Urban Ruins

In videogames, classical buildings and objects are usually tarnished and collapsed. This chapter surveys how different styles of videogame from the 1980s to the 21st century depict antiquity. Four versions can be identified: its original freshness, its modern traces, and the moments of its destruction are three. The fourth is that ancient Greece and Rome were already made of ruins. This range reflects the nature of games themselves, as well as the tastes of modern audiences.

Postwar reconstruction in Germany after World War II represented an opportunity for reflection on the urban form and the elements of the traditional city. Freudenstadt, the " City of Joy " commissioned by Duke Frederick I of Württemberg, designed and built in 1599 by Heinrich Schickhardt, is an example of urban renewal through a new and different value set to its elements. Freudenstadt was designed in the form of an ideal city with quadrangular layout inspired by the projects of Albrecht Dürer for the Renaissance city: the castle (never built) as physical and spiritual center of the city; the church in the southern corner of the Marktplatz, a large " square " with arcades.After the bombing in 1945, there were several proposals for reconstruction: some aimed to restore the original character of the square, others aimed to redesign that space, considered too broad and indefinite. Author of the final project was Ludwig Schweizer. His reconstruction project aimed to keep the Schickhardt plan, through the principles of Stadtbaukunst (the art of building cities). The replacement of traditional Giebelhäuser with the type of Traufenhäuser allowed not only update the residential building type, but also modified the character of that space, even by virtue of a changed sensitivity towards urban design, expression of a different political and social order.

The purpose of this article is to question the aesthetics and philosophy of the ruins that correspond to an old European tradition inherited from both, the Roman antiquity and the Renaissance, using as instruments of analysis the stories of science fiction related with the theme of Apocalypses. In fact, when painting cityscapes and broked symbolic monuments, science fiction authors settle for a classic aesthetic of ruins dating back to such illustrious artists as Juan Bautista Piranesi (1720-1778). However, the cities destroyed during the different ends of the world that occur both in futurists novels and films, cartoons or video games, are not but a sign and a warning that all our civilizations are mortal. In this sense, the ruined future of such famous cities like Paris and New York, not only play the role of ancient Roman’s memento mori ("remember you will die"), but also let us feel what the time captured in the stone means.

Après quinze années de guerre civile et dans un climat politique très instable, Beyrouth, entre ruines et chantiers, s'est renouvelée dans un mouvement effréné qui échappe au consensus. La métropole libanaise, palimpseste où affleurent de multiples strates d'urbanisation, a été et reste le champ d'une opposition farouche entre, d'un côté, partisans de l'effacement des traces d'un passé violent et de l'autre, défenseurs de la cause patrimoniale. Mais dans cet espace urbain complexe, comment identifier ce qui relève du patrimoine?
Loin d'être univoque, cette notion fait ici l'objet d'un état des lieux, dans l'histoire récente et à travers le prisme des différents protagonistes de la cité. De l'urbaniste au citadin ordinaire, chacun dessine une conception singulière du passé dans le paysage de la ville.
Dès lors, des enjeux de tous ordres surgissent et se heurtent. Les ambitions politiques ou spéculatives rivalisent avec les stratégies de promotion ou de défense d'un capital culturel et symbolique.
Ainsi, bien plus que des traces comme témoignage d'une douloureuse période historique, les îlots ruinés de Beyrouth révèlent les conflits irrésolus qui secouent toujours la société libanaise.

With reference to Walter Benjamin’s work on nineteenth-century Paris, and Debord’s work on the spectacle, this article argues that the depiction of ruined cities in video games – as virtual ruins of the present – simultaneously reproduces the empty novelty of the commodity (the phantasmagoria of progress-oriented civilization), and offers a vision of failed progress through counter-spectacle. One means of understanding Benjamin’s dreamworld of modernity is through ruins and rubble – not only as material remnants, but in other visual or artistic forms that might reveal the illusion of progress as a fallacy, particularly in contrast to an urban-focused commodity capitalism. With an emphasis on Fallout 3, Hellgate: London and The Last of Us, and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series this article argues that, if cities can be read as dreamworlds, and films, art and ruination as the means for awakening, then urban destruction in the virtual sphere can provide a counter to the collective dream of eternal progress.

Mumbai's textile industry is commonly but incorrectly understood to be an extinct relic of the past. In The Archive of Loss Maura Finkelstein examines what it means for textile mill workers—who are assumed not to exist—to live and work during a period of deindustrialization. Finkelstein shows how mills are ethnographic archives of the city where documents, artifacts, and stories exist in the buildings and in the bodies of workers. Workers' pain, illnesses, injuries, and exhaustion narrate industrial decline; the ways in which they live in tenements exist outside and resist the values expounded by modernity; and the rumors and untruths they share about textile worker strikes and a mill fire help them make sense of the industry's survival. In outlining this archive's contents, Finkelstein shows how mills, which she conceptualizes as lively ruins, become a lens through which to challenge, reimagine, and alter ways of thinking about the past, present, and future in Mumbai and beyond.

International workshop (May 15-17), organized by Eva Fotiadi and Maria Boletsi, in collaboration with Ipek Celik-Rappas (Koç University).
The workshop is accompanied by a film evening program (May 15) with a selection of Greek short films on the workshop's topic (curated by Geli Mademli).
The workshop is supported by the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA), the Amsterdam Research School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the Research Institute for Art and Public Space / Gerrit Rietveld Academy (LAPS).

The workshop will focus on city-scapes that have recently been radically reconfigured through pervasive frameworks of crisis – financial, political, humanitarian etc. We want to explore alternative experiences of urban space, new artistic imaginaries, and innovative cultural initiatives emerging from such urban crisis-scapes by centering on two distinct but interrelated thematic lines: ruins (Day 1) and walks (Day 2).
Those interested in attending (part of) the workshop, please send an email to [email protected] or [email protected] by May 6.

Winner of  the 2019 Nikki Keddie Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association, and the 2019 Anthony Leeds Prize from American Anthropological Association’s Society for Urban, National, and Transnational / Global Anthropology (SUNTA) section.

Beirut is a city divided. Following the Green Line of the civil war, dividing the Christian east and the Muslim west, today hundreds of such lines dissect the city. For the residents of Beirut, urban planning could hold promise: a new spatial order could bring a peaceful future. But with unclear state structures and outsourced public processes, urban planning has instead become a contest between religious-political organizations and profit-seeking developers. Neighborhoods reproduce poverty, displacement, and urban violence.

For the War Yet to Come examines urban planning in three neighborhoods of Beirut's southeastern peripheries, revealing how these areas have been developed into frontiers of a continuing sectarian order. Hiba Bou Akar argues these neighborhoods are arranged, not in the expectation of a bright future, but according to the logic of "the war yet to come": urban planning plays on fears and differences, rumors of war, and paramilitary strategies to organize everyday life. As she shows, war in times of peace is not fought with tanks, artillery, and rifles, but involves a more mundane territorial contest for land and apartment sales, zoning and planning regulations, and infrastructure projects.

The bombed remains of the old Royal Opera House have deteriorated for over sixty years. Located at the entrance of Valletta, the capital city of Malta, the site constitutes a prominent element of the urban fabric and its considerable use value, as well as its importance as a symbol in the collective memory of the local population, gives it high cultural significance.
The Royal Opera House project required preliminary excavations and studies that brought to light the basements and underground spaces of the theatre, unknown to the public before their recent unearthing. These, together with a large lapidary collection scattered all over the island, have become intricately connected with the 21st century conversion of the site into an open-air performance space situated above. The ruins, together with the values encompassed by the site itself, are factors that determined the design approach, as well as the restoration and technical methodologies adopted during the building works.
This paper describes the approach to the project that resulted not only from the careful consideration of the remaining elements of the theatre but also from a re-examination of the time-honoured concept of ruins. The overlap of the latter was necessary to achieve the desired urban, social and cultural impact on the on-going rehabilitation of the entrance to Valletta.

This chapter considers sites like Pripyat, in Chernobyl, as zones of alternative practice, especially in terms of urban exploration. At the same time, it offers a critique of such activities as a form of adventure tourism, contrasting the transformative potential of urban ruination against the commodification of the liminal.

The rapid processes of urbanization and industrialization changed the face of the planet, and Siberia had its share in these transformations. Dispersed throughout the Russian Federation are thousands of small " city-type settlements " constructed in the latter half of the twentieth century. The remarkable period of industrial upheaval resulted in mass internal migrations and relocations in response to a centrally planned economy. Camps, town, and cities sprang up almost overnight, creating the industrial geography of socialist reorganization. Following the end of the Soviet Union, many of these towns on the industrial margins suffered from a drastic reduction in government support and a collapse of manufactures. These processes resulted in a process that might be described as the evacuation of the population. This work investigates mobility and moving that people conduct in failing and malfunctioning infrastructures in rural Siberia as well as affects that the precarious conditions generate (Allison, 2003, Tsing, 2015). How people make decisions regarding their mobility and what conditions these decisions? Infrastructures become agential and affective: such modes of attachment as nostalgia, melancholy, and anticipation spring in the material settings. Affects function like a form of rationality overwhelming the calculations to leave. The malfunctioning infrastructures and ruins produce affects that paradoxically make people disregard economic hardships and the rhetoric of better opportunities elsewhere. This work on affective infrastructures connect the theories of affect (Deleuze, 1977, Stewart, 2007) and infrastructures (Larkin 2008, 2013, Simone, 2004) offering to consider beliefs, inertia, denial, and sense of belonging as infrastructurally embedded.

In un saggio del 1990, Rethinking public sphere, Nancy Fraser suggeriva che l'idea di "una" sfera pubblica finisse per coprire o mascherare l'esistenza di contro-sfere subalterne. La stessa cosa sembra valere per lo spazio urbano, l'idea di città: parlare di contro-spazi subalterni invita a leggere l'urbano come una sorta di battleground, tenuto insieme da un racconto, un'immagine, l'astrazione (reale, ovviamente) di una città come spazio pubblico condiviso.

The ruins of modernity are inevitably the ruins of the North. Actual or imagined ruined cities are always Euro-American industrial or post-industrial metropolises. The South, however, has its modern, post-industrial ruins as well. And they are neither a later nor an imperfect version of those in the North. Quite the opposite: they antedate the modern ruins of Europe and the United States, sometimes by a hundred years. As with other disasters, events happening in the South often foreshadow those that are about to happen in the ‘developed’ world. The early post-industrial ruins of South America are an excellent material to reflect critically on ruination, other modernities, the global logic of capitalism and the work of coloniality, both in the region and elsewhere. In this paper, I will focus on one of the countries that have generated more and more fascinating ruins of modernity: Brazil.

The proliferation in recent years of photography of urban ruins has proven polarizing: on the one hand, urbex photographers claim the status of art for their work; on the other hand, critics and members of local communities consider such photographs to be voyeuristic and exploitative. Hence the term, “ruin porn.” This dissertation draws together insights from art history, philosophical aesthetics, and theological aesthetics to frame photographs of post-industrial ruins as artistic expressions of the sensory experience of dereliction in the built environment. Using a theological construct of “significant human experience,” this dissertation demonstrates that photographs of modern ruins which communicate such should not be dismissed as “ruin porn,” but merit serious consideration as works of art.

(Dissertation with images redacted for publication on ProQuest. Please contact me if you would like the version with the photos for your own personal use. -- Elaine)

In The Aesthetics of Decay, Dylan Trigg confronts the remnants from the fallout of post-industrialism and postmodernism. Through a considered analysis of memory, place, and nostalgia, Trigg argues that the decline of reason enables a critique of progress to emerge. In this ambitious work, Trigg aims to reassess the direction of progress by situating it in a spatial context. In doing so, he applies his critique of rationality to modern ruins. The derelict factory, abandoned asylum, and urban alleyway all become allies in Trigg’s attack on a fixed image of temporality and progress. The Aesthetics of Decay offers a model of post-rational aesthetics in which spatial order is challenged by an affirmative ethics of ruin.

The main aim of this article is to offer a possible interpretation of meanings attached to ruins as image and metaphor in Brodsky’s essay writings, or, to be more precise, in Homage to Marcus Aurelius (1994), an essay that sets its narrative world in the ruined world that surrounds the narrator, elicits an ambivalent sense of time, and provokes complex thoughts of history as an eternal cycle and dialectic process. I will expand the well-established thesis according to which Brodsky’s writing is structured on an image of time as irretrievability and irreclaimability, which, in his writings, reverberates and re-creates an experience of continuous failure to discipline the memory, thus making any return impossible. Moreover, my aim is to show that the approach to Brodsky’s essays from the perspective of an analysis of ruins can offer us much more: for example, it can offer valuable insights into his understanding of the agency of the authorial modernist voice in literature. Where, in a work of art, is the writer’s voice located? What does it mean to see and to write, and what does it mean to read? What role, in this process, is assigned to tradition, “eternal values”, and cultural heritage?

In reform era China, demolition and rubble have become unavoidable presence in most major cities. Reifying “the menace to the city and its memory” (Yomi Braester), demolition has attracted many artists and filmmakers, who have incorporated it in their works. This dissertation contributes to recent studies of the ruin imaginary in Chinese art and visual culture, and to the emerging body of literature on Chinese photography with an analysis of experimental photographers who have engaged with urban demolition.

The predominance of the theme of urban demolition responds, first and foremost, to the fact that urban rubble has been ubiquitous, enduring and highly visible. In this sense, this dissertation sketches the institutional and legal framework regulating land development in China, to account for the particular dynamics responsible to the emergence and visibility of ruinous landscapes. At the same time, the focus on artistic experimentalism serves to focus on the ways in which the different artists have transformed demolition sites into ruins, going beyond a documentary or activist depiction of demolition. In this sense, the dissertation also partakes in the current transdisciplinar revision of ruins studies, which foregrounds the constructedness of ruins as a discourse and critical category.

The dissertation examines over 40 photographic series spanning from the early 1990s to the present, detects their aesthetic and discursive strategies, and divides them in different chapters according to their chronological sequence, and the commonalities in their approach to demolition. In addition to the immediate context of contemporary photography from China, the dissertation also explores the connections of contemporary photographic projects with the long aesthetical tradition around the ruin, and in particular with pioneering photo-conceptualist artists of the post-war period who rekindled its artistic value in tune with the contemporary context of mass-production and consumption.

After analyzing the different photographic works, the dissertation highlights conceptualism, performativity, and digital technologies as the main strategies for the creation of ruins. It also posits a temporal evolution in the style and attitude of the artists, with an exploration of the newest photographic works on demolition concurrent with the writing of this work.

Οι ταράτσες, οι ακάλυπτοι, τα ακατοίκητα κτίσματα, τα άκτιστα οικόπεδα, τα εγκαταλειμμένα εργοτάξια κ.λ. -χώροι
παραδομένοι στην αοριστία και την αχρονία, στιγματισμένοι από την ανθρώπινη απουσία και την φυσική φθορά- αποκαλούνται, κατά την αρχιτεκτονική ορολογία, “αστικά κενά”. Στα αστικά κενά συντελείται μια ανατροπή στη ροή της καθημερινής ζωής και δομείται ένα εύφορο έδαφος για δράσεις.
Το κενό πέρα από την πατίνα του χρόνου, φέρει και τα ίχνη μιας αλλοτινής ζωής αγγίζοντας έτσι τις ρίζες της εκάστοτε κουλτούρας και αφυπνίζοντας τη συλλογική μνήμη. Ταυτόχρονα, το χωρικό κενό γεννά θα έλεγα και ένα ψυχικό κενό, ένα ανεκπλήρωτο, το οποίο θέλει να αναπληρώσει η νόηση μέσω της φαντασίας και έπειτα η πράξη μέσω της δημιουργικότητας. Τέλος, το κενό, συνήθως ερειπιώδες και μυστηριώδες, τρέφει την ανάγκη του παιχνιδιού -του ενδεχομένως επικίνδυνου παιχνιδιού- και την χαρά της εξερεύνησης και της ανακάλυψης της πόλης.
Σκοπός αυτής της μελέτης είναι η αναζήτηση, η αναγνώριση, η κατανόηση και η καταγραφή των νοητικών, ψυχικών και κοινωνικών διεργασιών που συμβαίνουν κατά την βίωση και την αντίληψη του κενού αλλά και η διερεύνηση των υπαρκτών και δυνητικών πρακτικών «λαθραίας δημιουργικότητας» [De Certeau], κατοίκησης και τελικά, μετατροπής του κενού σε κοινό.

Λέξεις κλειδιά: κενό, Ερείπιο, μεταστροφή, πράξη, Πλήθος, κοινό, αναρχιτεκτονική

At the turn of the twenty-first century, contemporary art from China has displayed a recurrent engagement with urban ruins. Painting, performance, film, and photography have turned the rubble of demolition and construction works, an outcome of the vast urban development programs of the past few decades, into a powerful symbol of China's contemporary milieu. Critical and academic approaches to contemporary Chinese art have rightly inquired about the meaning of these ruins, in a process that has also reevaluated the place of these images in the representational traditions of China. Starting with these academic perspectives, this paper situates images of ruination in contemporary Chinese art in dialogue with transnational debates on the meaning and epistemology of the ruin, to argue for an essential element of constructedness in the representations of ruins. Photographic series by Wang Qingsong, Jiang Pengyi, and Yang Yongliang are analyzed as examples of an active appropriation of the process of ruin creation from a critical stance. Recycling urban wasteful rubble into an aesthetic object, these photo artists generate alternative visions of urban development and its consequent demolition and contribute to the negotiation of the meaning of the ruin.

Research that examines conservation of archaeological sites and ruins in post-war redevelopment, using London, Berlin and Beirut as case studies. It demonstrates the extent of socio-political sensitivites that surround many such sites within the post-war/conflict situation and suggests how such sites may aid in post-conflict recovery. It also examines the practice of conserving small or fragmentary archaeological sites for display within the modern city.

L'émergence de villes fantômes est parfois comprise aujourd'hui comme étant le symptôme d'un monde en constante mouvance. Qu'il s'agisse du déploiement de nouveaux pôles économiques, absorbant des population entières vers de régions plus attractives, ou encore de l'évolution remarquable du progrès technique, ayant occasionné la désindustrialisation de nombreux secteurs - et le délaissement de multiples infrastructures -, le paysage urbain abandonné semble être plus que jamais symptomatique de l'époque moderne. Aujourd'hui en France, il est devenu possible d'arpenter des rues parsemées d'immeubles abandonnés, terrains vagues et autres étendues d'usines désaffectées, qui sous le sort d'une industrie devenue obsolète, tombent désormais en ruine. Faisant le terrain de jeu privilégié de certains photographes, désormais fascinés par le caractère à la fois majestueux et menaçant de cette urbanité déliquescente, une telle architecture aux murs décrépis s'est vue échapper, depuis quelques années, à l'ombre habituelle qui plane sur elle.

Ruins are a proficient field of digressions and experiments collaborating to the maturation of the historical monument concept that settled down from XIX century. In the following century, traumatic episodes of war set the challenge of facing recent ruination, updating the problem. This study aims to verify how the remnants in a state of ruin are approached by the theoretical corpus of the main debates on heritage preservation between the nineteenth century and the promulgation of the Venice Charter (1964), a document that consolidated the foundations of contemporary restoration. For this analysis, we based on the verification of two questions: ruins, what is it and how to intervene in it? In the network of meanings that involves the concept of cultural heritage, it is verified that the definition of ruin is complex because it implies in the following aspects: degree of mischaracterization, condition of use, age of the buildings, temporal distance and causes of the ruin. Disarticulation of a property enhances the complexity in dealing with the preexistences and the acceptance of the marks of its destruction. Considering the meaning of ruin as a state of degeneration (regardless of edification’s existence time), it is observed that the theoretical prescriptions for its treatment are not different from any other cultural good; in this way, maintenance, conservation, and restoration operations are valid, based on the following assumptions: minimum intervention, distinctiveness, respect for materiality, reversibility; and use of compatible materials and techniques, combined from a strict historical and critical analysis of each object and its degree of degradation.

本文旨在以台湾导演蔡明亮电影《郊游》( 2013) 为例，探讨当今西方学界关注的“慢电影”与都市“废墟”美学及文化的关联，涉及空间( 如城市、建筑、自然景观等) 、身体与影像的多重交迭，论述“展现”( presentation) 与“再现”( representation) 、有形与无形、可见与不可见、实体的/物质的与精神的或虚拟的、及物与人之间的复杂纠葛、流动与彼此作用。边缘、底层人的处境通常被掩藏和遗忘，各类特权阶层的光鲜生活总被通俗媒体强调、宣传和钦羡。“废墟”空间对都市规划的反抗性，在《郊游》中被刻意强调，然又因人物状态的倦怠而削弱。无论如何，“慢电影”成为保存都市“慢废墟”的重要媒介。

O livro propõe uma história do cinema contemporâneo através de suas relações com a arquitetura e a cidade. Cinematografia e gêneros narrativos correspondem a três modos de constituição do espaço e da experiência: interiores, referentes aos espaços reduzidos e sombrios da metrópole dos anos 40; exteriores, que correspondem ao movimento, a errância em espaços abertos e imagens, quando as situações e histórias passam a remeter ao próprio imaginário cinematográfico. Esses modos possuem técnicas cinematográficas (enquadramentos, iluminação, movimentos de câmera) próprias.

Video games have received comparatively little attention in relation to ruinscapes and spaces, despite the fact that the decay or abandonment of human landscapes has been particularly prevalent in 3D, first and third person games for some decades. This paper considers the way in which specifically urban ruins and decay, as depicted in video games, contribute to meaning making practices and the possibilities of play, in circumstances where making sense of the game is facilitated by the wider contextual meaning of the ruin landscapes (or ruinscapes) depicted. This discussion relies on approaches from urban and modern ruin studies; games and media studies, and geography, with a particular emphasis on the work of Walter Benjamin in reference to ruins, the image, the city, and allegorical perception as it relates to the experience of modernity.

This  essay  attends  to  the  temporal  and  material  relations  through  which  the  former  Soviet proletariat and former factory directors pull the remnants of the socialist factory into relations of capital. I introduce the concept of trials of ruination to refer to the  struggles  to  discover  value  in  old  things,  when  the  temporal  and  material  logics  of capital, and the waning life course of objects and humans, test the limits of those efforts.  A  life  extempore  is  one  in  which  the  primary  tactic  for  discovering  value  is  perpetual extemporization, doing things one never planned or was trained to do. Life extempore alerts us to an orientation to time that is grounded firmly in the present, marked by a sense of urgency, requiring creativity and spontaneity, and existentially linked to a position of exteriority from dominant temporal ideologies of socialism and capitalism. This study focuses on the improvisational practices of two “extemporists”, and  their  efforts  to  revalue  the  persistent  material  world  of  Soviet  industry.

Հոդվածում  քննարկվում  են  այն  ժամանակային  եւ  նյութական առնչակցությունները, որոնց միջոցով նախկին խորհրդային պրոլետարիատը եւ գործարանների նախկին տնօրենները կապիտալի հարաբերությունների մեջ են ներքաշում սոցիալիստական գործարանի մնացորդները։ Ես առաջարկում եմ «փլատականացման  փորձության»  (“trials  of  ruination”)  կոնցեպտը,  որն անդրադառնում է հին իրերի մեջ արժեք գտնելու համար պայքարին, երբ կապիտալի ժամանակային եւ նյութական տրամաբանությունը, ինչպես նաեւ առարկաների եւ մարդկանց կրճատվող կենսընթացները փորձարկման են ենթարկում այդ ջանքերի սահմանները: «Extempore», այսինքն  «հանպատրաստից”  կյանքը  այնպիսի մի  վիճակ  է,  երբ  արժեքի  բացահայտման  հիմնական  մարտավարությունը հավերժական մի փորձարկում է, որի ընթացքում արվում են այնպիսի բաներ, որոնք  երբեք  չեն  պլանավորվել  կամ  սովորական  չեն  համարվել։«Extempo-re»-կյանքը ժամանակային առումով միշտ վերաբերում է ներկային, նշանավորված է  հրատապության  զգացմամբ,  պահանջում  է  ստեղծագործականություն  ու ինքնաբխություն եւ էքզիստենցիալ կերպով կապված է տարբեր ժամանակներում գերիշխող սոցիալիզմի եւ կապիտալիզմի գաղափարախոսություններից դուրս գտնվող դիրքավորման հետ։ Այս ուսումնասիրությունը անդրադառնում է«ex-tempore»կյանքով ապրող երկու անհատների իմպրովիզացիոն պրակտիկաներին եւ  խորհրդային  արդյունաբերության  դիմակայող  նյութականությունը վերարժեւորելու  նրանց  ջանքերին: