulation, conflict and reconcilia-
The ruined form is one of the most enduring
tion – would have found relatively little to work
and complex representational devices in west-
with. Ten years on, the same search reveals an
ern tradition, and contemporary perspectives are
extraordinary intensification of academic and
inevitably inflected with traces of earlier
popular interest in the ruins of the recent past
engagements. During the Renaissance, the ruin
and associated realms of dereliction. We seem
was emblematic of ‘a sundered past’ (Dillon,
to be in the midst of a contemporary Ruinenlust,
2005/2006); the break with Roman civilization
which carries strange echoes of earlier obses-
was filtered through Christian iconography that
sions with ruination and decay. While there has
transposed classical fragments with mortal
been focused attention on this topic in anthropol-
ogy (Dawdy, 2010; Stoler, 2008), archaeology
(Gordon, 2010; www.ruinmemories.org) and lit-
Corresponding author:
erary studies (Hell and Schönle, 2010), there has Caitlin DeSilvey, University of Exeter, Tremough Campus,
been no sustained analysis from within human Penryn TR10 9EZ, UK.
geography. In this paper, we identify emergent Email: C.O.Desilvey@exeter.ac.uk
466
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
Progress in Human Geography 37(4)
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;
González-Ruibal, 2005); urban wastelands and
edgelands (Farley and Roberts, 2011; Franck
and Stevens, 2007; Hudson, 2010); derelict rail
and transportation networks (Qviström, 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 Schönle, 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
DeSilvey and Edensor
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 Schönle 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
467
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 and
regression
We begin with a review of recent scholarship
that charts the critical relationship between
468
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,
Progress in Human Geography 37(4)
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
DeSilvey and Edensor
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.
469
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 (Pálsson, 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). Schönle
(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 Ceauşescu 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
Ceauşescu, 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
470
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). González-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 González-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),
Progress in Human Geography 37(4)
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
DeSilvey and Edensor
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
471
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
472
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
Progress in Human Geography 37(4)
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
DeSilvey and Edensor
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
473
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
474
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: productive
possibilities
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
Progress in Human Geography 37(4)
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,
DeSilvey and Edensor
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).
475
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
476
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
Progress in Human Geography 37(4)
(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. Qviström (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. Qviström’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
DeSilvey and Edensor
reinterpreted’ (Qviström, 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’:
477
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’ (Pálsson, 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
478
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
Progress in Human Geography 37(4)
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
circulate around ruins articulate notions of
disenchantment and re-enchantment (Bennett,
2001; Picon, 2000).
DeSilvey and Edensor
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’ (Schönle, 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
479
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
480
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
Progress in Human Geography 37(4)
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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