The Dead City

Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay

Paul Dobraszczyk

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781784537166
• eBook ISBN: 9781786722409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Dead City unearths meanings from such depictions of ruination and decay, looking at representations of both thriving cities and ones which are struggling, abandoned or simply in transition. It reveals that ruination presents a complex opportunity to envision new futures for a city, whether that is by rewriting its past or throwing off old assumptions and proposing radical change. Seen in a certain light, for example, urban ruin and decay are a challenge to capitalist narratives of unbounded progress. They can equally imply that power structures thought to be deeply ingrained are temporary, contingent and even fragile. Examining ruins in Chernobyl, Detroit, London, Manchester and Varosha, this book demonstrates that how we discuss and depict urban decline is intimately connected to the histories, economic forces, power structures and communities of a given city, as well as to conflicting visions for its future.

Notes

Introduction: urban ruins, imagination and exploration

1.Brian Dillon, ‘Introduction / A short history of decay’, in Brian Dillon (ed.), Ruins (London, 2011), pp. 10–14.

2.See Caitlin DeSilvey and Tim Edensor, ‘Reckoning with ruins’, Progress in Human Geography 37/4 (2012), p. 3. Since their survey of the recent academic literature on ruination was published in 2012, many more works have appeared, including book-length studies: Ann Laura Stoler, Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham, NC and London, 2013); Bjørnar Olsen and Þóra Pétursdóttir (eds), Ruin Memories: Materialities and the Archaeology of the Recent Past (London, 2014); Hannah K. Göbel, The Re-Use of Urban Ruins: Atmospheric Inquiries of the City (London, 2015); and special issues of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38/3 (2014); Performance Research 20/3 (2015); and Transformations 28 (2016).

3.Examples of apocalyptic destruction in post-9/11 cinema are legion and in 2014 alone included, large-scale urban ruination generated by aliens (Edge of Tomorrow), dystopian warfare (The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1), rebooted monsters (Godzilla), and a global pandemic (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes). Recent examples of post-apocalyptic video games include the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series (2007–), The Last of Us (2013), and the Fallout series (1997). On the Ruin Lust exhibition, see Brian Dillon, Ruin Lust: Artists’ Fascination with Ruins, from Turner to the Present Day (London, 2014).

4.Stephen Graham, ‘Postmortem city: towards and urban geopolitics’, CITY 8/2 (2004), p. 188.

5.Ibid., p. 187.

6.Exemplified in Dora Apel’s Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline (New Brunswick, NJ and London, 2015), which is surprising given that the author is an art historian. It also underlies many overtly political readings of ruins, including Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London, 2012). A more nuanced reading of the relationship between politics, aesthetics and ruins is provided by Daryl Martin, ‘Introduction: towards a political understanding of new ruins’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38/3 (2014), pp. 1037–46.

7.As far as I am aware there has been no attempt to survey images of urban ruination in contemporary visual culture, and such a survey would be difficult to undertake considering how quickly digital images become obsolete. Yet even a cursory search reveals the extent of the proliferation: as of 10 September 2016, there were over 4 million photographs of ruins on the file-sharing site Flickr.com; over 9 million news articles (nearly 8,000 on ‘abandoned cities’ alone); and nearly 300,000 Google search results for ‘abandoned cities’. This in addition to the dozens of photographic collections of abandoned sites published by companies such as Carpet Bombing Culture, RomanyWG, and Steidl.

8.This argument is central to Apel’s Beautiful Terrible Ruins.

9.Nick Yablon, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819–1919 (Chicago, 2009), pp. 3, 5.

10.Stephen Cairns and Jane M. Jacobs, Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 2014), pp. 1–2.

11.Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London, 2011), p. 174.

12.As explored in depth in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London, 2008). Klein identifies the shock doctrine strategy as based on neoliberal capitalism’s exploiting of crises to push through controversial exploitative policies while citizens are too emotionally and physically distracted by disasters or upheavals to mount an effective resistance.

13.Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA, 1999), p. 97. On the development of aerial warfare and its impact on cities, see Kenneth Hewitt, ‘Place annihilation: area bombing and the fate of urban places’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73/2 (1983), pp. 257–84.

14.On the Chinese tradition of contemplating ruined cities, see Wu Hung, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (London, 2012), pp. 18–19.

15.See Alexander Regier, ‘Foundational ruins: the Lisbon earthquake and the sublime’, in Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (eds), Ruins of Modernity (Durham, NC and London, 2010), pp. 357–74.

16.On the British context, see David Skilton, ‘Contemplating the ruins of London: Macaulay’s New Zealander and others’, Literary London Journal 2/1 (2004), available at http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/march2004/skilton.html; on the American context, see Yablon, Untimely Ruins, pp. 147–52.

17.George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (New Haven, CT and London, 1971), p. 19.

18.Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA, 1986), pp. 384, 386.

19.Georg Simmel, ‘The ruin’ (1911), in Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), Georg Simmel, 1858–1918: A Collection of Essays (Columbus, OH, 1959), pp. 259–66.

20.On Benjamin and ruins, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA, 1991), pp. 159–201; and Emma Fraser, ‘Interrupting progress: ruins, rubble and catastrophe in Walter Benjamin’s history’, unpublishe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: urban ruins, imagination and exploration
• I Histories
• II Explorations
• III Futures
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography