Retail Ruins: The Ghosts of Post-industrial Spectacle 9781529225556

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Retail Ruins: The Ghosts of Post-Industrial Spectacle
Copyright information
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Notes on the Author
Acknowledgements
Introduction
One What Are Retail Ruins?
Introduction
What are ruins?
Spectacle and ruination
Assemblage thinking and contemporary archaeology
Hauntology
Methodology and the question of context
Two Retail Ruins
Introduction
Dream messages
Mud prints
Splatter Town
Summary: Temporality and rhythms of retail ruins
The impossibility of (exiting) ruins
Three Spectacle, Haunted
Introduction
Post-industrial North-East
Urban exorcisms
Gentrification
Retail gentrification
Heritage-led strategies
Temporary urbanism
After spectacle (towards a conclusion)
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

Phil Hubbard, King’s College London

“As high street shop closures accelerate, Miller’s highly evocative discussion of retail ruins is most timely. His focus on concepts of the spectacular and the haunted draws out their potency as fixtures that once lived, may slide into dereliction but may once again be reconfigured as retail spaces.” Tim Edensor, Manchester Metropolitan University

“Miller is a passionate spectator of retail ruins, wandering through the creative destruction of the high street and keeping the teeming debris at bay through the careful taking of notes and the clicking of his camera.”

RETAIL RUINS JACOB C. MILLER

“Miller dares to peer through the dirtied windows of the deserted shops on our high streets, suggesting these ruins may symbolize the end times but also represent the beginning of a move beyond the spectacle to a more authentic form of consumption.”

Deborah Dixon, University of Glasgow

In the context of widespread precarity and ongoing crises, it is no surprise ruins have captured much attention in recent years. This book is about a new kind of space, one that is deeply troubling for consumer society: the retail ruin.

Jacob C. Miller is Assistant Professor of Human Geography at Northumbria University.

Jacob C. Miller bridges human geography, archaeology and critical urban studies to offer a starting point for conceptualizing retail ruins. Drawing on fieldnotes and photographs, Miller crafts a hauntological approach informed by the theories of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida as well as more recent thinking on assemblage, spectacle and the politics of urban space.

ISBN 978-1-5292-2553-2

9 781529 225532

B R I S TO L

@BrisUniPress BristolUniversityPress bristoluniversitypress.co.uk

@policypress

RETAIL RUINS

The Ghosts of Post-Industrial Spectacle

JACOB C. MILLER

JACOB C. MILLER

RETAIL RUINS: THE GHOSTS OF POST-​INDUSTRIAL SPECTACLE

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1–​9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +​44 (0)117 374 6645 e: bup-​[email protected] Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2023 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-5292-2553-2 hardcover ISBN 978-1-5292-2554-9 ePub ISBN 978-1-5292-2555-6 ePdf The right of Jacob C. Miller to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design: blu inc Front cover image: Unsplash/Micha Frank Bristol University Press uses environmentally responsible print partners. Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

For Pamela

Contents List of Figures Notes on the Author Acknowledgements

vi vii viii

Introduction one What Are Retail Ruins? two Retail Ruins three Spectacle, Haunted Conclusion

1 12 38 89 116

References Index

121 136

v

List of Figures 1 Falling in 2 Random object and neglect 3 Ceiling collapse 4 Unplugged and shattered 5 Splintering 6 Insect cemetery 7 Carpet torn out 8 Combination all wrong 9 Milkshake dust 10 Vacant shop 11 Glue art 12 Dark portal 13 Litter creeping in 14 Escalator night 15 Carpet roll 16 Cobwebs and broom 17 Crumble 18 Worksite 19 Debris on display 20 ‘WESTMINSTER RULE IS KILLING THE NORTH’ 21 A dirty old room 22 Last ghost, Grey Street

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39 40 41 42 44 47 48 48 51 52 57 60 65 65 68 68 71 74 78 79 85 119

Notes on the Author Jacob C. Miller is Assistant Professor of Human Geography at Northumbria University. His work focuses on urban space and consumer culture, including things and places like shopping malls, museums, tourism, geopolitics and ruins. He is author of Spectacle and Trumpism: An Embodied Assemblage Approach (2020, Bristol University Press). His articles appear in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Progress in Human Geography, Annals of the American Association of Geographers and elsewhere.

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Acknowledgements First, I thank Pamela for her constant support and feedback. Thank you to my department and colleagues who supported me during a research sabbatical. I also thank the teaching team on the module ‘Post-​industrial Landscapes of the North East’ who helped collect and digest some of the literature discussed in this book: Graham Mowl, John Clayton, Wenying Fu, Kevin Glynn, Francis Massé and Paul Griffin. Thank you also to all the Northumbria University students who took this module and shared their knowledge with me on fieldwork trips and in the classroom, with special thanks to Ben Lyall. Thank you Manuel Prieto and Xurxo Ayán Vila for introducing me to the study of ruins and sharing your work with me. Thank you James Riding and Carl Dahlman for organizing the ‘Spooky Geographies’ sessions at the 2022 meeting of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-​IBG), and to the audience members who provided helpful feedback on this project. Thank you Mara Ferreri, Richard Kotter, Paul Greenhalgh, Jason Luger, Natalie Koch, Victoria Jones, Aditi Das, Maria Dubrova, Kahina Meziant, Ruth Rogerson, Kathryn Cassidy, Paul Griffin, Jessie Speer, Majed Akhter, Darren Tesar, Alastair Bonnett, Tim Edensor, Eric Magrane, Paul Kingsbury and Phil Hubbard for providing encouragement, constructive feedback on the manuscript and other support. Special thanks to J.P. Jones III and others at the University of Arizona for the inspiration and support. Thank you Emily Watt and Anna Richardson at Bristol University Press for your support with preparing the book. Thank you very much to the anonymous reviewers for their generous, constructive and encouraging reviews. Thank you lastly to my sister Amber and my parents, Marcia and Lou.

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Introduction

In recent years, many have turned their attention to ruins. This is not surprising considering the ruinous times we live in (Tsing, 2015) and the general sense of dread, outrage, anxiety and many other feelings that come with widespread precarity and ongoing crises. There must be a reason for the popularity of ruins in media culture. As Hell and Schönle (2010: 1) put it: ‘in the era of global media coverage and round-​the-​clock exposure to visual data, ruins have become ubiquitous’. ‘New ruins’, moreover, are being produced all the time as the result of chaotic and always-​accelerating capitalist production, as well as due to the impacts of climate change, war or other ‘unrest’. Recent scholarship views these not as isolated and self-​contained sites –​somewhere you might visit while on holiday –​but instead as complex processes linked with their surroundings, including human and non-​human interactions (Stoler, 2013; DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013; Millington, 2013; Cairns and Jacobs, 2014; Göbel, 2014; Dawney, 2020; Pohl, 2022). As such, ruins are ideal for thinking through some recent terms in social theory, for example, ‘new materialism’, ‘affect’ and ‘hauntology’. Contemporary archaeology, as well, opens new approaches to studying these as socio-​spatial phenomena (Hill, 2015). Rather than dead spaces of some distant past, ruins are today alive, pulsing through our contemporary worlds in ways that deserve our attention. This book is about a new kind of ruin, one we are all familiar with: the retail ruin, manifest in ‘dead’ or ‘zombie’ shopping malls, sputtering high streets, vanishing department stores and other scenes of vacancy, abandonment, dereliction and disarray. As shopping landscapes have gained such great importance in contemporary consumer culture, surely the decline and deaths of these spaces qualifies them as ruins of

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Retail Ruins

some kind. While Edensor (2005b: 829) positions industrial ruins (factories, warehouses and so on) as an ‘antidote’ to a more commodified and sanitized landscape of the ordered city, retail ruins illuminate in a troubling way how even that landscape, the landscape of spectacle, can fall into ruin (Wark, 2013). The retail ruin stands out for its socio-​cultural location. It is found not just anywhere, but in what was once a sacred space: the display windows and retail environments of retail capital, where the powers of spectacle meet everyday life. Instead of finding ‘magic’ (Goss, 1993), we encounter blankness, or an abrupt scene of shocking disarray –​a void staring back at us (Wylie, 2021). As such, we find an eerie landscape, not only one that feels haunted, but also one that haunts. This could be just around the corner for nearly anything, not just retail. As such, the retail ruin is the site of a specific kind of haunting immanent to the spectacle. To push this thesis forward, this book builds on the ‘new urban ruins’ literature, which examines urban vacancy in terms of ruination (Dobraszczyk, 2017), and what this literature has to offer critical urban studies interested in the ‘less visible, more mundane, forms of urban vacancy’ (O’Callaghan and Di Feliciantonio, 2021: 7). Indeed, Phil Hubbard’s (2017: 70–​1) critical engagement with the ‘battle for the high street’ acknowledges that abandoned shops form part of these ‘new ruins’, pointing to their capacity to haunt the landscape. Yet, Hubbard (2017) does not explicitly pursue the ‘spectral turn’ (Maddern and Adey, 2008) or the implication of thinking with ruins and ruination. Elsewhere, the new urban ruins literature focuses on other mega failures, from vacant homes to stalled infrastructure and entire planned cities, half-​built and empty (Kitchin et al, 2014; Arboleda, 2017; Lee, 2021). These have emerged in our lifetimes as failed or suspended projects that persist in the landscape, often unfinished and languishing in the hold of undecidable forces. Yet, O’Callaghan and Di Feliciantonio (2021) find that mundane vacant spaces are rarely considered in terms of

2

Introduction

ruination, while scholarship on ruins often overlooks mundane vacant spaces. To build on the current literature, they specify ‘that vacant space is an important and dynamic characteristic of cities that warrants greater conceptual and empirical attention’, adding further that ‘the relationship between ruins and urban vacancy is under-​theorised’ (O’Callaghan and Di Feliciantonio, 2021: 7, 8). Retail Ruins aims to further that agenda in several ways. One strategy is to build on another trend identified by O’Callaghan and Di Feliciantonio (2021): the capacity of ruins to exceed representational registers of experience and expression (see also Göbel, 2014). Building on Gordillo (2014), there is a ‘multiplicity and, indeed, negativity created in the void of “vacant space” ’ (O’Callaghan and Di Feliciantonio 2021: 5). Reframing ruins as ‘rubble’, Gordillo (2014) expands the purview of what these spaces are and what they are capable of. The Western idea of a ‘ruin’ is often too narrow to describe the array of things that people do with the ruinous materials and the multiple meanings that emerge around and through these sites. Rubble carries with it much more than the official narrative of ‘ruins as heritage’. Part of that excess emerges as a powerful negativity that engages with the structures of power that shape the landscape. Haunting has emerged as a key trope in the literature on ruins and ruination due to the capacity for ruinous sites to still contain not only the traces of past activities, but also the trauma of violence and dispossession (Till, 2005; Gordon, 2008; Coddington, 2011). Hauntology has even emerged as a critical methodology to think through not only ghostly feelings, but also how absence runs through all existence and through being itself (Wylie, 2008; Frers, 2013; Fisher, 2014, 2016; Lee, 2017; Wylie, 2021). The retail ruin also carries with it a negativity that demands attention and indeed challenges its status as a ruin, a tension that runs throughout this book. This project hinges on the overlapping of the following three ideas: first, ruins have hauntological capacities; second,

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Retail Ruins

hauntings are affective; and, third, this affective hauntology of the retail ruin reveals a void that troubles the spectacle of retail capital everywhere it goes. Before moving on, let us consider each point briefly in turn. First, ruins have hauntological capacities. This project engages with the recent literature on haunting but insists on the narrower terminology of hauntology in keeping with the theoretical and methodological approach of Jacques Derrida and his overall philosophy of deconstruction. Deconstruction insists on creating space for difference (Spivak, 1999; Critchley, 2014; Caputo, 2021) insofar as it never settles on anything as natural or essential. Everything is moving all the time, and all (power) relations, if they are to exist, must be constantly built and rebuilt. To consider presence as always troubled by what is absent –​what Derrida called the ‘constitutive outside’ –​is to acknowledge this never-​ending unfolding of reality, meaning that nothing is forever stable, or certain. Hauntology, then, replaces ontology as the more appropriate formulation of what constitutes being and becoming. Ruins are likely sites for such speculation considering the multiple temporalities that constitute them, making them ripe for deconstructive analysis: what is there must be cut with what was once there and now is missing, as well as what else has come on to the scene and the future direction that it is all headed towards. Ruins are not only about contested versions of the past, but also the site of active locations for contemporary difference (Mah, 2012, 2017; Gordillo, 2014). Hauntology, as we will see, is capable of apprehending formative aspects of the retail ruin, namely, its status as authentic or artificial, and what that means for the future of these spaces. Second, hauntings are affective, meaning that they move us in ways that are often hard to describe (Lee, 2017). Affect names this force that exerts a kind of push on us, which is slightly different than other sensations or moods we also experience, such as emotions, though these often go together and have a

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Introduction

complex relationship (Pile, 2010; Anderson, 2017). Gordillo (2014: 31) is helpful in distinguishing haunting from memory: Strictly speaking, a haunting is distinct from memory, for it is not reducible to narratives articulated linguistically; it is, rather, an affect created by an absence that exerts a hard-​to-​articulate, nondiscursive, yet positive pressure on the body, thereby turning such absence into a physical presence that is felt and that thereby affects. The retail ruin produces potentially complicated affective and emotional scenes for a populace that relies on the retail landscape for any number of purposes (Hall, 2011). By turning to these dimensions of ruins, we find a rich hauntology that includes, but cannot be fully explained by, representation and theories of presence. This is a different kind of problem than what Dobraszczyk (2017) and Swyngedouw (2010, 2013) face, a problem in the politics of representation around contemporary ruins. The danger is in producing ‘ruin porn’ that does not really attempt to grasp at the causes of such ruination and the political relationships therein. Retail ruins, as we will see, not only avoid this pitfall, but also move closer to embodied experiences of ruinous spaces that are closer to non-​representational theories (Hill, 2015). As we will see, this does not mean that we ignore representations, but rather that the methodology attends to how ruins can ‘overwhelm the senses’ (Edensor, 2005a: 124), thereby opening an entirely different domain. Third, this affective hauntology of the retail ruin reveals a void that troubles the spectacle of retail capital everywhere it goes. Even in places where the magic is alive and well, it is just underneath the surface and might even be noticeable if we look closely. It is the negative power of this void-​like force that this book documents and engages with as a force in the world (Kingsbury and Secor, 2021; Rose et al, 2021). The trouble with retail on the high street and in other town and city

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Retail Ruins

centres, then, is not with the ‘wrong’ mix –​as in ‘too ethnic’ or ‘too working class’, that is, the standard narrative and discourse of ‘retail gentrification’ (Hubbard, 2017) –​but with the real affective and negative power generated by voids in the landscape. There is a real lack of literature on these spaces in these terms, with most interest being absorbed by economic geographers and other urban scholars who have devised complex instruments of analysis to track and do battle with these voids (Wrigley and Dolega, 2011; Parker et al, 2014; Jackson and Hughes, 2015; Wrigley and Lambiri, 2015; Ferreira and Paiva, 2017; Hwang and Lee, 2020; van den Berg et al, 2021). Few have explored the everyday experience of these spaces. This book fills that gap by stopping to simply observe what happens in the retail landscape when the magic of capitalist spectacle simply stops or pauses (Woodward et al, 2012). As consumer culture has consolidated throughout the 20th century, there is a potentially traumatic experience to be had today as we visit or encounter these sacred spaces in everyday life, only to find them shattered to pieces. The scene forces an encounter with the future, that is, with what we want to happen next, which is fundamentally a political process that this project seeks to comment on, arguing for the ‘loosening-​up’ (Caputo, 2021: 130, 147) of what may come in these spaces, though in ways that are surprising and unique, ways that we have yet to know and experience. What is retail capital and ‘the spectacle’? While ‘spectacle’ is now a common word that often appears in academic writing, it is often used in broad brushstrokes to refer to any kind of event or production that involves many people as recipients or participants. My approach is inspired by a more narrowly defined meaning, specifically that deriving from the work of Guy Debord’s (1967) The Society of the Spectacle and those that came before him, namely, Walter Benjamin and his The Arcades Project (Benjamin, 1999). At the same time, my approach is not satisfied with most theorizations of the spectacle to date. This book builds on previous work (Miller, 2020) that attempts to reconstruct the spectacle away from meta-​theorization

6

Introduction

that explains everything in terms of a one-​note power grab that assumes consumers to be simply duped and results in an ultimately watered-​down and diluted existence. The social relations of consumerism identified by the term ‘society of the spectacle’ still deserve our attention, particularly in times of climate crisis and deepening inequality, but we need to think harder about how it works in practice and how it cuts across other social and political relations. We cannot sustain criticism of capitalism as a system without also thinking about how it potentially impacts us socially and culturally through its methods of communication with us. This does not mean that we only think about capitalism (Gibson-​Graham, 1996), but rather that we do not leave it behind entirely. Importantly for this project, the logics of spectacle have increasingly been abandoning the built environment for new digital frontiers, what Briziarelli and Armano (2017) call the ‘Spectacle 2.0’. As the spectacle mutates, one of its traditional domains –​retail capital –​is suddenly thrown into crisis, as some now argue that we have too much built retail space (see Wrigley and Lambiri, 2015; Greenhalgh, 2020). Before moving any further: who is the researcher, and how does that shape the study? Most of my life has been spent in the US, where I was born and raised. My ancestors came from Germany, Ireland and England in the 19th century, along with so many others. As a white, cis male, my experience of urban retail space is shaped by an immense amount of privilege. Growing up in the rural Midwest, where the nearest town had only a small, outdated shopping centre, we travelled 60 miles to the nearest ‘real’ mall, where we learned to shop and to participate in the economy of signs that mark class, race and gender differences. Further up the road, within a half-​ day’s drive, is the mythical Mall of America, that citadel of 20th-​century retail madness. I eventually found the critical vocabulary that promised to reveal the harsh reality behind the surfaces of consumption, in terms of their environmental and socio-​cultural impacts, including the politics of a postcolonial

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Retail Ruins

Anglo-​settler state. Learning that minoritized peoples are more heavily surveilled by, and excluded from, shopping malls further bolstered and solidified my suspicion of them. Equally disturbing is the genocidal scale of the violence against the many Indigenous peoples that made this consumer society possible. There is no doubt that my embodied subject position gives me ease of access to the urban spaces I wish to physically visit and observe. While this is true, I hope to avoid setting exclusive parameters around what constitutes fieldwork and research. In orientating towards mundane, everyday spaces, this approach also seeks to avoid the overly masculinist tendencies found in some areas of urban work that involves not just observation, but ‘urban exploration’ (for a critique, see Mott and Roberts, 2014). The scenes found in this book are nothing like the daring exploration of ‘off-​limits’ space found in some of that work, for instance, but simple moments of observation and awareness that can be captured in everyday life on the footpath or high street. Unlike Edensor (2005a, 2005b), who went inside the industrial ruins he was interested in, the retail ruins exist more at an interface where a clear surface boundary is established. This project utilizes hauntology and an archaeological ‘surface methodology’ (Harrison, 2011) that, nevertheless, tells us something about the social and political dimensions of these vacant spaces. Even though I did not find and interview those humans that are most affected by these vacancies, this methodology can tell us something about the social and political dimensions of the haunting taking place in the city. The rest of the book proceeds as follows. Chapter One introduces concepts and theories for understanding retail ruins and ruination, and concludes by laying out the methodology for the field study in Chapter Two. The literature on industrial ruins includes the spatial forms that came to replace the industrial infrastructure (Edensor, 2005a), spatial forms that are now themselves falling into ruination. ‘New ruins’ are

8

Introduction

now on the agenda, with such figures as ‘ruins in reverse’, in which these spaces might still morph into something else and complete their frustrated production process. The chapter introduces some of the complexities of these emerging conversations, as well as the thought of Walter Benjamin, who was not only one of the first theorists of spectacle, but also one of the first to study retail ruins with his unfinished master work The Arcades Project (Benjamin, 1999). His work presages both the construction of the society of the spectacle in the post-​war period and its demise at the turn of the new century. The chapter draws on lines of connection between his work that other recent approaches to the study of ruins and ruination, specifically approaches in contemporary archaeology that link space, subjectivity and the passage of time in unique and powerful ways. Lastly, these trends overlap and correspond with the ‘spectral turn’ (Lee, 2017) and hauntology as a deconstructive practice that can guide a way through some of the difficulties found in this emerging body of work and in the city itself. Chapter Two takes us to the retail ruins. Using a mix of photographs from vacant retail sites around the Newcastle upon Tyne city centre and high street, the chapter fuses them with other observational data collected over a 12-​month period (2021–​22). Quotations from the literature are interspersed, as well as reflections on how these abandoned spaces make sense as new ruins that surround us, especially in places that have invested in and built a post-​industrial landscape of services, including retail, leisure and hospitality. A narrative arc moves through the observations in a way that stages an encounter between Benjamin’s dialectical methodology and Derridean hauntology. This move can help us avoid pitfalls in interpreting and understanding dialectics as an appropriate framework for analysis, particularly for issues concerning consumption and retail (Goss, 1999). Following a montage methodology, the chapter weaves together these materials in a way that disrupts linear narratives and invites a kind of haunting logic –​it tries

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Retail Ruins

to ‘be spectral’ (Wylie, 2008: 184, emphasis in original). Rather than rush by these spaces, or simply look ahead to utopian visions of what might or might not come to pass, the chapter focuses a microscope on these void-​like spaces whose negative energies seep into the urban atmosphere. Their qualities deserve attention as unwitting agents in the production of atmosphere, tinging it all with a spookiness that runs down our spines when confronted with the ghost. We all react a little differently. For that reason, a montage approach allows for a consideration of specific ideas and themes, though without synthesizing them into a singular summary of what they might mean. As an anti-​totalitarian methodology, it leaves space for readers to think for themselves. Chapter Three turns to the critical urban studies literature to better situate these ruinous spaces and to better understand their context. Deconstruction is not mindless ‘destruction’ (see, for example, Caputo, 2021: 35, 57); it is not about insisting only on the ruinous, ghostly space for the sake of it, or for some aesthetic disposition. There is, indeed, an observable political and cultural economy to these spaces. In fact, some major trends in urban thinking confirm the disruptive potential of the urban ruin. Gentrification, for example, aims at recapturing its disruptive potential, a process that has retail as one of its under-​studied areas of interest (Hubbard, 2017). Other trends like ‘heritage-​led redevelopment’ and the ‘pop-​ up’ spaces of temporary urbanism (Ferreri, 2015) signal how retail capital and the spectacle also attempt to claw their way back. The chapter, then, reviews various urban strategies that attempt to exorcise the ghosts that haunt the spectacle and retail capital. In this way, then, deconstruction helps us better grasp and understand the logics of ‘creative destruction’ that run through modernity itself, and not just its recent capitalist incarnations (Harvey, 1990: Part I). Equally, the void never establishes itself permanently; rather, it always keeps things moving, often by being filled in, thereby pushing it back into hiding. There is a productivity to its negativity (Kingsbury

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Introduction

and Secor, 2021), from the advertising used to sell cars made in ruinous Detroit (Kinney, 2016) to the politics of memory at play in the ruins of post-​Second World War Berlin (Till, 2005), among other examples. Retail ruins are produced through, counterintuitively, another version of spectacle that has been called ‘Spectacle 2.0’ (Briziarelli and Armano, 2017), which takes digital life to new diabolical ends. The spectacle betrays its own sacred spaces by abandoning them in favour of new online and digital worlds. In the context of the last financial crisis (2007–​08) and the ongoing global pandemic (2020–​present), the dynamics of urban space have produced more and more of these ‘new urban ruins’. Yet, O’Callaghan and Di Feliciantonio (2021: 7) suggest that work on ruins has mostly been on almost mega spaces, so it does not always ‘simply map onto less visible, more mundane, forms of urban vacancy’. In turn, they also note how research on urban landscapes often neglects the complexity of on-​the-​g round vacancy as a force in the world (see also Kingsbury and Secor, 2021; Strohmayer, 2021). While this study is surely limited by a methodology that relies solely on this researcher, with his camera and notebook, my hope is that enough has gone into this offer for others to take and run with! In my view, future work with inhabitants of these ruinous spaces is urgently needed. Equally, quantitative and spatial, or more policy-​oriented, approaches can help better situate the region and its situation relative to broader flows and relations of power. This research, then, is far from definitive, but it is a first step in generating new critical ideas and theories around a space that has become common for many –​the retail ruin –​and to encourage other studies that push further, both empirically and theoretically. We can learn to creatively weave together image, word and observation to produce new experiences of the urban itself. We may need this research ethos in the years to come, as it reaches for new futures that are more open to radical difference and to life beyond the commodity after the spectacle.

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ONE

What Are Retail Ruins?

Introduction If these vacant retail spaces are ruins, what kind of ruins are they? What kind of haunting is taking place? There now exist several excellent reviews of the literature on ruins that help inform this study (see, among others, DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013; Pétursdóttir and Olsen, 2014; Dobraszczyk, 2017; Emery, 2018). Rather than rehashing this work, this chapter plucks from it and holds together different images to suggest resemblances and potential overlaps that help us consider what these spaces are. In introducing the study of ruins, this chapter also engages with archaeology as a way of grounding the meta-​theories that are also called upon, namely, theories around the spectacle and retail capital. Treating the spectacle as a socio-​spatial formation that falls into ruin like any other, an ‘archaeological imagination’ (Hill, 2015) helps reveal the multiple hauntings that constitute it. This crash course in ruins engages with Walter Benjamin’s (1999) The Arcades Project as an early study of retail ruins, specifically the arcades of Paris that helped define the 19th century but were falling out of favour by Benjamin’s time. The arcades, of course, did not just vanish without a trace. Instead, their logic morphed into other spatial forms throughout the 20th century in Western cities, culminating in a new postmodern landscape by the 21st century. Today, it is that landscape that is noticeably deteriorating in front of our eyes. One way of building on Benjamin’s work is with hauntology, a methodology that sees these ruinous spaces not only as negative, but also as potentially productive for what

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What Are Retail Ruins?

comes next. Benjamin’s thinking, in fact, works with a similar ethos. In other words, the negative has its own force; an absence has its own presence, after all (see, among others, Frers, 2013). The end of the chapter details the methodology of the field study presented in Chapter Two and interjects a question of context, insofar as a hauntological approach implies a particular way of conceptualizing context and what it means for research. What are ruins? We frame ruins, and they frame us. Boym, 2010: 83 To begin, Ann Stoler (2013) suggests that ruins are best conceptualized not as static things, but as active processes shaping and shaped by the present. ‘Ruin’ ‘serves as both noun and verb’ and ‘is both the claim about the state of a thing and a process affecting it’ (Stoler, 2013: 11). It would be a mistake to consider ruins as signs of a past that is inert and unrelated to the present. Instead, contemporary scholars are focusing on how ruinous materials continue to circulate in the world today, resulting in many kinds of innovative uses by contemporary peoples, as well as more troubling hauntings that reinscribe uneven relations of power between groups (Gordon, 2008; Gordillo, 2014). Turning to global issues of empire and the ruinous forces it entails, Stoler (2013: 13) writes that ‘to think with ruins of empire is to emphasize less the artifacts of empire as dead matter or remnants of a defunct regime than to attend to their reappropriations, neglect, and strategic and active positioning within the politics of the present’. These remnants of the past are, then, particularly charged objects that exert a force today as life and history go on around them, taking new shapes that can recast the past, banish it or seek to preserve it, or become something else that we have yet to experience and discover. As such, not only do we ‘frame ruins’, as Boym (2010: 83) suggests, but they also simultaneously ‘frame us’.

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Retail Ruins

Similarly, scholars of deindustrialization have also tracked the ongoing relevance of ruins and ruination for the communities and places that remain. Alice Mah (2012: 3) also prefers the use of  ‘“ruination” rather than “ruins,”  because the word “ruination” captures a process as well as a form’. For Mah (2012), it is crucial not to isolate and remove the ruinous site from its surroundings. Instead, Mah (2012: 4) focuses on the ‘place-​based communities’ that exist ‘adjacent to sites of industrial ruination’ and urges a kind of analysis that acknowledges their broader connections, writing that ‘snapshots of industrial ruination can reveal a great deal about socio-​economic processes, but cannot be separated from either the residential, commercial, community, and natural spaces in which they are located or the people who make up these surroundings’ (Mah, 2012: 11). Understanding ruination, then, requires context. As we will see later, however, a hauntological approach is also weary of ‘too much context’ (Millward, 2017), as it can equally misdirect or lead us astray from the kinds of findings this approach has to offer. Context should not disappear completely but is appreciated in a different way that avoids over-​coding the study site with pre-​established narratives, formulas and assumptions. There are also different kinds of ruins and processes of ruination attached to different circumstances. Some ruins emerge quickly, such as those caused by hazards or war. Others happen at a much slower pace, such as those emergent from bureaucratic or market forces (DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013). Likewise, processes of decay always depend on the materials at hand and their environment (Cairns and Jacobs, 2014; DeSilvey, 2017). Retail ruins are somewhere between fast and slow. They are slow, as the decline can happen across long periods of time, and are composed by many kinds of material, meaning that there are different rates of decay and deterioration that can be observed. These same ruinous spaces can also be fast, as abrupt crises can also lead to a speeding up of their proliferation. In the wake of the COVID-​19 pandemic and the additional shock it produced for a struggling traditional retail sector, some are now

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What Are Retail Ruins?

suggesting that we simply built too much retail space and that not all will be needed in the future (Greenhalgh, 2020). These are ruins of a system that has been criticized for its artificiality and inauthenticity, resulting in a difficult set of questions around what constitutes these as ruinous spaces. The decline of retail spaces hits a particular nerve in contemporary consumer culture. Friends frequently send me links to journalistic photo essays on the ‘death’ of this or that shopping environment (Buehler, 2022). Retail vacancies sting because the spectacle is still with us: it has seeped into our everyday life and culture. As I have argued elsewhere (Miller, 2020: 105), the spectacle today is ‘embodied and intense, not passive and hollow’. While retail spaces and window displays are still relevant, they are now fading in importance, as they now compete with the digital arsenal of ‘Spectacle 2.0’ (Briziarelli and Armano, 2017), in which we become both online star and commodity. The decline of these sacred spaces –​their transformation into voids –​hits a nerve. What kind of nervous system does the spectacle cultivate? Despite major interest in ruins and ruination in recent years, few have focused on the declining retail landscape using such terminology. Instead, the leftover infrastructures and residues of modern industrial production in Western or Global North societies have garnered more attention. Once installed, these heavy assets are not easy to move across space and become ‘sunk costs’. ‘Unlike a piece of clothing that goes out of fashion’, write Cairns and Jacobs (2014: 111), ‘or an electrical appliance that gets surpassed by a new model, buildings cannot be put away in a cupboard, easily binned, or taken to a charity shop’. Since the most recent phase of capitalist globalization is content with relocating parts of the system or simply building new machines closer to the cheapest labour, these former sites of manufacturing are often simply abandoned and left to the uncertainties of the future, in which ‘it is expensive to adjust, modify, or retrofit buildings so that they many enter back into the cycle of value’ (Cairns and Jacobs, 2014: 111). Edensor (2005a, 2005b) is drawn into these

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‘derelict and abandoned’ spaces around the UK because of an inclination that they contain secret and subversive powers. A lot still happens in these spaces amid all the rubble and sense of abandonment. Edensor (2005a: 10–​11) distinguishes between industrial and non-​industrial ruins, naming the latter as ‘classical or archaic ruins, crumbling medieval townships and castle, decrepit stately homes’. In industrial ruins, something else takes place, something that is less scripted and more open. These are ‘playful’ and fugitive moments, veering off the grid and therefore peeling away space that escapes the sway of the spectacle. Importantly, they are forward-​facing ruin experiences, ones that embody ‘a politics of urban becoming’ (Edensor, 2005a: 19). Yet, there is more to these spaces than simply a theatre for the unscripted and unsurveilled. Drawing on Benjamin (1973) and Buck-​Morss (1989), Edensor (2005a, 2005b) moves into the haunted space of these industrial ruins. For Benjamin, ruins are important because they insist on a confrontation with the past. Benjamin’s interest in the arcades was not only focused on their capacity to induce a great ‘dream sleep’ of commodity fetishism (Buck-​Morss, 1989), but also because these same spatial forms were falling out of popularity in his lifetime. Like an archaeologist, then, Benjamin peels away layers of debris and links them with the literary cannon of the 19th century, when the arcades were at their zenith, creating a ‘porosity’ of space and time (Gilloch, 1996: 94). For Benjamin, ruins forced a confrontation and exposed a contradiction inherent to our attempts at understanding reality: a world falling to pieces before our eyes, while powerful ideas about progress, order and the future circulate and appear as detached from actual catastrophic experience. As Benjamin worked on his project in Paris in the 1930s, the Nazis were seizing power, a set of historical realities that infused his research and ultimately prevented him from finishing it. Benjamin’s radical theory was focused on just this: what he called a dialectical operation that tracks the constant spatial

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What Are Retail Ruins?

formulations that inform consciousness, teetering between the control of new capitalist technologies and the insistence on something else that complicates it all, a deadly remainder that crops up with every instance of injustice and violence. It is this deconstructive edge that calls the attention of Edensor (2005a), Gordillo (2014) and others who have conjured him to help articulate what is so important and meaningful about ruins and ruination. As we will see in Chapter Three, the disruptive power of ruins is sometimes recaptured by the ‘heritage industries’ that are often aligned with new flows of capitalist investment. Nevertheless, for Edensor (2005a), with Benjamin, industrial ruins are a spatial riposte to the emerging forms of consumer culture, a ‘counter-​site’ (DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013) or ‘antidote’ (Edensor, 2005b: 829) to the spectacle and its magic powers. What happens, though, when the spectacle itself falls into ruin? There is nothing wrong with the way Edensor (2005a) positions industrial ruins, but he does not consider how the forces of ruination, and a logic of ruination, are also at play within the spectacle itself. As such, these may be a different kind of ruin altogether. Instead of ruin as ‘other’ to the commodity, we find ruin in the commodity form itself. We do not need another form to juxtapose it to. We can now see it in crises in front of us, the form itself becoming ruinous. As such, we witness a disrupted commodification of space, flickering with uncertainty. While Benjamin appears in many recent publications on ruins and ruination, few have considered the significance of his objects of analysis, which are certainly retail ruins. Furthermore, considering his theoretical approach, it is fair to say that The Arcades Project was also a study of capitalist spectacle itself falling into ruin. It is for this reason that The Arcades Project receives sustained attention in what follows, as it is a surprisingly under-​appreciated resource for thinking about ruins and their urban politics. His Thesis IX of the ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’ (Benjamin, 1968) is perhaps more often cited, particularly its ‘angel of history’ that

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witnesses the piling up of catastrophic wreckage, growing ever ‘skyward’ (Benjamin, 1968: 258). The longer and incomplete The Arcades Project, though, takes us inside the process as it is lived and experienced. Spectacle and ruination There are some difficulties in defining the retail ruin. First, if the spectacle is manufactured and artificial, how can it acquire ruinlike status? This and other difficulties hinge on key terms like ‘authenticity’ and ‘alienation’. We know that some ruins are made to participate in total simulacra, the reproduction of a copy that has no original and is, therefore, a complete fabrication. Gordillo (2014: 9) cites work by Quetzil Castañeda (1996), who analysed the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá in Mexico as an overbearing invention by ‘archeologists and Mayan workmen “according to their own imaginings of the past” ’. As such, following Castañeda, ‘what makes ruins “authentic inventions of modernity” is that they are “the copy of an original that never existed” ’ (Gordillo, 2014: 9). Elsewhere, Hell and Schönle (2010: 6) ask a compelling question that prepares us for contemplating the retail ruin: ‘Is authenticity a necessary condition of a ruin, or are manufactured ruins just as real? And how do we define the authenticity of a ruin in the era of tourist consumption?’ This is important because the retail ruin emerges out of what has been largely dismissed as an inauthentic and alienating built environment. Insofar as the shopping malls, department stores and other themed environments defy the ‘real’ and pass into the ‘hyperreal’ (Baudrillard, 1994), these spaces are manufactured and artificial but are also authentically experienced. Since these are new sites of destruction, they have a more difficult time being conceptualized as ruins. As traditional industry declined in the 20th century in Western or Global North societies, producing the ruins experienced by Mah (2012), Edensor (2005a) and others, a new post-​industrial landscape was also emerging. Post-​ Fordist and neoliberal capitalism included a greater role for

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What Are Retail Ruins?

retail, leisure, tourism, hospitality and other service-​related industries. These, of course, required new kinds of spaces, and the built environment continued to gain spectacular dimensions as shopping centres expanded rapidly and new tourist zones were created, often incorporating official heritage sites (Harvey, 1990; Urry, 1990). By the end of the 20th century, a postmodern landscape was upon us, seemingly to deepen the kind of ‘dream sleep’ that Benjamin saw as the result of widespread commodity fetishism. Again, it is this built environment that is now falling into processes of ruination, prompting us to encounter and engage with the retail ruin. Herwitz (2010: 237) nudges us to consider the intimate dimensions of these spaces that some have dismissed as inauthentic, referring to our ‘postmodern monuments’ as ‘our skyscrapers, malls, theme parks, and places of business where information circulates in offices touching the sky’. While the Situationists decried the creation of this landscape as it was coming into being, a close reading of Benjamin finds a critical wrinkle of interpretation that opens the door for these spaces to become ruinous because of the way they affect society and the people who visit them. The power of commodity fetishism may resemble and ultimately lead to a kind of alienation and inauthenticity, but it happens only through the momentary flash of mythology. The spectacle grasps us in a powerful and affective way as it forms us into shape. The arcades were ‘temples’ and ‘cathedrals’, and their spatial logic proliferated into the department stores and shopping malls. While these spaces might seem stale to Debord and others, they are the new sacred spaces of consumer society, meaning that they operate through powerful logics of affect and emotion. If we accept that these spaces do become secular temples or cathedrals, experienced authentically despite their hyperreality (Miller and Del Casino Jr, 2018), then we can better grasp their process of becoming ruins. What is compelling about the retail ruin is that it complicates some previous reflections on how ruins relate to a postmodern and media-​saturated culture. Similar to Edensor (2005a), Hell and Schönle (2010)

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also find subversive energies in the ruin that pitch it against the modern and its prevailing narratives of progress. In this way, the ruin becomes a constitutive component of the modern as the flip side that defines it and, in that way, holds it together. In postmodern hyperreality, the ruin continues to play this role, even if it comes pre-​packaged by the heritage and tourism industries. As Hell and Schönle (2010: 5) ask: are we addicted to ruins as a stimulant to counteract the numbing effects of the media-​induced bubble we live in? Does the thrill of ruins return us to a pre-​post-​modern feel for reality, despite the fact that many of us experience the rawness of ruinous reality primarily as a media effect? Here, the ruins are still juxtaposed to an emerging hyperreal landscape: the ‘media-​induced bubble’. To that, we must add this new, hyperreal built environment, one that is now falling into pieces. Yet, its reference points date back not generations, as was the case with some industrial areas, but only decades, or perhaps less in some cases. We have yet to fully think through the nuances of a postmodern, hyperreal ruination, one that lacks the historical trajectory of some traditional ruins (but see Clarke, 2008; Lavery et al, 2014). As a form that does not lead back to a bygone production regime, as with industrial ruins, the retail ruin is formed out of a new kind of post-​industrial material, among others: the stuff of commercial display and store design; semiotics, signage and graphic design; and environmental psychology, marketing, advertising and urban design. Are these materials any less real than, say, abandoned factories, heavy machinery, coal mines or shipyards? Recent research on ‘new ruins’ (Dobraszczyk, 2017; O’Callaghan and Di Feliciantonio, 2021) signals attention to these new kinds of ruinous spaces facing us today. These are often structures that were begun but never completed, leaving them stranded in time and space. Mega structures in Italy, for instance, have no bearing to any original use or history, yet

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What Are Retail Ruins?

there they are (Arboleda, 2017). Dobraszczyk (2017) ponders these and other ruins, such as the stalled housing development in Spain, leaving behind a bizarre landscape of bits and pieces that never came together (on ‘ghost estates’ in Ireland, see also Kitchen et al, 2014). These are examples of ‘ruins in reverse’, a term coined by US artist Robert Smithson ‘to describe incomplete or abandoned structures’ (Dobraszczyk, 2017: 191). These are odd for a few reasons. Arboleda (2017: 811) highlights their lack of artefacts that would indicate a prior use or ‘formal habitation’. They have always been empty, literally. There are no bonds of experience and memory in the human community that would inform a kind of heritage like other more familiar kinds of ruin might contain. In any case, these dangling, misplaced projects can reach in only one temporal direction: the future. Retail ruins may occupy a similar ‘suspended future’ (Dobraszczyk, 2017: 189; cf Woodward et al, 2012), but they are populated to a great degree, depending on the specific site. Some may be recently closed, with the staff leaving behind their things as if in a rush. As such, we can sometimes review the materials left behind to gain a sense of what activities were present there not long ago. Other sites emit other signs of long-​term abandonment. For its part, retail capital may claw its way back into these derelict spaces, leading it to resemble more closely a ‘ruin in reverse’. The retail ruin, then, holds the spotlight on this encounter between the spectacle and the void that overtakes it when left unattended. What would happen if retail capital suddenly stopped working? If retail capital was suddenly frozen? Things would happen that amount to a kind of ruination. Something always comes back: retail ruination and the slow deterioration and death of the building (Cairns and Jacobs, 2014). This will always happen in such circumstances, as an always looming ‘entropy’ (Dobraszczyk, 2017: 191; see also Cairns and Jacobs, 2014; Rose et al, 2021). As such, there is a specific kind of haunting taking place in the retail ruin that deserves further attention. There is the haunting of a void

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that returns again and again, troubling any claim to absolute presence. Entropic forces trade blows with the efforts of retail capital to ward off the void. The retail ruin highlights this encounter of material forces, left to their own devices in some cases. Interestingly, theories of assemblage have pushed forward thinking on these aspects of existence, while archaeology has also extended its tradition of examining artefacts to consider the dynamics of consumer culture and society. Assemblage thinking and contemporary archaeology In previous work (Miller, 2020), I offered assemblage theories as one way of pushing consumption studies to take the political implications of consumerism more seriously. Far-​reaching consumer practices are now seeping into the political sphere, creating opportunities for reactionary extremism to flourish. Assemblage theories allow for an easier understanding of how the fantasy life of the shopping mall infiltrates what would at first appear to be a completely separate world: that of political practice and institutions. This work draws on a particular interpretation of assemblage theory, one receptive to theories of biopolitics and other explanations for how the world maintains some noticeable traits of coherence despite all the flux and movement that assemblages are said to contain. Today’s scholarship includes ‘new materialism’, ‘object-​oriented ontologies’ and ‘post-​phenomenology’ with which to think further about the influence and significance of non-​or more-​than-​human worlds. These discussions have come, not surprisingly, with a significant amount of criticism and debate, from Brenner et al’s (2011) ‘critical urban theory’ reproach to McFarlane (2011), to Kinkaid’s (2020, 2021) more recent feminist criticism. Notwithstanding Kinkaid’s criticism of what is identified as the smuggled-​in moves of masculinist thinking into some assemblage theories, Kinkaid (2021) also cites a plethora of work that makes a stronger effort to bring together assemblage thinking with more familiar trends in

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What Are Retail Ruins?

critical human geography and related fields. As such, there is an ethics of assemblage thinking that can do two things at the same time: criticize familiar power relations in the world and not ascribe those powers special status as essential, natural or the only players, thereby opening space to recognize difference and alterity in a radical way. As geographers and others have incorporated these theories into their work (see Lorimer, 2005; Braun and Whatmore, 2010; Müller and Schurr, 2016; on the ‘scale debates’, see also Jones et al, 2007; Woodward et al, 2012), Lisa Hill (2015), both a cultural geographer and an archaeologist, comments on the surprisingly scant encounter that has taken place between geography and archaeology. This is surprising because archaeology is a research tradition that pays close attention to the materiality of the world, and to ruins specifically. Geographers and others interested in assemblages, objects and materiality can learn a lot from archaeology, particularly in terms of methods that maintain focus on specific ‘artifacts’, ‘materiality’ and ‘material evidence’ (Hill, 2015: 415). As Pétursdóttir and Olsen (2014: 20) put it: ‘Archaeologists are trained to engage in meaningful and original ways with such stranded, fragmented and messy things, and possess skills and methods for documenting and analysing this material record.’ At the same time, Hill (2015: 415) comments on how contemporary archaeologists are increasingly using the qualitative research techniques familiar to geographers, such as archival records and ethnography. Hill (2015) and Pétursdóttir and Olsen (2014) are part of ‘contemporary archaeology’, or what is also referred to as ‘archaeologies of the contemporary past’. This approach is different than traditional archaeology, which is concerned with longer and older timescales, and is instead interested in ‘recent pasts’ and how the present currently links with them. Some of this work approximates similar ‘material culture studies’ (Miller, 1987) and occasionally takes on questions of consumerism directly, as do Majewski and Schiffer (2001). However, their

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study of ceramics seems far away from the critical theories of consumption roiling through human geography at the time (see Crewe, 2000; Goss, 2004). More recently, in ‘An archaeology of ruins’, Pétursdóttir and Olsen (2014) situate consumerism as a driving force behind the production of contemporary ruins. Interestingly, these differ from the ruins of antiquity because they arrive with a kind of negativity that restricts their transformation into ‘heritage’ (Pétursdóttir and Olsen, 2014: 3; see also Chapter Three). Despite their flagging of ‘closed shopping malls’ (Pétursdóttir and Olsen, 2014: 3) as sites of interest for today’s contemporary archaeology of ruins, their sizeable edited volume includes only one chapter on urban ruins of this nature (Hudson, 2014). Amid these studies, Harrison (2011) encourages further development of contemporary archaeology and assemblage theories. While there has been some development of ‘symmetrical archaeologies’ that incorporate actor–​network theory (ANT), Harrison (2011) seems driven by the slightly different imagination of becoming offered by assemblage theories in particular (Müller and Schurr, 2016). Harrison seeks an even greater shift in archaeology, beyond adding to its engagement with such theories. Instead of an archaeology of the recent or contemporary past, Harrison (2011) urges an explicit archaeology ‘of and in the present’, one that looks at objects and the material world in a slightly different way. Instead of excavation as the key trope of archaeology, Harrison proposes ‘surface assemblage’, signalling the work of Deleuze and Guattari (2004), Bennett (2010), Latour (2005) and others. This does not preclude identifying items from different time periods. Instead, we find them at the surface with many other items, resulting in a multiplicity of potential relationships. This methodological focus on becoming changes the way we conceptualize the meaning of the material world: An archaeology of the surface thus becomes a study of assemblages of humans and non-​humans which are

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What Are Retail Ruins?

the product of a series of historical processes by which they are jumbled together in the present. To name these collectives ‘assemblages’ recognizes explicitly the archaeological act of classification, the application of an archaeological gaze to the surface. It also explicitly recognizes the heterogeneity of the collectives, the fact that they represent multiple, palimpsest pasts and have implicit within them multiple potential futures, and flattens not only our perception of stratigraphic depth, but also the common practice of giving priority to humans over non-​humans in these collectives. To study surface assemblages in the present means to recognize the agency of humans, non-​humans and the collectives themselves as charged with latent potential, as generative of new pasts and futures in the present. (Harrison, 2011: 157) This is an important ethical positioning of archaeological and assemblage-​inspired thinking. In pursuing the double-​move that Kinkaid (2021) helped identify earlier, this way of thinking can be positive, while also addressing political problems, perhaps even in radical new ways that might lead out of the many crises we find ourselves in today (Linz and Secor, 2021). Citing Jane Bennett’s (2010) Vibrant Matter, Harrison (2011: 156) writes that ‘Bennett’s (2010) discussion of assemblage theory also draws out another key issue. In thinking of the present as a series of heterogeneous socio-​technical assemblages, unlike the organismic metaphor, we are able to identify both relationships of functional flow and more volatile relationships of friction and conflict.’ This could help with the study of consumer spaces, especially considering their complexity. The number of stakeholders on any given high street, for instance, is immense. Moving away from the ‘organismic metaphor’, in which we might attempt to conceive of the high street as something with ‘a nervous system and brain centre’, we can now better come to conceive of it as many moving pieces that interconnect and

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collide in so many ways. At the same time, we are faced with a kind of aporia: that we feel the need to plan or somehow gain influence, if not control, over the dynamics and flows that constitute the everyday retail and consumption landscape. Left to their own devices, capitalists practise a ruthless ‘creative destruction’ that simply moves wherever it needs to go in order to maintain the circulation of capital (Harvey, 1990). The complexity of landscapes like high streets is best thought of as a ‘series of heterogeneous socio-​technical assemblages’ (Harrison, 2011: 156), but that does not mean we should give up on producing better spaces or criticizing the ways in which landscape is currently being assembled. We might come to terms, first, with the structural causes but then refuse to let those realities cloud our view of all the other alternatives also at play in the landscape (Gibson-​Graham, 1996). The point is that it could be different. Conceptualizing research sites in terms of ‘surface assemblages’, then, means maintaining an intense focus on the materials at hand, as these are signs of life and possible signals for what might come next. As such, it is far from what has been criticized as ‘ruin porn’ in the broader production of images and literature on ruins in recent years. This refers to the alleged exploitation of images, usually photography, through an unreflexive and ultimately consumerist approach to representational practice. This is typically referred to as an ‘aestheticized’ approach to ruins and ruinous landscapes, one that is guilty of remaining too much on the surface and therefore fails to ‘unveil’ the broader relations of power responsible for the devastation. Dobraszczyk (2017) neatly summarizes the history of this critique, from Susan Sontog’s (1965) criticism of media representations of disasters to art historian Dora Apel’s (2015) work, as well as that of the geographer Swyngedouw (2010, 2013), who urges caution against excessively negative representations of the climate change crisis, as it potentially removes any reason for attempting change. As noted earlier, researchers like Mah (2012) work to consciously avoid these

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What Are Retail Ruins?

mistakes through a methodological decision: they seek out those who inhabit the ruins, while also investigating the structural forces that produce them. A ‘surface assemblage’ methodology avoids such pitfalls precisely because it also searches out the wider relations between the ruinous site and its surroundings, though in a different way. Similarly, Pohl (2022) offers a rethinking of the debate around so-​called ‘ruin porn’ and the meaning of fetishization when it comes to ruins. The dimensions that make ruinous sites meaningful for those who coexist with them, or those who are interested in them, cannot be explained away as simply untruthful mediations that hide a ‘deeper’ truth of how the ruin came to be to begin with. Instead, Pohl draws from psychoanalytic theories and from Benjamin to remind us that fetishes are an important part of how we experience reality. By simply dismissing the fetish as a mask that hides ‘deeper’ truth, we risk missing out on a large part of social reality. He urges us to ‘get with the fetish’, in terms of acknowledging the reasons why these sites sometimes elicit powerful reactions. These insights are particularly helpful for situating retail ruins (see also Pohl, 2021a, 2021b), as they are inextricable from the mundane drama of retail capital and the spectacular fetishization involved in window displays and store layouts. While Hill (2015) suggests that geography should learn more from the ‘archaeological imagination’ (see also McGeachan, 2019), archaeology can also learn from geography and the attention that has been placed on immateriality and haunting, issues that have been addressed, in particular, by the development of ‘non-​representational theory’ in geography (Hill, 2015: 413). This is important for the study of ruins, as they often have an unavoidable ghostliness to them, in that they always pull on, and are pulled by, something past that no longer appears there. There is often a negative force involved here, insofar as the ruin is characterized as a form but with something missing. Hauntology, then, is the last

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piece of theoretical equipment required for understanding the possibility of contemporary retail ruins. Hauntology Maddern and Adey (2008) introduce ‘spectro-​geographies’ as a gentle but necessary correction to the effusiveness of some versions of assemblage theories. In short, what might be dismissed as ‘negative’ conditions must also count as forces in the world (see also Braidotti, 2019). ‘Even as it has the capacity to awaken a previously inanimate world with affective intensity’, Maddern and Adey (2008: 293) write, ‘spectral relations must be able to invoke a sense of lessening, slowing, lingering, deadening, vulnerability, loss of hope, boredom and withdrawal; and unpick the absences that make these states a reality’. These forces can become the prevailing force in shaping space and subjectivity, as absence and presence remain locked together in complex ways (Frers, 2013). For Kingsbury and Secor (2021), the figure of the void appears as negative at first but is, they illustrate, endlessly productive, as if a tool that constantly overturns soil to make for new life. Rose et al (2021) make a similar argument for negativity itself, while others like Mark Fisher (2014, 2016) have expanded hauntology to consider a variety of cultural texts, practices and experiences. This attention to absence and its constitutive role owes a lot to Jacques Derrida, whose philosophical approach was largely dedicated to uncovering these traces as they move through the world. Everything contains this underside reality, where its conditions of possibility are tethered to a kind of quasi-​materialist universe: no idealism is allowed in terms of explaining why things are the way they are, only the here and now. Ideas and identities always need an outside to define themselves, an outside that is not always easily recognized by those same ideas and identities. A haunting trace, then, runs through all existence and all claims of presence (Rose, 2006, 2010; Harrison, 2008). Deconstruction pays attention to these

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What Are Retail Ruins?

possibilities and their reverberations across space and time. While this work has been influential throughout the ‘cultural turn’ (Dixon and Jones, 2004), it is again taking on new life in ‘spectro-​geography’ and other experimentations with what Derrida called ‘hauntology’ as a way of coming to terms with being as always haunted. That being haunted, it turns out, is crucial for the step into a becoming that faces the future. Haunting, then, holds these temporalities together at once in complex formations (Wylie, 2009, 2021; Roberts, 2013; Fisher, 2014, 2016; Hill, 2015; Buser, 2017). Ruins and ruination are, not surprisingly, rich domains to think through these questions of haunting. Edensor (2005a, 2005b; DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013), again, draws heavily on notions of the ghostly and of haunting to describe the sensations of what it is like inside industrial ruins. The literal signs of the past are still there, contributing to the atmosphere as they decay. While there is no acknowledgement of Derrida, Edensor’s project seems in line with the ethics of deconstruction, insofar as the insights he draws are put into direct conversation with broader themes and debates around the city. As industrial ruins act as ‘counter-​sites’ (DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013: 467) to the dominant forces in urbanism today, this is fuelled by the haunting itself. In other words, because the sites are haunted, they acquire the power to haunt beyond themselves. It is common to find ruinous sites described as being haunted, but we must also consider the ways that they do the haunting. This methodology has also been useful beyond post-​industrial cities of the Global North. As noted in the Introduction, Gordillo (2014) outlines haunting in terms that rely less on memory and more on affect. In what is today northern Argentina, Gordillo charts a complex landscape where the leftovers from the Spanish Empire and its violence continue to reverberate through ruins, both old and new. Remnants of abandoned forts and lost towns are among the artefacts that Gordillo (2014) finds pulsating through the contemporary

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landscape, fraught with its own tensions and relations of power in today’s neoliberalism, which is producing new ruins as forests are destroyed to make fields for growing soybeans. In his encounters with local people living with the sites he went searching for as a researcher, Gordillo (2014) finds that the objects and materials of the sites are circulating in ways that far exceed the official meaning of the term ‘ruin’. In fact, many of the local people were unfamiliar with the notion of a ruin, as he had to describe material things to better indicate what he was looking for. Yet, this difference does not mean that the sites are unimportant for local peoples. Often, they are used in unpredictable ways, while they also circulate in political imaginations. To account for this greater life of the sites, Gordillo (2014) proposes ‘rubble’, a more open and flexible term that accounts for this greater multiplicity of meanings and reuses of the ruinous site. This work continues the critical work of deconstruction in the way it questions ‘ruins’ as an elite concept that too often defines the ruin too narrowly and incompletely. As ‘rubble’, the sites become richer, more complex and more open to difference and even alterity. In this way, we can then better understand how these sites are not only haunted, but also do the haunting. These sites occupy a critical temporal juncture between the past and the future, that phantom moment of the present, blazing forward in each instant of consciousness that we experience. Interestingly, Gordillo (2014: 129) also draws from Benjamin, Derrida and others in articulating a version of what he calls an ‘object-​ oriented negativity’ that can encapsulate the significance of this moving envelope of critical awareness, one that fuses the positive hopefulness of assemblage thinking with the dark demands of haunting. In another way, these reflections also call for an awareness of the distance between subjects as a large chasm or void that can never be fully crossed. The void appears again and again in Gordillo’s (2014) landscape of rubble (see also Gordillo, 2013) as a negative figure that becomes

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What Are Retail Ruins?

productive of colonial modernity itself. Yet, this productivity is through a haunting, one that is difficult to elucidate: ‘I seek to show that the pure multiplicity of rubble is the void that haunts modernity’ (Gordillo, 2014: 25, emphasis added). As we will see more in Chapter Two, there are some resemblances and lines of overlap between Benjamin’s and Derrida’s thinking that deserve more attention. In other words, ruinous sites, then, are always reaching out beyond themselves. Ruins are haunted and do the haunting, a process often intertwined with traumatic histories of violence and dispossession (Till, 2005; Gordon, 2008). As voids in the urban landscape (Hwang and Lee, 2020; Kingsbury and Secor, 2021; Strohmayer, 2021), retail ruins potentially encapsulate the absurd and outlandish results of economic crisis and rapid socio-​technical change that troubles what we have come to expect from the urban retail experience. This void is lurking just underneath the surfaces of retail capital as it moves around and sets up shop where it sees fit. The retail ruin exposes this relationship, usually kept hidden away from view. Even though some amount of change in the retail environment is always likely to be found (Wrigley and Lambiri, 2015: 18–​19; see also Greenhalgh, 2020), the landscape today is particularly disturbed following the recent global financial crisis and the austerity regimes that followed (Hall, 2019, amongst others), as well as the more recent impacts of the COVID-​19 pandemic. The void is now unavoidable. Methodology and the question of context How, then, might we get closer to these ruinous spaces and contemplate the emergence of a new kind of ruin altogether, one that surrounds us but has yet to be considered in such terms? This project works with empirical material generated from direct observations of vacant commercial properties around the city centre of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK (including its main high street), the city where I have lived since 2018.

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Inspired by the work discussed earlier and by my collaboration with an archaeologist and another geographer (see Miller et al, 2021), my intention was to document this kind of (non-​) activity as it manifests in the everyday atmospheres that are emitted by these spaces. Through observations, field notes, sketches and photography, I sought to document the surfaces of the site and the objects visible inside, as well as the atmospheres emitted, as experienced by myself. These were, I came to find, always linked in practice. Which places did I choose to stop and look at? Only the ones that emitted (for me) a kind of ghostly charge. Only then would I move closer and examine the material components that make this happen. There are surely many other ghosts that I was not summoned by (Rose, 2021), and everyone will bring a different eye to the details and impact of any retail ruin or landscape. Further, this is not a scientific survey of voids and their locations; rather, the method was more embodied, intuitive and attuned to the presence of ghostly voids, those that either demanded attention or called out more quietly from the corner of the eye. The logic of the fieldwork was to simply pay close attention to these sites and create a detailed description of them using the camera and notebook. Taking inspiration from the ‘surface assemblage’ methodologies outlined earlier by Harrison (2011), this fieldwork notebook included the following: (1) an inventory of things inside the space and sometimes sketches of the site layout and location of objects; (2) the quality of the various materials of the site in different phases of newness or decay; (3) the material and condition of the surfaces of the sites, both inside and out; (4) any signage that would give clues to past usage; and (5) signs of activity left behind outside, often in the doorways or on the window sills. Although these sites are often closed off, sealed and surveilled, signs of unauthorized use nevertheless appear on the exterior surfaces meant to keep us out (written words or other signs), or in the objects that butt against the retail ruin (materials left behind or other accumulated debris).

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What Are Retail Ruins?

While these kinds of vacant sites have always caught my attention since arriving in 2018, I conducted more focused and deliberate observations from June 2021 to May 2022, with ethical approval from my university. Returning regularly to several key sites, I was able to track the ongoing status of its material composition. Often, I would simply walk the public footpaths and along the high street, just like any other pedestrian or inhabitant. When detecting a haunting, I would pay closer attention to a single site and sometimes spend up to 20 minutes there taking notes. As the objects of analysis were these formerly quasi-​public spaces, there was no need to trespass. Often, we can easily look in the window displays or simply pay more attention to these as we pass by as we go about our daily lives. This methodology is more attuned to ‘seeing the everyday’ (Moran, 2005) than any kind of adventurous ‘urban exploration’ (Garrett, 2013). As such, it has much greater accessibility, as it does not require trespassing or any kind of excessive risk taking. Everything we need for this study is right there, visible from the footpath. However, my embodied subjectivity did, no doubt, facilitate the data collection. There is some privilege involved in my standing in front of vacant properties, scribbling in a notebook for minutes at a time, without it being seen as ‘loitering’ and potentially drawing the attention of security or police. Yet, compared to the demands of ‘urban exploration’, there are few barriers to conducting this kind of research; all it takes is a heightened awareness of our everyday surroundings. Most of the observations were made during daytime hours. As these sites were designed for looking into, even when vacant, what seems like ‘voyeurism’ is, in fact, what the site invites you to do. This mismatch –​vacancy and disarray in the space of commodity fetishism –​contains a disruptive potential that this methodology chases after. The problem of voyeurism did become important, however, as I was made more aware of how many shop doorways are used by the homeless as temporary shelters. This meant that I would

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avoid examining sites of interest if they were being occupied to respect their privacy. I would often find remnants of this kind of inhabitation in the form of flattened cardboard boxes and other rubbish and supplies left behind. Never did I observe any obvious unauthorized activities inside the properties, such as squatting or other unauthorized entry, but I did sometimes find things moved around since the last time I visited, making me wonder about what was happening inside. This awareness of homelessness surrounding the vacant sites adds to their outrage, as so much space is wasted in the face of human need. The broader historical geographies of uneven development make their mark on this study, then, in this unsettling way, making the vacancies resonate with longer trajectories and dynamics of power (Amin et al, 2003). This evidence of deprivation and human need adds further to my suspicion of the spatial form under examination. My intention is not to deceive the reader by sustaining focus on the voids that haunt the retail landscape; there is plenty of ‘live’ retail activity in this same area, often right next door to the vacancies, and some of the sites photographed and discussed here have already been converted and put back into business. The main high street, Northumberland Street, has not been decimated to the extent that other parts of the city have (the high street on Shields Road in the nearby neighbourhood of Byker was recently labelled the ‘worst high street in Britain’ by a retail consultancy [see Lockwood, 2019]). Northumberland Street is pedestrianized and is bustling every day, positioned as it is between Central Station and two large universities, and nestled alongside the large shopping centre that worms its way through the city centre. I have only noticed a small handful of vacancies on the high street itself, as it seems to have weathered the most recent retail storms better than some others. Other pockets of the city centre are perhaps more ghostly but usually exist alongside other activity that has come into the retail void in recent years, such as charity shops, mobile phone servicers, vape shops, pound shops and other low-​price retail. Several

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What Are Retail Ruins?

large investment construction projects have recently begun that promise to change the nature of the area. Newcastle upon Tyne is an ideal place to conduct this kind of research. It is the urban centre of a region that has a long history of retailing and has also been hit hard by deindustrialization and, therefore, has had to invest in post-​industrial activities. These processes weave together in complicated ways. In the industrial 19th century, planners had meticulously crafted a system of streets, markets, shops and arcades (Barke, 2002: 15). Forced to accelerate these retail and service activities in a post-​industrial late 20th century, some of the traditional formats and locations have now been replaced or have been erased completely. Pendlebury (1999, 2002) and Barke et al (2021: 220) detail how the historic city centre shops had been ‘in decline since the 1950s’ as new trends in urbanism and retail planning pushed investment and shopping activity elsewhere, often towards newer retail formats, such as fully enclosed retail palaces like Eldon Square in Newcastle and the Metrocentre in Gateshead, opening in 1976 and 1986, respectively. This history of retail includes previous places that can no longer be found, such as the Handyside arcade (now the Eldon Garden shopping centre), the Royal arcade (now a motorway) and several large department stores (Rogerson, 2018). Others remain and fulfil vital functions for multiple publics, such as the Grainger Market, built in 1835 as part of the urban vision of developer Richard Grainger (González et al, 2021). Retail change has been taking place for a long time here. Yet, today, we are now facing another convulsion in the circuits of investment and expertise as the post-​industrial consumer economy again takes new shapes. Retail ruins perhaps hit especially hard in communities that have had to rely so heavily on retail and services in a post-​industrial era. Regional inequalities in the UK have been widely documented, as the northern region has been consistently subordinated to the more wealthy and powerful southern England (Amin et al, 2003). For a region that was once so important for industrialization,

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it was hit especially hard throughout the 20th century, which saw these industries decline (Robinson, 2002). There is much debate and contestation around the post-​industrial economy as an inadequate replacement. These tensions and contradictions do make their way into the findings, particularly through the proliferation of protest stickers that I often found on the surfaces of the vacant sites. Hannah Awcock (2021) suggests that these are underappreciated signs of a certain kind of urban activity around the right to the city and broader politics around public space and inequality. Social and political tensions are manifest in these stickers, as they are easy to produce and distribute, adding a rogue layer to the surfaces of the city. Chapter Three returns to situate Newcastle upon Tyne and the region in its wider contexts. For now, I want to follow Liz Millward (2017: 105) who, in pursuing a spectral methodology, warns against including ‘too much context’. The findings presented in Chapter Two are not meant to stand in for any kind of generalized post-​industrial condition. In some ways, the meaning of these findings is not exclusive to the regional context; these kinds of spaces can be found almost anywhere (though some of the protest stickers do make clear reference to regions). Further, this approach also avoids the risks that are always involved in representation, particularly of a ‘post-​ industrial region’ that is often associated with wider political representations of being ‘left behind’ (Jones, 2022). At the same time, flashes of political and social life do make their appearance, and I sometimes include further historical materials to further contextualize some aspects of the landscape. The choice to limit the historical context at this point in the text is, however, related to a hauntological methodology. Millward (2017: 105, emphasis added), researching a ruined ‘ghost airport’ in Canada, warns that ‘too much context’ can subtract from the force that a hauntological approach is after: ‘This poignancy is a general affect experienced in ruins and to some extent the contextual detail is immaterial. Indeed, too much context can undermine the ghostly effect since the ruin

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What Are Retail Ruins?

becomes rational wreckage rather than evocative spectre.’ Chapter Two, then, is a photo essay, theoretically informed by Benjamin, Derrida and others, that attempts to ‘be spectral’ (emphasis in original) (Wylie, 2008: 184) in addition to using the lens of ‘haunting’ to explain the findings. My hope is that, overall, these reflections will be understood as deeply historical, social and political, notwithstanding the limits of the methodology itself. In conclusion, there is a final risk and challenge to this approach, which is to avoid producing what some say amounts to ‘ruin porn’ –​an exploitative visual practice that avoids any historical, social or political explanation of the ruins themselves (also see Strangleman, 2013 and Mah, 2014). That is not what contemporary archaeology and hauntology strive for (see also Pohl, 2022). Contemporary archaeology, especially, interrogates the material record and uses it to advance relevant theories about space, time, place, politics and more. Hauntology does not just find things in the photographs and environment that are eerie. Rather than reproducing the commodity fetish of the spectacle by way of ‘retail ruin porn’ (see Dobraszczyk, 2017: 13–​14), this project does something very different: it focuses on retail ruins as a way of further exposing and unravelling that spectacle. Following Pohl (2022: 154), this project ‘works-​through’ what might appear as a fetishized image of the retail ruin, attempting to inject it with multiple meanings pertaining to the world it signals. Methodologically, it deconstructs the spectacle that has invaded our lives and is also out of control as its drags us towards catastrophe. Retail ruins remind us that it does not have to be this way.

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TWO

Retail Ruins

Like ghosts, ruins are inarticulate, indeterminate and hybrid, they contain traces of emotion, activity, knowledge and event. The telling of their tale is impossible. Edensor, 2001: 50 Introduction In Buildings Must Die, Cairns and Jacobs (2014) write with a great intensity about the many processes that make up buildings, from the materials themselves to their environmental surroundings and the ideas that govern them in particular ways. Citing Brand, for example, they remind us that ‘Because of the different rates of change of its components, a building is always tearing itself apart’ (Brand, 1994, quoted in Cairns and Jacobs, 2014: 125, emphasis added). However, that does not mean that buildings die. For many reasons, buildings do not go away easily or quietly. These long durations of buildings also grabbed the attention of Walter Benjamin (1999), who saw in the Paris arcades a powerful spatial form in crisis. For him, Honoré de Balzac came to mind, as ‘[N]‌othing dies; all is transformed’ (on page 62 Benjamin [1999] cites Honoré de Balzac, Pensées, sujets, fragments [Paris, 1910] page 46). As Buse et al (2005: 54) put it: ‘Benjamin believed that his own era also stood at a threshold, the end of the commodity form: “With the destabilizing of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.” ’ Yet, today, nearly a century later, we experience a layering of retail crisis and ruination, as the commodity form, it seems, had in

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Figure 1:  Falling in

fact survived Benjamin’s era and was now, again, facing a new era of volatility and crisis. The ‘monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins’ are again on our minds as our cities and towns are bespeckled with vacancies –​voids that have proliferated across the landscape. While ruins may signal tension and contradiction, and while telling their tale may be ‘impossible’ following Edensor (2001), they are powerful thinking devices because they can also open new horizons. As Hell and Schönle (2010: 8) put it: ‘Ruins emancipate our senses and desire and enable introspection.’ The following account tries to remain open to these multiple demands around how to best conceptualize this kind of ruinous space, experienced in central Newcastle upon Tyne (see Figure 1). Corner Shop A hole blasted through the surface, from the outside. Glass fragments scattered across the floor inside –​a queasy carpet in the dim light.

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Figure 2:  Random object and neglect

Jagged shards hold together, still vertical, but just barely. Roughly a fist-​sized gap in the glass, giving a direct glimpse into the vacant retail space on a busy corner, a glimpse untainted by the cloudy surface of the battered and dirty windows. The space inside is almost completely empty, except for a few stray things: a random, ornamental object, perhaps a clue to the space’s past use (see Figure 2); a pale with some rags; a strange metal panel against the wall; and an old circus poster crumpled in the corner. While empty, many features are semi-​ intact: the flooring, walls, ceiling panels and lighting are still installed, though they are fraying all over and not just at the edges. Bits of the ceiling are caving in (see Figure 3), with cords and wires dangling. They drop a little more each day, extending like vines. The fixtures are off kilter and mangled (see Figure 4), with pieces missing and misplaced. Shards of wood and fragments of ceiling tile are settled in among a wider spray of tiny, smaller debris. One sketch details a corner location and labels each piece in order to try and keep track of these phantom movements: (1) carpet pulled back; (2) metal shelf on floor; (3) plastic bag/​wrap; (4) yellow bird feather; (5) white bird feather; (6) plastic fragments; and (7) crumpled napkin. Another sketch included the following list: (1) wood shard #1; (2) electrical fixture; (3) wood board; (4) ceiling panel fragment; (5) wood shard #2; (6) tiny fragments and

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Figure 3:  Ceiling collapse

miscellaneous screws; and (7) metallic ceiling panel hanging by the corner thread. Thick residues accumulate on the exterior surfaces outside; left unwashed for how long? Layer upon layer of materials: dirt, dust, markers, stickers and bird poo. This site (what I call Corner Shop, an invented name) grabbed my attention before the pandemic. A complete emptiness engulfs the space, even amid the manic foot traffic taking place outside. Inside, absence and stillness. Yet, small changes are noticeable. The collapsing ceiling tiles, for example. Other ceiling tiles seem newly disrupted, hanging on by a thread –​hanging like that for months. One day I notice the lines of a stain for the first time. How slowly does it all move? Debris from the window blast continues to break off, crumbling, creating a glassy layer scattered inside. The puncture wound is still there but now, days later, is contained by another transparent pane set in place with thick adhesive globs to stop the damage. However, there are more strikes to come, more blows from the outside. With each strike, more glass fragments fly into the vacant interior space. Another transparent pane had to be put into place, cluttering the window and its desperate pleas from a much earlier and happier time in this very scene of destruction. It was a furniture store, judging from the words pasted to the glass.

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Figure 4:  Unplugged and shattered

Now, the glass is impounded and crunching, held together with glue and eviscerated by thousands of cracks in the glass, moving in a chaos of directions all at once. It is difficult to tell which puncture goes with which surface, as they blur together, transposed, layer on layer, line over line. The globs of glue are soft and gummy to the touch. One day, along the outside exterior on the footpath, something new appears: e-​scooters linked with a smartphone app required for rental. They are lined up outside, linked with their smart devices, against smudged windows, with so many competing signs, some carved out of dust and dirt with pedestrian fingers, working with a thick cake, crying out in temporary materials, alongside the more permanent markers and paint of more committed authors. There are other shattered signs from another time, remnants of past usage: snowflake-​shaped graphics stuck to the window alongside the words ‘Winter Sale, Now On’ (14 snowflakes in total); ‘www.bea​utif​ulho​mefu​rnit​ure.co.uk’; ‘WE WON’T BE BEATEN ON PRICE’; ‘PRICE MATCH PROMISE’; and ‘LAY AWAY OPTION’. Looking closely at the surface, there are rogue messages, stuck on without authorization, raising a wide variety of themes. Four, for example,

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appearing separately: ‘WESTMINSTER RULE IS KILLING THE NORTH’; ‘COVIDIOT GOVERNMENT’; ‘Wearethedead.co.uk’; and ‘LET’S BUILD A BETTER NORTH, The Yorkshire Party, The Northeast Party’. Separately, on a piece of A4 folded in half, firmly taped to the window on all edges, the story of Jesus Christ is written in roughly 250 words of contemporary vernacular. Other stickers signal the methods of payment once accepted in a previous time: ‘VISA’, ‘MASTERCARD’, ‘DISCOVER’, ‘LLOYD’S BANK’, ‘MAESTRO’, ‘DINER’S CLUB INTERNATIONAL’ and ‘CARDNET’.

The scene inside Corner Shop described in the preceding box is made even more acute as it exists amid a very busy intersection in the middle of the city centre. Nearby is the Eldon Square and Eldon Garden shopping centres, the Gate entertainment complex, and the Grainger Market, dating back to the industrial 19th century. One ruinous edge of Eldon Square is just visible from one side of Corner Shop: a five-​storey wall of glass that once housed a large department store, now gone bust. It is a mega retail ruin: five empty stories, now grey and stained with bird poo and with only a strange metallic look of empty hangers and fixtures inside. Corner Shop can feel a sense of relief: it is not just them. Perhaps the Eldon Square, opened in 1976, even had a negative impact on that location. In fact, there are gaps and voids all around. Looking across the street, the wood exterior of the building splinters apart, rotting and disintegrating (see Figure 5). Retail in the city is alive, but it is all speckled with dark voids everywhere you look. Just when you settle in, a sudden bang, an explosion inside: total disruption and disappointment. There are empty, tomblike shells of rooms left smooth and empty, or with a big mess to clean up when the time comes, when the money is flowing again and when private investment puts things back into motion. Until then, dead insect carcasses pile up and water-​ stained tiles fall in on themselves within stained exteriors, with outside wiring hanging all over the place and sheets of metal

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Figure 5:  Splintering

bent out of shape and slumping down. Homeless people often rest outside by leaning against the exterior. Sometimes an older man plays an accordion on a little stool. Throughout the day, there is much footfall, with roaming groups of partygoers in the evenings on their way to the bars and clubs and restaurants nearby. Bustling life in the city ensues loud and fast in this exact spot. This retail site seems viable but forgotten –​perhaps cursed, a sense of violence taking place. Newcastle upon Tyne, situated in a wider political economy of deindustrialization, has experienced its fair share of hardship (Robinson, 2002). These scenes of retail ruins track with a sense of society unhinged by the contradictions of capitalism and, in the process, led astray by the promises of modernity and consumerism. More recently, in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–​08 and the impacts of COVID-​19, the retail landscape is again populated with ghosts. There is a desperation that they emit into the atmosphere, foreboding and ominous.

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Benjamin, ruins and ruination. Benjamin is cited in much contemporary research on ruins; yet, surprisingly, few reflect in much detail on the object of analysis in his unfinished master work The Arcades Project (Benjamin, 1999): a retail ruin. These commercial spaces once helped forge the capitalist subjectivity that was thriving elsewhere in urban space while the arcades themselves were falling into decline by the 1920s and 1930s, as he writes: ‘If this book [Zola’s, one of his many references] really expounds something scientifically, then it’s the death of the Paris arcades, the decay of a type of architecture. The book’s atmosphere is saturated with the poisons of this process: its people drop like flies’ (Benjamin, 1999, H1, 3: 204). This darkness flows through the work, taking us into a kind of ‘underworld’ (Gilloch, 1996: 20). Here, a smooth sedative lulls us into a great ‘sleep’, one of his favourite concepts for describing the effects of the arcades and capitalism more broadly. The debris that piles in front of the ‘angel of history’ (Benjamin, 1968: 257) may be more than a figure of philosophical speech –​in this case, the derelict, commercial arcades of Paris sputtering alongside other spatial technologies of sleep induction. Yet, amid these dark thoughts, Benjamin insisted that the materials for emancipatory change are already and always at hand: ‘That the Parisian arcades remained strictly circumscribed in space and time and that eventually they lost their shine, acquiring the patina of antiquity and obsolescence, did not dimmish their accidental Utopian nature. According to Benjamin, only a faded modernity was ready to release its Utopian energies’ (Buse et al, 2005: 26–​7). Benjamin’s work includes this double move of negative critique and then going past it. That is to say, for him, the point was to blast apart this somnambular consciousness and free us from the powerful mythic forces that the arcades and other technologies had unleashed. Crucially, there are utopian energies that continue to flow through the ruinous form of the arcades, an energy that can and must be revived in order to derail the cult of progress that is destroying the planet.

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‘Awakening’ and ‘redemption’ are key terms in Benjamin’s project that deserve further thought and attention. Arriving at firm conclusions on these issues, though, is notoriously fraught with difficulty, partially the result of Benjamin’s idiosyncratic thinking and his premature death, meaning that he never finished The Arcades Project. Both Buse et al (2005) and Gilloch (1996) suggest that his early belief in awakening may have faded through the 1930s, leaving us with a sense of ambiguity in what is found in the unfinished pages of The Arcades Project. Conjuring his ghost every time we open those pages, we now wonder: did he really give up on awakening? Today, the retail ruin still stares us down in our time of need, our contemporary moment of danger. While there may be some element of ‘disorderliness’ to the scene described earlier at the Corner Shop, they exude a different kind of ruinous process than merely objects out of order (Edensor, 2005a, 2005c). The window display, Edensor (2005c) reminds us, is one that promises a certain ordering of objects. The display window as a retail technology (Hardwick, 2004) helps to illuminate commodities and elevate them to the mythic status of fetish. In this operation, there is a ‘banishment of the dark and mysterious’ that Edensor (2005a: 135) finds in the industrial ruins: ‘This monumental banishment of the dark and mysterious within such a modern topography leaves little room for gloom and the disordered yet evocative matter which may lurk there.’ Edensor finds the lurking darkness that is excluded from the window displays in the industrial ruins. Yet, retail ruins also course through the urban landscape, running through the spatial form of the commodity itself and destabilizing its temples of glory from within. The destabilization that Edensor (2005a) finds in industrial ruins is even more troubling when found in these sacred spaces of retail capital and spectacle. What we can contemplate in these desperate spaces is that the commodity fetish is always built from the ground up, right there, piece by piece. The preceding photographs show not only objects out of order in a failure of retail magic, but

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also a more thorough shattering of space and the falling apart of materials that surround and adorn commodities. This is more of a decay than a disordering (DeSilvey, 2017). This literature is more inspiring for understanding retail ruins when engaging with the force of matter itself in producing spaces that feel haunted. Edensor’s industrial ruins are not only disordered, but also unsettling because of the layers of decay and an overall sense of being overwhelmed by the space itself: ‘In ruins, freed from the necessity to disguise its nature in the service of commodification, or escaped from the realms to which it was consigned, no longer swept up or polished away, the materiality of matter returns’ (Edensor, 2005a: 122, emphasis added). In the retail ruins of central Newcastle, some vacancies become crypt-​ like, covered in cobwebs, with dead insects in the window display, their carcasses decomposing and drying out, and with the carpets torn out and the floors below rusting, combinations of things that are all wrong, not making any magic at all (see Figures 6–​8). Figure 6:  Insect cemetery

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Figure 7:  Carpet torn out

Figure 8:  Combination all wrong

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The ‘materiality of matter returns’ (Edensor, 2005a: 122, emphasis added). In Cormac McCarthy’s (2006) novel The Road, a father and son fight to survive amid total system collapse. Set in the US South, Turner (2017: 120) is attentive to the remnants of a past consumer economy in ruins, citing Scott Romaine’s take on the South’s ‘consumption-​based economy –​the South of the museum, the reenactment, the themed space, and the tourist destination’. In the sometimes grotesque and spectral scenes of the novel, Turner (2017: 128) finds an awakening of things, as the material world suddenly takes on a new significance and glow: ‘As artifacts break down we see an anterior thingness emerging and encroaching on the human realm.’ In this destruction, Turner (2017) detects a strange kind of ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett, 2010), always pulsating all around us. Yet, that optimism clashes with the bleakness of the actual breakdown of artefacts presented by McCarthy. The narrator ponders the significance of it all: a consumerist paradise collapsed, with its built environment there for all to see, bloated and decomposing. In the display case of an abandoned shop is a human head, the remnant of some ‘blood cult’ roaming the land, taking prisoners and eating them. The conditions for a vibrant life are gone in this dystopia. The return of matter brings a kind of depravity (for a similar collapse of civilization inside one of its spatial citadels, see also J.G. Ballard’s [1975] novel High Rise). As McCarthy’s (2006: 293) narrator ponders: ‘Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.’ Yet, we know that voids and hauntings are never static. They may demand our attention at times as they take shape, but they are ultimately what help keeps things always in motion. The insect cemetery (see Figure 6), for instance, has been replaced with a fancy-​looking and dog-​friendly wine bar, perhaps a new form of what Hollands and Chatterton (2002) were just starting to see appearing in Newcastle upon Tyne, competing with the traditional pubs. In these emerging drinking cultures,

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Hollands and Chatterton (2002: 307) also find traces of industrial ghosts, as ‘the city’s nightlife is strongly shaped by its lingering connections with its industrial past which spill over into nightlife’. To substantiate this claim, they then engage with one of their participants, a bar owner, who explains that because the people of the region have faced such hardship in deindustrialization, and because of a view that the good times of the past are not likely to return, the best thing to do is enjoy life now, an impulse that helps drive the night-​time economy. Hollands and Chatterton (2002: 307) summarize that ‘a night out in Newcastle, then, is framed by escapism, local pride and a sense of place’ (see also Nayak, 2003). The insect cemetery, located in the historic Bigg Market, is covered over by these layers of meaning and psychological investment. Similarly, also at Bigg Market, the milkshakes have now returned to a site that I once called ‘milkshake dust’ (see Figure 9). Other sites I observed, however, remain dislocated, dark and quiet, worming inward, waiting. Urban scholars are busy making sense of these different rates of change across cities, with different compositions from street to street and building to building, each containing unique materials and connections to urban infrastructures. It is not an easy challenge (Rabun and Kelso, 2009). Benjamin’s awakening. The spatial subjectivity of the city was one of interiority and closure, one that feigned a kind of equality, as the ‘the arcade was the place where the bourgeoisie came to buy and the rest came to look at what they could not buy’ (Gilloch, 1996: 124). A new kind of visual ‘culture of display’ was created, one that anticipated later advertising (Buse et al, 2005: 119). The arcades also provided a kind of architectural protection from the elements of the environment (rain and mud) that added to this interiority. A basic function –​ shelter –​is then weaponized to facilitate the circulation of commodities, a relatively new process that was wreaking havoc on society at large in terms of institutionalizing uneven class relations (Marx, 1990 [1867]). Benjamin’s focus on the arcades helped reveal how ‘To live in these interiors was to

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Figure 9:  Milkshake dust

have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. From this cavern, one does not like to stir’ (Benjamin, 1999, I2, 6: 216). Yet, this was the challenge for him: to instigate a great awakening. The methodology hinged on the production of the dialectical image, the tool that would be capable of such a feat. Past and present encounter one another in an explosive instant that eviscerates the myths of the present, clearing the way for a different future. Today, the memes on social media represent the flourishing of this methodology (Hardesty et al, 2019), as so many creative images now flood the digital channels and lead to an infinity of openings (see also Kingsbury and Jones, 2009). In distinguishing Benjamin’s interest in dreams from Freud, Pile (2005: 57) summarizes as follows: Benjamin is not asking modernity to wake up from its dream of itself, but instead to get in touch with the wishes

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that the dream contains. ... In other words, Benjamin’s dream analysis of the modern city assumed that authentic wishes were woven into the making of the dream-​world of modernity: the fulfilment of wishes was not to be found in waking up from the dream-​world to reality, but in seeing the reality in the dream-​world. As such, we approximate Benjamin’s idea of redemption. Goss (1999) exemplifies the power of this way of thinking as he adopts Benjamin in his research visit to the infamous Mall of America, opened in 1992 in Bloomington, Minnesota, USA, outside of the ‘Twin Cities’ of Minneapolis and St. Paul. With Benjamin’s help, Goss (1999) finds in the commodity aesthetic the very materials that delineate our own authentic experiences. In other words, despite all the manipulative technologies of the malls and the arcades that Goss (1993) described in previous work, one nevertheless finds the kernel of social life insofar as we coexist

Figure 10:  Vacant shop

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with others in physical space. The consumer finds redemption in the mere act of participating in the mainstream forms of consumption, not alternative, ethical or sustainable consumption (though the boundaries today are becoming less and less clear as many corporate brands at least feign a progressive streak): The task is to recognize how the age-​old fears of obsolescence –​nature dies, children grow up, primitives are ‘civilized’, and our heritage is lost –​and dreams of immanence, live in the commodity aesthetic, not to eliminate them as so much ‘false consciousness,’ but to liberate them and live them more fully in really meaningful consumption. (Goss, 1999: 72) Dream messages Paying attention to signage offers explicit clues as to what once occupied the retail ruins. Whispering from somewhere, these spaces still gesture in the way they were originally intended, but something is not right, like a screw that has lost the thread and spins endlessly. ‘Your dream holiday starts right here’: a scene of rapid retreat, slow collapse. First, right after the bankruptcy, the space looked like this: abandoned desks and workspaces; mysterious random objects on a desk close to the window (a bottle of malt vinegar, a can of sweetcorn and microwave noodles); scattered mail pilling up; computer monitors facing the wrong direction and unplugged; pens and other debris of office work, shreds of paper, and so on; office chairs left scattered in oblique angles, all out of order; a wall of travel brochures that still remains intact; a small welcome desk with an image of a secluded beach with a hammock, with the words ‘Your dream holiday starts right here’; left-​behind rubbish, coffee carry-​away trays and hand sanitizers; and binders piled high on a desk. The lights are off and it is dark, but ‘Travel Money’ can still be seen at the back wall, somehow still illuminated (observations from fieldnotes, 5 June 2021). Eight months later, it is still ghostly: a pile of cardboard boxes has somehow

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appeared in the middle of the room, which is an ironic mess because their purpose there is ostensibly to help contain the mess; desks and computers are gone; and a property management sign is now in the window. The pile of boxes forms a pyramid. There must be dozens of them, small to medium sized, all thrown together into this pile in the middle of the ex-​store (observations from fieldnotes, 6 March 2022). ‘Tressure your dress for years to come’: everything torn apart. The doorway to this service provider is often occupied by the homeless. Much of the signage is still there, both inside and out. The counter is still intact. Yet, there are jagged scars along the walls, vertical lines from where something was ripped out and black squares appearing to be a kind of Velcro, once holding something up. Now, they are just open wounds. Some are solid and fresh, and others are faint and residual. Along the side wall is a faint floral pattern in a calm blue. There are posters piling up after being slid underneath the door (‘Big Fat Rave’, ‘Russell Brand’ and ‘Continental Circus Berlin’), as well as flattened cardboard in the doorway inlet outside, coming from Brazil according to the stickers. ‘We clean and care for your clothes’ is still proudly printed on the wall (observations from fieldnotes, 6 March 2022).

Near to this vacancy on Percy Street is one of the more spectacular retail ruins: the Eldon Garden shopping centre, a full-​blown dead mall inside. Walking in, all looks well at first (its advertising slogan is ‘Inspirational Shopping’, and it has a map and other signage), but then the vacancies start appearing, one after another. There is an abandoned welcome desk, looking old with its wood fixtures, bland cabinets and standard kitchen sink (the adjoining shopping centre has recently installed much brighter, sleeker and more attractive welcome desks, fully staffed). In the middle of the ground level are the remnants of an Italian restaurant, stranded in between the surrounding shop fronts and with the entire dining apparatus still in place and ready to go, but it has been frozen like this and abandoned for months. The edge of their sofa is torn and the sticker letters on the pillars of the centre are peeling off, frustrating the name. Bored security staff lean on the coffee bar, still with an espresso machine, sink and empty display case frozen in time.

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Nearby is one of the recently closed shops –​a women’s shoe store. Dozens of sleek glass shelves are still in the windows, and a large advertising image is a close-​up of a feminine model wearing boots. The signage is still there, lingering, along with the remnants of their last ‘sale’. Neat display windows are ready to go but left empty. A reddish colour taints the window, perhaps some residue of a poster. Many hours were spent here by the staff, now gone. Where has everyone gone? And what does it mean for them personally? For better or worse? Watching the store go from open to its last sales and then finally become empty, though with a lingering presence, impressed me with a feeling of loss for those who interacted with the shop. Upstairs is a similar scene for a jewellery store: letter fixtures falling off the wall, mutilating the previous brand name; window displays still trying to display, but failing; and a cafe area, complete with a chandelier and other familiar fixtures in place, accumulating dust and roped off, closed. At the same time and place, an art collective remains open on this floor, displaying the work of local artists. Also, a lingerie shop is still open. On the ground level, there is a little more life (a hair salon, nail salon, another art gallery and, more recently, a protein/​fitness shop), but these are flanked by dark vacant units on nearly all sides. The same pile of screws and dust has been in one display window for the entire year of observations. I do have memory of when a multilingual library was located here on the second floor, but that too has now gone. While this retail space is now facing decline, it is especially painful when reading about what was here before. The Handyside arcade was, by some accounts, a much livelier and more popular retail place before it was demolished in the late 1980s to make way for this ‘modern’ shopping centre. Several respondents in Rogerson’s (2018) book Newcastle: City Born to Shop! reported on their fond memories of the arcade, particularly the countercultures and alternative consumption practices that could be found there. One recalled the ‘second hand shops’ that ‘made it a magnet for hippies and punks

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alike’, but also that it had a ‘sad, haunted feel’ due to some of its odd features (a pet store) and the possibility of running into ‘undesirables who, like ourselves, had no good reason to be there’ (Rogerson, 2018: 17). Another recalled the smell of incense and oils in one of the beloved shops and the teenage rush of finding ‘Beat’ literature there (they mention Kerouac and Ginsberg), adding that ‘shopping in those arcades was exciting, tactile and educational. The shops were doorways into other cultures, far away places’ (Rogerson, 2018: 107). This arcade and other shops on Percy Street made for what one called ‘an eclectic mix if ever there was’, adding that it is all ‘sadly now replaced by the Eldon Garden shopping “mall” ’ (Rogerson, 2018: 112). Today, a small part of the Handyside arcade survives amid the wreckage. Looking up while inside, the visitor will notice several roof trusses along the atrium-style glass ceiling that are the originals from Handyside, hanging in quiet and solemn reserve, knowing their time has already passed yet persisting on. Are memories flashing up for today’s visitors who look up? In closing their reflections, one participant signed-​off with, ‘God bless Percy Street’ (Rogerson 2018: 82). Meander down the high street and beyond The pedestrian walkway is wide (approximately 15 meters), teeming with people on a Sunday afternoon in March 2022. Here, we find the monuments of today, bringing us into the fold we all know we must abide by at some level of complicity, if only to avoid suspicion. It is a money stroll, an image buffet and sometimes a horror show of inequality. For the most part, these are places that have yet to become retail ruins, but some are perhaps already on the way –​some may be on the brink. Some, indeed, have gone over. Some retail ruins emerge again with new life, as if nothing happened at all, confounding easy categorization. On this main pedestrian area, labelled as ‘Shopping Street’ on metal signs fixed to vertical poles sticking out of the concrete ground, is the slow spread of subversive graffiti, igniting itself against the cool neon of the newest stores and sound systems. All along are occasional caverns of absence. Dark nooks and crannies full

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Figure 11:  Glue art

of rubbish and accumulating debris. A bag of McDonald’s, overflowing with rubbish, has been inside this one doorway for months. The sign above has been torn away, leaving major scar tissue that looks strangely artistic, as if somehow planned, like maybe it is an intentional installation (see Figure 11). A man sitting on one of the few benches gives a hard look. Threat and desperation are suddenly in the air, mixed with the buzz of shopping and other fast happenings: youth of all ages running wild, having fun; families trying to savour the moment; homeless people in sleeping bags, sometimes pleading for help; and new shops appearing here and there. Vintage shops release the merchandise of my youth into new flows of meaning and semiotic performance. There is no guarantee that the person wearing it even knows the wider meaning of the signs they bear. Even something as consequential as ‘Death Row Records’ can be worn in total ignorance. A rash of retro T-​shirts and sweatshirts from US colleges and universities have flooded the youth market, circulating as so many signs of who-knows-what. At the end of the high street is the ‘dream holiday’ location described earlier. I would later find this site entirely disassembled, leaving no sign

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whatsoever of the travel shop, just a concrete shell with piles of debris, tools and other materials of space in transition. Tools and equipment are scattered on the ground, amid a scene of sharpness, rubble and wires hanging down from the ceiling. Here, the pedestrianized high street ends and the route continues towards a less attractive strip of buildings, if only because the vehicle traffic is now a factor. A container village was installed here on the corner for several years, bearing different trades, goods and eating and drinking experiences. Moving further away from the high street, everywhere I look, if I slow down, something is a little off: boarded-​up windows, a sign falling off its hinges and the outline of where a sign once was, a whispering silhouette –​nothing takes its place. While a large crane nearby now installs a new building (‘Pilgrim Place’, the project of billionaire property investors the Reuben Brothers), how can it avoid the fate of these previous constructions? How long until it too falls into ruin? Even the grandest and most luxurious projects have come to a screeching halt, such as the ‘ghost tower’ in Thailand (Pohl, 2022). Across town, Hadrian’s Tower, the newest and tallest building in the city, offering luxury condos, looks over at us, winks and winces. Here, on this street is another vacant space, with big bold letters recently implanted above, ‘Housing Assistance’, while, mockingly, the property is already boarded up. The pub next door –​on again, off again –​is today drenched in sawdust, with pieces of wood extracted from the walls and the drinks bar torn apart with power tools. An older sign is nearby in simple paint, as if from an older time: ‘Snax in the City’. Remembering clowns on the high street, selling their animal balloons, appearing also as time travellers, someone or something materialized from smartphones in a way that we all know is simply terrifying. A man walks by in his underwear, shockingly in the coppery winter air, smoking a joint. Small groups of people scurry to their bars or shops, breathing in a small amount of sunlight after weeks of stormy weather. The sun is shining, but the temperature remains low –​a cruel trick to the sick-​minded, or the inexperienced, now stuck out on the town shivering and drunk. Alienation is all slumped over on benches on the inside, hidden away from the masses, lost in the service ducts piercing through the shopping centres, the places they do not even bother to cover with drywall, just letting all the bits and bobs hang out carelessly. We carry it inside, with every purchase and every whim, calmly guiding

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us to the grave of what our consumer life once promised but now fails to deliver (Berlant, 2011). We knew it had to run out someday. Still, nobody is prepared for it, and no one wants it to happen to them. Maybe we are always living in ruins.

Benjamin’s redemption. Goss’s (1999) reading of Benjamin on ruin, ruination and spectacle insists on a kind of redemption in spaces of alienation. Capitalism gets very close to us when it builds itself into our lives in these extremely invasive ways (as argued by Miller [2020]). A tension persists between alienation and redemption in this theorization. Benjamin’s insight is that even though commodity fetishism seeks to convince us of many falsities, the acts of consumption also carry with them something important for our humanity, something like a secret reserve. What is it? How does it relate to alienation? Even though the commodity form takes root, there remains a human element that continues to flow through it and that constitutes part of its content. These, in fact, merge. The infiltration of this domain, however, is alienation at its most shocking, with its substitution of desires and the mad scrambling of the codes that go into our everyday reality. Alienation confuses our desire. Yet, even in that maelstrom, we find the essential social energy of collective existence flowing through the experience of retail and consumption. Goss (1999) suggests that even though these are manufactured, we can still have meaningful experiences through the commodity aesthetic. Consumers, despite everything they have been through, are redeemed in this dialectical reversal, though with a critical catch if we are to follow Benjamin more closely: it must spark a realization that something is wrong, that something must change to disrupt modernity’s progress towards catastrophe. That full circle is what Benjamin’s dialectics were seeking to achieve as a radical theory and practice. Where is this secondary phase or movement in Goss (1999)? What is the role of a redemption that only leads to a kind of easy acceptance of an unreconstructed consumerism as the preferred way of life?

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While Goss (1999) criticizes his contemporaries for a ‘failure of dialectical thinking’, it seems like his dialectics have also run into some problems of their own, as they appear to become bogged down in the historical material they seek to overcome. This is the rut that deconstruction can avoid because it is always incomplete and never claims to be fully present. In the context of the conversation around consumer society at the time, these might be compelling dialectics, as they seek to breathe life back into consumption but without ignoring the significance of retail capital as a force in our daily lives. These may be compelling dialectics, in other words, but can they dissolve when the time comes? Can they give way to the flexibility required by another kind of force, another kind of haunting –​the one that returns again and again –​the void that persists?

Figure 12:  Dark portal

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Dark portal A gloomy compact site on a side street, near the historic Grainger Market and nestled between two functioning units (major brand names) and below a tattoo parlour, site X is a dustbin, forgotten, dark inside and splattered with liquids outside, and caked in dirt and grime. The signage panel above the windows is studded with empty notches, outlining the faint shape of letters –​gasping for breath, but failing. Something, and then nothing, nothing but an outline; the sign is literally disintegrating. On the glass are remnants of a rogue sticker. Its message is now scratched out with jagged gashes, while another part has been peeled away –​another failed transmission. The scene from 2021 to 2022 is largely unchanged. The same smudges and grime are still present. I kneel to inspect the material piling in the corner of the windowsill: a spiral of some kind of wastage and bird poo, next to several free-​standing lemon seeds, of all things. Below is a rotting wood frame, with rusty nails poking out. A plastic panel hangs from the ceiling on the inside, coming loose and becoming trapped at an odd oblique angle against the glass. A strange fixture and old phone book have been left behind on the windowsill. Literature left behind on the windowsill identifies this as a hearing service centre; also, on the wall inside is an artistic diagram of an ear canal. A welcome desk is trapped in time, waiting to welcome –​waiting patiently, numbly. The entire site is numb: specks of debris on the floor; a trail towards the back of the room away from the window; a door left ajar; darkness inside, real darkness; and fleshy chucks of debris pilling up against the door. They are pouring out of this dark room. Coming from where? Something is lurking. (Is it [still] back there?) A horrific and hidden violence is just beyond reach. With our methods, we coax it out. In David Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Drive, a young man dares to confront the content of his nightmares: an evil figure lurking behind the diner, in the alleyway, near the trash. ‘He’s the one doing it!’, he says, convinced and terrified, looking unhinged. His sceptical companion then takes him to ‘see if he’s out there’. On the way, there is a slow-​ tempo accumulating build-​up, then a perfect jump scare, and it is sealed: the evil figure is real, hitting him like a gargantuan force, a spectral ton of bricks, sending him to the ground reeling in shock. It is more horrifying than we ever imagined. Several units down on this same street, site Z has a different story. In June 2021, the doorway was full of dead leaves soaked in urine,

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flavouring the air and seeping in under the crack and onto a carpet. Again, there are time-​warp posters for the circus. In the window are smooth-​surfaced floor ceramics and dead insects, small black beetle carcasses and one large dead bumblebee. The room inside is empty except for a long desk, mounted TV and some remaining signage. The signs on the glass speak of offering, of all things, hope: ‘We help people to: Gain confidence. Find a job. Get skills and training. Be independent.’ Along these ghostly lines of past authorized use are other rogue stickers and interventions with other messages. For example, on this surface are two legible messages; small rectangular white stickers with dark ink printed in simple font: ‘Westminster Rule Made the North what it is today LEVELLED DOWN AND LEFT BEHIND!’ Another in all caps: ‘WESTMINSTER RECORD: BANK DEREGULATION, INDUSTRY DESTROYED, OIL REVENUES SQUANDERED, 1.8 TRILLION DEBT, OMNISHAMBLES BREXIT’. These conflicting signs that remain here speak to the contradictory forces that grip the landscape today. In April 2022, this site has changed significantly. A secure door is now installed and the windows are washed out from the inside, concealing what is happening inside. The glass surface is clean, but some of the sticker residue remains. The unit later appears ready to open again, but it is not clear as what.

It is difficult to believe that on the very block where the sites in the previous text box are located was a notable department store called Farnon’s, with a long history. In the memories collected by Rogerson (2018), Farnon’s makes several appearances. As a discount department store in a hierarchy of others in the city, Farnon’s was associated with thrift and bargain hunting, and was known as the place where everyday items could be found, such as net curtains, gloves, hats, underwear and school uniforms. The memories are mixed, as one fondly remembers the ‘smell of the nets [net curtains] was lovely’, while another recalled: ‘I was always bored in this shop, the only items bought for me were school uniform (the “ladybird”  label) otherwise it was dull household things’ (Rogerson, 2018: 42). The store was

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also known for what sounds like a temporal juxtaposition in the very elements that made up the retail environment: a tube system that was used to move money through the store, and an ‘old-​fashioned lift with the wrought iron doors’ (Rogerson, 2018: 42). The memories collected by Rogerson (2018: 42, 40) also include other mention of mothers as ‘expert bargain hunters’, as the store advertised itself at one point as ‘the best buys for your family, your home, for you’. The store closed in the 1990s. All these memories, then, if not to be found in the architecture space today (there is no sign of it), may still circulate in the location, as some may remember that it was located on ‘both sides of Nun Street and Newgate Street too!’ (Rogerson, 2018: 40). These kinds of memories must still be steeped somewhere on this block, amid the doom and gloom. Esther Leslie (2006: 110), reading Benjamin, writes evocatively: ‘Ruin upon ruin. The ruins must be detonated again.’ It comes directly after an excerpt from The Arcades Project that Leslie (2006: 110) cites to help refute the notion that Benjamin’s project ‘appears to be a backward looking archaeology’. Leslie (2006: 110) writes that ‘The ruins of history spike the present’ before continuing with the following excerpt from The Arcades Project (1999: 862): We can speak of two directions in this work: one which goes from the past into the present and shows the arcades, and all the rest, as precursors, and one which goes from the present into the past so as to have the revolutionary potential of these ‘precursors’ explode in the present. And this direction comprehends as well the spellbound elegiac consideration of the recent past, in the form of its revolutionary explosion. These lines help clarify the political role of ruins and ruination for Benjamin: ‘Ruination is redeemed by Benjamin, and endowed with a critical charge’, writes Leslie (2006: 106). As if blazing the trail for later thinking on deconstruction,

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hauntings and voids, Benjamin’s interest in negativity was one that always led somewhere more hopeful, more just: ‘Benjamin is not a moralist, providing positive images, but a purveyor of a negativity with an explosive charge’ (Leslie, 2006: 102). Contemporary ruins, then, have been detonated once already. However, to carry forward their affirmative, negative charge, a critical methodology must make them detonate again, insofar as new and better worlds are created out of that awareness and out of that praxis. This second detonation is the one yet to come.

Escalator night Pre-​pandemic, it was a rainy Saturday afternoon and I was walking around the city centre looking for vacant spaces. The ‘immense power of emptiness’ of these spaces was starting to affect me (Gordillo, 2014: 135 [discussing Sebald]) as I felt myself being pulled into their mysterious orbit. A large glass-​ plated storefront appeared before me on the high street, dark and empty on the inside. Ketchup had been splattered across the last brand name to grace the side panel. Cigarette butts and other rubbish were piled up in the doorway inlet –​it was seeping inside the building (see Figure 13). This debris was piled up higher on the inside, out of reach from the street cleaners. Peering inside, the smooth floor was uncluttered and intact. There was not much to look at except for a vast, dark emptiness. Yet, off to the side, inexplicably, an escalator remained lit from above, guiding something, somewhere (see Figure 14). Peering inside with the camera lens, my lack of photographic training presents a problem. In trying to photograph an interior space through a pane of glass, the camera often captures reflections. I begin to snap shots at different angles, trying to get the light right, and notice as the people walking by behind me are appearing in the shot, reflected in the glass. Their forms become ghostlike blurs superimposed over the interior of the scene, like a double image. Yet, scenes of interaction and life come through, nonetheless, with their forms anonymous but recognizable: youthful horseplay; an elderly man and woman walking side by side; a man holding a young girl’s hand; and remarkably, stunningly, side by side, an infant in a pram and an elder in a wheelchair.

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Figure 13:  Litter creeping in

Figure 14:  Escalator night

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These photographs stood out to me later, remembering the scene. In the moment, though, protected by this inlet and away from throngs of people, a sense of peacefulness came over me. A reassuring voice sang through air, provided by a street performer nearby with an amplifier, emitting gentle, sweet, deep and moving sounds –​serenity and hope in the face of misery and uncertainty. They were just blurry reflections in the glass, but still promising so much (retail capital trying to get into this level –​and failing). I will never get close to describing how I felt during this string of moments.

Deconstructing Goss (1999). The ethics of deconstruction are not about mindless or irresponsible destruction (as Caputo [2021] labours to communicate), but instead about holding something together coherently, and justly, in the face of constant change, removal and the need for renewal. When we stop relying on essences as the explanation for the world, everything is seen as always built from the ground up, meaning that it all comes down in the absence of the ordering force that once gave it shape. We often rely on devices, such as stories and narratives, to give meaning. These sometimes involve claims to total presence and of things happening ‘naturally’, as simply ‘the way it is’. Deconstruction is what happens when these devices break down, come unmoored or are dislodged. It involves a returning of something –​a state of unstructured forces, not yet hammered into anything. No matter what logos or mythos is involved (Caputo, 2021: 84), what returns is a kind of void-​ like space that tears it apart (Kingsbury and Secor, 2021). Like a ghost, the void returns. For Derrida, then, ontology is better conceived of as hauntology, in which these opposing forces are acknowledged and sought out, rather than ignored or negated. From the perspective of deconstruction and hauntology, Goss’s (1999) dialectics of redemption begin in the right direction but then fall into a rut. In fact, they are inadequate from today’s perspective, in which we face the climate crisis and other socio-​political issues with much greater urgency. Amid the dialectical reworking Goss executes, the danger is that a

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settling takes place. This settling is a complacency if it allows the structure of commodity capitalism to remain in place. While there is the power of a dialectical reversal –​consumers are not passive and hollow, after all –​it then settles back down into commodity rule, rather than producing a rupture. The dialectics stall. Finding the humanity in shopping was not meant to drive us deeper into sleep; rather, it should shock us into the space of difference, of an undetermined future. Despite the brilliant reading of Benjamin, one that fits in its time and place, Goss (1999) may be an example of what Benjamin (1999, K1a, 9: 391) means when warning that ‘The first tremors of awakening serve to deepen sleep.’ In reassessing Goss (1999) with a particular interpretation of Benjamin, I suggest that there is simply not enough catastrophe in his theorization. The doubt that drives this concern has to do with signs in the retail and consumption sphere itself. Bluntly, following Benjamin only as far as Goss (1999) may ultimately solidify the system currently in place. We can imagine that, somehow, everything is ok. The problem of alienation in consumer subjectivity appears to be solved, but that does not solve the socio-​spatial implications of that subjectivity and the networks of relations that it helps sustain. Going only that far, we might feel relief that we can keep consuming now that we better appreciate it more fully, being more enlightened by becoming aware of the ruses of capitalist alienation. Going further, it is easier every day to participate in what is branded as ‘ethical’ or ‘sustainable consumption’, even if the underlying models remain mostly unchanged. Companies are increasingly branding themselves in explicitly political ways that join in this discursive practice. Increasingly, the semiotics of revolution are available to us in the consumption sphere. In Newcastle and other UK cities, there are now ‘Pizza Punks’ restaurants (written with the anarchist A symbol), ‘Punk IPA’ from a local brewery (not in the ‘affordable’ range) and rebel leaders alongside our burrito and salsa orders (see: www. zapat​ista​burr ​ito.com). There is also a flare for the Cuban

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Figure 15:  Carpet roll

Figure 16:  Cobwebs and broom

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Revolution, with both a ‘Castro’s’ bar and ‘Revolución de Cuba’ restaurant in the city centre. One of the nightclubs near Central Station simply calls out ‘Revolution’ as the crowds pile in. These are only a few gimmicky examples of such a colonization in the built environment of consumption. Their ideologies, however, have bled into our cultures that guide us through, or around, such establishments. If we are not careful, we fall back into sleep, as we imagine our unjustified consumption as justified. Again, this is the rut that deconstruction can help make sure we avoid. Mud prints Muddy footprints can be seen in a recently abandoned window display on the high street; one of the large retailers just closed, leaving a large void. In the window display is a white floor and a white wall, blank. A crumbling hole in the side wall, blasted through from the other side, is now leaking a chalky dust. A glass door has been left ajar, like the entrance to a stage, leading to a huge grey room with the lights on. Nobody is home. Little piles of gravel are everywhere. On the exterior glass surface is a large splattering of some liquid, thrown upwards and leaving long arching remnants that stay stuck for months. The liquid material sticks, like long strokes of a ghostly brush. Outside, a rogue sticker is left on the glass window, leaving a material trace of someone’s daydream in action. Substantial in size –​a little smaller than a piece of A4 –​it is stuck right in the middle of the large glass display window at eye length. It is packed with words in typescript (approximately 50), pleading with us, something urgent, but every word is scratched out. Its adhesive is strong and will not easily peel away. Removal by peeling is not an option, as the surface sticks hard all around. Some other solution is likely needed. Yet, while that official task has yet to come, someone else has already moved into action. Instead of peeling away the sticker in one swoop, a

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scalpel-​like jabbing operation has hollowed out each individual word. A short paragraph, in fact, said something. Every single word is now carved out, like a messy cheese grater, a leftover crust –​a hollowed-​out daydream. Its message is lost forever to this act of counter-​subversion –​a rogue manifesto forever lost (maybe for the best). It is a scene of double subversion: first, the sticker goes up, unauthorized; and, second, the sticker is attacked, hollowing out its substance, leaving only a shell. Weeks later, what look like faeces are smeared on the window outside. I notice a hand-​written message to ‘Big Red’ in black marker on a surface nearby, the same name I saw written on the wall across town months ago in the abandoned doorway near the vacant Family Bakery. Secret messages make their claim and take their last stand, though we will likely never know who they are from, or the adventures and traumas that they have lived through. This project can notice these signs of activity but cannot pretend to know exactly what they mean. A present absence is in play, complicating all reading of the landscape as it multiplies in mystery. One day, heavy mechanical diggers show up and the passage off the high street is mostly fenced off as they put into place a current council plan that has been advertised on posters hanging nearby. In these images, the street is represented as a vibrant and lively place, not the empty, cold, concrete place it is now. Efforts are being made to ward off the void that haunts the city centre. This project has now dragged on for months, constricting the heavy foot traffic. It is a busy route, and many are sure to feel relief once it is complete, even if it is only for the freeing up of space to move. The current passage is very narrow and uncomfortable. In the retail ruin, some scenes remain easily identifiable by signage still in place, or other obvious objects, such as advertising prompts left in the dust. Others resemble nothing like what was there previously, with the entire previous surface removed, exposing underlying layers of other materials and connective infrastructure (see Figure 17). Some can be

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Figure 17:  Crumble

observed as ‘ruins in reverse’ (see Chapter One), with retail capital clawing its way back, and others not, as they languish in their own dust and accumulating fluids, with shards of materials breaking away bit by bit.

(Burgers) In the dark This is a central location, next to Grey’s Monument and surrounded by historic buildings. This one has stained-​glass borders above the main glass plates, with many other intricate details in the architecture. Inside, though, is a wild and distressed scene. The unit occupies the entire ground floor, wrapping around the structure; I walk along the window edge all around the building, looking closely. On the window are decal stickers declaring ‘7 DAYS A WEEK’ –​ remnants of official signage still on the windows, in a dusty dark lane. The container pop-​up space nearby is bouncing and buzzing, but here, it is still grim, not yet ‘back’. ‘EAT IN, TAKE OUT’ –​there is a shattered glass pane, barely holding up, and graffiti tags, faint, but  clear.

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‘MADE TO ORDER’ –​looking in, there is a bizarre scene: beer kegs and shopping bags, full of mystery; a sea of debris, including metal scraps, splinters of wood, a hard hat upside-​down and a two-​litre bottle of soda, half consumed; on the bar are gallons of chemicals, glowing in different colours, an open can of Monster ‘energy drink’, coffee takeaway cups from Gregg’s, and an empty plastic bottle of water; open binders and papers are all strewn about; a bike helmet sits upright on the mangled bar; a wire runs through splintering wood; and a plastic tube points upward. ‘PROPER HAMBURGERS’ –​post piles up in the doorway, cans of Pepsi soda, random pieces of cut lumber and another keg of beer and two gas canisters; in the window, a rogue flyer is fixed and demands, ‘Stop! Are you going to: Hell?’; one of those fashionable hipster light bulbs hangs down; and a heart-​felt message hangs on the front door, saying good-​bye to the beloved customers. Outside, next to me, is a group of young people posing in the reflective glass panes, laughing joyfully during a group selfie in the reflection. ‘ALL DAY DINING’ –​there is a coil of purple snake cord and one fat white snake cord; and blotches of plaster and putty are on the wall. ‘MADE TO ORDER’ –​there is a pile of bricks or brick-​shaped objects; black soot and dirt coat the wall; slivers, dust, rubble, nails and screws cover everything like a screen, a kind of layer of debris, or a stew; there is more dust, wire, wood blocks and paint chips; two pipes open up and out come purple and white snake cords, coiling back into the stew of dust, ready to strike; there is a wooden crate and a heavy-​duty extension cord; and a bright orange jacket is hung over a railing in the dark. ‘PROPER HAMBURGERS’ –​ there is another big pile of snake cords, once yellow but now sooty, dirty and paint-​splattered, nestled up with greyish gravel, ready to strike; gravel is scattered all over like golden nuggets; a staircase and upper-​floor platform are visible; steps go down towards a faint light left on downstairs (real darkness, again) and a strange painting on the wall; gravel pours over and down it all; and there is a little mouse-​house crevice along the windowsills, full of dust. ‘PROPER HAMBURGERS’ –​there is a takeaway coffee carrier full of gravel. ‘EAT IN, TAKE OUT’ –​more pipes with white and purple snake cords, ready to strike, are popping out of this side of a wall; there is an overbearing pile of splinters, metal chains and boards, all smashed up; a tornado mess is in a corner; and then, somehow, amid the chaos, doors ripped off hinges are now neatly stacked, slanting. ‘7 DAYS A WEEK’ –​there are more rotting boards, with nails sticking out; a blue plastic bin is on its side, with wire for a handle, all dead in twisted metal, odd boards, foam scrap, dust and splinters, and electrical outlets; and

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there is a pile of long thin boards, stained or rotting brown. ‘MADE TO ORDER’ –​reflective yellow work clothes are in the window display and more Gregg’s takeaway. ‘PROPER HAMBURGERS’ –​looking deeper into the room of boards, little piles of green tile are in the corner; and in the final corner, the floor completely falls into a dungeon pit of darkness and dust, splinters, and long lost things, like a big role of duct tape. The scene above is so chaotic partly because it was being worked on at the time and was a perfect example of a ‘ruin in reverse’. By 2022, this site is now completely refurbished inside and selling bright clothes in a bright space. That crazy ghost scene is gone. The snake cords are all hidden away. A smooth white marble surface now wraps around the entire windowsill. Clothes, shoes and jewellery are on display, with sharp design and displays. All that terror and negativity, where did it go?

These scenes are shocking because they are often located alongside other functioning sites that, in their self-​containment, try to carry on as if nothing is wrong. Passing a fun-​looking restaurant, I suddenly come upon a site that is shattered and torn apart: a pale shadow of its former self, with a broken-​up window display. Elsewhere, the bare skeleton of the building is laid bare, as the magic-​making equipment has been stripped away. While these spaces can be sparse, they can also appear chaotic in the array of items on display. What Edensor (2005a: 109, emphasis added; see also Figure 18) describes for industrial ruination also applies for retail ruination: Ruination produces a defamiliarized landscape in which the formerly hidden emerges; the tricks that make a building a coherent ensemble are revealed, exposing the magic of construction. The internal organs, pipes, veins, wiring and tubes –​the guts of a building –​spill out, as informal and official asset-​strippers remove key materials such as tiles and lead.

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Figure 18:  Worksite

These unsettling scenes, again, are more shocking when found in the crypts of retail. Interestingly, Edensor consistently juxtaposes the visceral scenes of industrial ruination to logics of commodities, but he simply does not extend the methodology to abandoned shops and display windows. Nevertheless, his critique propels this study of retail ruins, as Edensor sets up a series of problems that neatly cross over into this now-​emergent realm of ruins. At times, Edensor’s engagement with industrial ruins reads as a prophetic script that will soon be read across many retail ruins, as they ‘dispel the magic of the commodity as a separate and unique entity worthy of ownership’ (Edensor, 2005a: 113). Elsewhere, he summarizes by borrowing from Stallabrass (1996) that ‘commodities, despite all their tricks, are just stuff’ (Edensor, 2005a: 100). The retail ruin is disturbing because it unhinges the fantasy of spectacle and reveals it for what it is: a historical artefact, a wooden sculpture, a plastic form, an electrified space and so on. It only works with a

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great deal of attention, planning and maintenance. It can all go bad very quickly. Deconstruction is ‘affirmative’ (Caputo, 2021: 128–​9). Deconstruction keeps the elements of reality always moving, and at all costs. There will be no settling down, no permanent harmony. ‘Derrida suggests’, Hill (2013: 392) writes, ‘that the ghostly, or the spectral, is always revenant, creating an endless process of returning that displaces spaces and time, absence and presence’. If Benjamin suggests that revolutions are attempts to pull the ‘emergency brake’ (see Ross, 2017: 3), deconstruction helps with the question of what comes next, as it must surely not follow whatever is the current set of rules and procedures. Since it works incessantly against the settling effects of representation (Doel, 2010), deconstruction requires a constant ‘open-​endedness’ (Caputo, 2021: 105), one of the recurring tropes of Caputo’s rereading of the roundtable discussion with Derrida in 1993 at Villanova University. Deconstruction is a philosophy of things always yet to arrive, namely, what Derrida calls ‘the other’ as the constitutive condition of ‘the self ’. Self and other locked together, forever. So much drama ensures –​life and death drama. In denying the self-​affirming presence that is the fare of the hegemonic mode of thinking, deconstruction always insists that things are how they are because of how they relate to each other in space and time. There is no essence that justifies it all. This is, to be clear, an act of ‘affirmation’, one that works against all conservative and reactionary forces (Caputo, 2021: 81). The ghost always comes back, despite efforts to get rid of it: Capitalist societies can always heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: communism is finished since the collapse of the authoritarianisms of the twentieth century and not only is it finished, but it did not take place, it was only a ghost. They do no more than disavow the undeniable itself: a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-​back. (Derrida, 1994: 123)

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In Specters of Marx, Derrida (1994) reminds us of the first noun found in The Communist Manifesto (1848): ‘specter’, that is, ‘the specter of communism’. In 1848, communism is an emerging idea, a future yet to come. In Specters of Marx, Derrida (1994) is responding to celebratory attitudes following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Just because the Soviet Union had collapsed does not mean that all the ghosts of Marx and Engels (see also Maley, 1999) suddenly disappear forever. This is the error of Francis Fukuyama, according to Derrida, enumerating a litany of contemporary crises and sins that are simply absent from the ‘end of history’ narrative, including unemployment, homelessness, the arms trade, nuclear weapons and ‘inter-​ ethnic wars’, among other horrors (see Derrida, 1994: 100–5​ ). Derrida asks: is this your triumph? For Caputo (2021), understanding this criticism is aided by considering what Derrida wrote about justice and the law. Law can easily be corrupted by the powers of any given era, but justice as a concept is something greater, something that drives and shapes the law as an institution. Justice, then, is what animates the world, insofar as it is something that exists but is also ‘impossible’, to the extent that it always points beyond the current way of seeing things. Justice means that the law needs to be reapplied every time and not as a ‘computer system’ that determines outcomes (Caputo, 2021: 137). Singularities of experience of the world –​of what Derrida called ‘différance’ –​ should be taken into consideration to better understand the truth of each specific case. Contrary to some lazy depictions of Derrida, according to Caputo, this way of thinking is about getting closer to the truth, not obliterating it. There is a lot haunting Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis that Derrida addresses. The underlying forces that gave rise to the ‘specter of communism’ in 1848 are still with us today, even if the Soviet Union has collapsed and notwithstanding the triumphant discourse of Fukuyama. Derrida’s life’s work, then, in a way, is scaled up and gives texture to the meta-​theories that he is perhaps not best known for: the persistence of

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capitalism in the era of hyperreality (Evans, 2014). The spectre is a constitutive part of existence and being, not just something important for politics. Wylie (2008: 172) puts it as follows: ‘The self, in other words, is in actuality constituted by the attempted exorcism of specters who, as it were in the nature of things, incessantly return to haunt both its “being” and its “thereness”.’ Haunting runs through being itself, not just its politics. Time being ‘out of joint’ is the key to opening alternative futures for Derrida. Instead of settling into any ‘community’, we should strive to keep up with this disjointed time, as it allows for a greater array of experiences and provides a greater space for difference. Why this must always be tethered to the ‘impossible’ is a challenge, as it assumes a stasis or hegemony to be surpassed. We really do want to experience the impossible justice and are becoming impatient. Yet, Derrida would not have bothered if he thought it was really impossible. It is a formula apt to always keep pushing. Splatter Town The site I call Splatter Town was one of the first ghostly vacancies that caught my attention soon after moving to the city. It has several features that make it stand out, and I returned to it again and again, tracking its mysterious composition and apparent sense of dynamic stasis. Like Corner Shop detailed earlier, it had a crypt-​like atmosphere, and it also seemed to change only in strange, minor ways over the course of the observations. Both sites deepened in their ruinous mystery, caught in a vortex of mandated stoppage, but with a sense of pulsating refusal from the materials themselves. Splatter Town is composed of six small window displays and three inlet doorway entrances. The window displays are small and compact, thereby accentuating the absence inside, or magnifying the disjuncture between themselves and the seemingly random things left behind: bits of snipped wire and tiny specks of unidentifiable debris (see Figure 19).

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Figure 19:  Debris on display

Thick black slime is smeared on the windows outside. Tiny rogue stickers have been layered on the glass surfaces, fighting a political battle in short punchy phrases, like an analogue version of Twitter. The inlet doorways provide snug holes in the wall that seem almost hidden among the streetscape as tiny refuges, just one step off to the side, totally concealed. They are consistently used as toilettes.There is no sign of what was once here inside the property. The view inside is obscured by darkness. All I can see is a hole in the floor with some raw saw-​job textures, a nondescript door left ajar and a faint light left on that is barely perceptible. On the window is another sticker that says: ‘WESTMINSTER RULE IS KILLING THE NORTH’ (see Figure 20). Observations from field notes are as follows: Splatter Town, 2 April 2022: doorway rubbish at Splatter Town includes a banana peel, an empty crisps bag, multiple cigarette stubs, a clear plastic wrapper, an empty plastic water bottle, an empty energy drink can, a burger wrapper, a paper

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Figure 20:  ‘WESTMINSTER RULE IS KILLING THE NORTH’

cup, a sandwich wrapper, a vape box and an apple core. Inside, more debris seems to have accumulated, somehow multiplying, with papers piling up that I do not remember seeing previously. On one occasion, the wrapper of a chocolate bar immediately stood out as something new in this abandoned display. Also, like a David Lynch film, a single blue key appears, on its own, amid the debris. Something is always splattered along these surfaces and in these doorways. Desperate refuges, they scream in pain to the city around them. Some people are nearby on the footpath in sleeping bags, with hand-​written cardboard signs asking for help, and other people in clean clothes storm past, determined to consume and experience the nightlife nearby. Splatter Town, 21 April 2022: there is a new sticker on the window: ‘Clapclapclap, Stab them in the back’. A spent toilette paper role is now in the window display. Evening is falling, and I suddenly feel fear, like I am interrupting something and should not be there. It is just a feeling. Roving bands of

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boys are nearby and boisterous, and most shops are closed. I note new fragments of plastic in the window display. The stack from the post office is still there in a pile. Fresh vomit in the doorway, and black slime and soot still caked on the window, accumulating. Splatter Town, 1 May 2022: I realize that there are few pubs on this street, so it is quiet, which perhaps adds to the eerie feeling I get when I come here in the evening. Looking into the window display, I notice for the first time an insect cemetery and a mesh of spiderweb across the display and into the corners. Dead bees, flies and other desiccated carcasses are laid bare amid the spiderwebs. I wonder how long it has been there and if I overlooked it in previous visits. What further non-​human life might be inhabiting these vacant spaces, from insects, to rodents, to birds and other creatures? I linger around, taking in the site again. One of the rogue stickers on a window catches my eye and I want to move closer to see if I recognize it, but a group of young men have come along and are sort of lingering about. Again, I try to avoid interfering with anything taking place. I think, again, that this is the only site where I have these awkward feelings. Why? As I contemplate it all, a familiar homeless man approaches the group. As I move away, I notice someone in the doorway who seems to fit with the group and it makes sense of what was happening: I can see him urinating in the doorway nook, adding to the noxious fumes. Splatter Town, 26 May 2022: I finally return to check out the sticker I was not able to see previously. It is one of the small, punchy political ones that says in its tiny letters: ‘17.4 M VOTED TO GIVE THE CLOWNS IN WESTMINSTER MORE POWER!’ Looking into one of the doorways, there are not many objects, but instead a sort of translucent layer of fluids and wet pasty materials of different shades and colours. It is residual, rather than objective. A terrible stench projects outward and tinges the air, sensible even from a few feet away. Only bits of plastic wrappers are found, a single cigarette butt

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and a few shards of broken glass. The black sludge is still on the windows. Nearby, Corner Shop is a little more ruinous every time I look in. Cords hanging from the ceiling are always hanging more dramatically, or so it seems, and there are holes bore through the walls that I did not notice previously. A more-​ t han- ​ h uman haunting? A hauntological approach to buildings and the built retail environment, then, would consider these ongoing displacements that have to take place for the building to cohere in its current presence. So many little things must happen for the building to survive, depending on what it is made of, its surrounding environment and so on. How do buildings experience time being ‘out of joint’? Interestingly, this is very much the approach of Cairns and Jacobs (2014). While buildings are implanted ‘in place’, they can ‘fall out of time’ as the world around them changes (Cairns and Jacobs, 2014: 111). This sets the scenario for a disturbing array of things that happen to buildings: weathering, decay and encounters with a more-​than-​human world. ‘Buildings may well be suspended in this valueless present for lengthy periods’, Cairns and Jacobs (2014: 111) write. Some are eventually revived and others demolished. Their project, in fact, begins with Derrida (among others) and specifically his ‘Letter to Peter Eisenman’ (Derrida, 1990), in which he addressed architecture directly and ‘asked what might bring architecture back to “the experience of ‘its own’ ruin” ’ (Cairns and Jacobs, 2014: 4–​5). Cairns and Jacobs (2014) chart their overview of architecture precisely in terms of hauntology, including that of buildings and the relations that shape them. Their work also resonates with recent justifications for the ‘spectral turn’, which expands on the liveliness of the ‘new materialism’ to include the forces of negativity: Architecture’s persistent natalism comes from this foundational link to creativity by design, a link that has been rehearsed, modified, and reasserted throughout the history of the discipline. But in this entanglement

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of creation and creativity, when does the discipline ruminate on the finitude of the created work? Where are its treatises on afterlives, wasting, deterioration and destruction? When does architecture allow itself to tarry with the negative? How does it manage the hauntings that entropy necessarily visits upon all creative practices? (Cairns and Jacobs, 2014: 24) For Derrida, hauntology is the effort to include these constitutive absences in ontology. It is a methodology for deconstruction, with his overall effort being to undermine the mythology of self-​certainty of all power centres. If this sounds like Benjamin, that is the idea. Both are onto this track of deconstruction: the identification of what exists in the world and what it takes to bring it into being; and, therefore, what it takes to break it apart and put it back together, but differently. If Goss (1999) was on the right track with Benjamin, a lack of deconstructive flare meant that the insights deflated soon after lift-​off. For a while, Goss (1999) made me feel better about being a consumer. I could justify certain choices somehow. I knew deep down that it was not always justice. Whole Foods is not justice, despite its branding. Alternative consumption has latched onto and stoked these kinds of utopian potentials, I think diluting them in the process. Hauntology and deconstruction have been drawn on to extend caution to radical theories that may tend towards solidification or stasis, albeit of a different order. Laura Grace Ford’s (2019) work exemplifies the power of hauntology to disrupt the settling of what should be a more active and creative method with ‘critical’ credentials: psychogeography. Collier (2017: 176–​7), in synthesizing these concepts with respect to Ford’s work, writes that ‘her work is the specter that denies psychogeographic practice total presence or self-​ identity: that keeps it amendable to multiple futures through its incessant returns to the past’. The same could be said for Goss’s (1999) dialectics: that they risk falling into a similar trap

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if not ‘reanimated’ (Collier, 2017: 177). By what? The spectres of hauntology. What does Laura Grace Ford think today, with everyone head down in their screens and all the automated cashier machines emitting the same robotic and insane demands at the same time at the overcrowded checkout lane? Are they thinking: does anything happen anymore? On the other hand, what else do we have going at the minute? Fast-​forward to 2022 and it is a freakshow of terror and overcrowded truths, tossed into the bin, with crowds crowding against better judgement (close enough for airborne viruses to circulate between people). The aisles in the supermarket move around just to confuse us, to send us searching aimlessly, exposing us to more goods and signs –​what is by now a well-​known tactic (the ‘Gruen Transfer’ [see Hardwick, 2004]). It is a pastime, after all (if you will). They kept doing it even during the height of the early pandemic, when they were also ostensibly trying to protect us with their arrows, barriers and regimented opening procedures. People shriek for help in the bread aisle, wanting to contest the price, like a time traveller. Yet, the bar code does not lie and cannot be negotiated with. Paralysed with fear in the cheese aisle, always with fear. A monument for these pastimes is needed –​surely some executive or creative type is thinking that (like a full-​scale Disney World but a recreation of what are today’s mega malls). Soon, these inconveniences will be all but abolished, as consumption becomes fully automated with home deliveries that are reliable and always just in time. For now, a few traditional cashiers are still present, dashing and mingling, and getting too close, though less floorspace is now devoted for them –​the automated machines need their own space too. We are funnelled through a two-​sided gauntlet, with crowds forming easily as the uninitiated are befuddled, desperate for assistance. Booze purchases are halted with a loud beep and flashing light (not yet automated). The staff are nimble and direct flows for hours at a time. Machines jam, queues stall and customers get lost. Outside on the high street, amid these various voids, so much is happening. Musicians and other performers offer their

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talents: some professionally trained and others mere beginners. Sometimes, activist interventions take place, such as outside the bank, where a group uses bullhorns to inform us of the bank’s nefarious practices around the world. Various religious expressions are possibly the most common intervention in these spaces, as preachers and others take to the high street and its footfall to spread their beliefs. Some recruiters seem to have a daily presence, even if it is quiet. There are many pop-​up kinds of retail that can appear, using tents, tables and other fixtures to display goods. Sometimes, the bigger stores will use the space for promotional events, giving away free stuff or simply attracting attention. The Fenwick’s holiday window has been a long-​standing tradition on the high street, and it is also on the high street and surrounding areas that an extensive Christmas village fills in each year. Summary: Temporality and rhythms of retail ruins In the scenes depicted earlier, we can identify five modes of activity that summarize the different temporalities and rhythms of what is taking place. First, there is a scene in which the operators just got up and left, leaving everything behind, meaning we see the scene as it was left (such as the travel shop and defunct cleaners). Second, there is the scene in which everything is cleared out, meaning that we cannot easily tell what was there, and it may be more or less ready to be put back into use (see Figure 21). These scenes seem to display some level of activity inside, but the next use has not yet been determined. Third are scenes in which things have been neglected for long periods of time, and they start to fall apart. In this mode, there is also the accumulation of debris to contend with (for example, in Corner Shop and Splatter Town [see Figures 2, 3, 4, 19 and 20]). Fourth is when we witness reconstruction in progress, which can at first seem like a ruinous space but is, in fact, evidence of the effort to fight against the void and chase it away. Fifth, then, only happens

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Figure 21:  A dirty old room

on the occasion that the vacancy has been fully exorcised and something has come to fill the void completely (from insect cemetery to pet-​friendly wine bar). Unlike industrial ruins that are often completely cut off from their surroundings and connections to infrastructure, these retail ruins remain close at hand and integrated into multiple urban infrastructures. This is accentuated by their geographic location, being more central to towns and cities, again, as opposed to some industrial locations that are outside or on the peripheries of urban centres. Retail ruins are harder to ignore. Benjamin’s deconstructive archaeology. Gilloch (1996: 89) flags Benjamin’s work as a kind of ‘urban archaeology’. Interestingly, this has a deconstructive flavour. As ‘counter-​site’ (DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013), the ruin troubles the prevailing modern narrative of progress. By attending closely to the spaces before us (and not relying only on mediated sources), we can grasp the importance of fieldwork and the source of this desperate retail-​world-​in-​trouble, one

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having to constantly reinvent itself to maintain its form amid all the soot and debris, all the shattered disorder and all the bleakness of stasis and only strange, random changes. Not surprisingly, everything comes undone all the time (Linz and Secor, 2021). For Benjamin, thinking through the arcades as ruins by looking back to the 19th century when they were the rage is a kind of proto-​deconstruction (see Caputo, 2021: 157, fn 2). Benjamin saw this semblance of the arcade and the dreamworld: ‘Arcades are houses or passages having no outside –​ like the dream’ (Benjamin, 1999, L1a, 1: 406). Yet, in watching these fall into ruin, Benjamin is implicitly aware that, yes, they do have an outside. There is nothing essential or natural about them. Their decline reveals this essential structure in the commodity. The constitutive outside reasserts itself. As Rose et al (2021: 5) put it, an ‘entropic power … haunts the world’. Others have elaborated more fully on the lines of connection and overlap between Benjamin’s and Derrida’s thinking. Caputo (2021) links them when suggesting that for Derrida, the philosopher is a ‘rag picker’, that familiar figure from Benjamin whose attention to the refuse and rubbish of the world offers an opportunity to consider an important set of truths (Caputo, 2021: 52; see also Caputo, 2021: 157, fn 2). As for the leftovers, thrown away, forgotten and pushed away, what are they trying to say to us as we blaze forward, faster and faster? There was another figure of Benjamin’s that would be perhaps even more influential for Derrida: the idea of the Messianic. According to Caputo (2021: 157), Derrida initially hesitated to use the term but then adopted it ‘evidently under the influence of Walter Benjamin’. This line of thinking links the always-​impending arrival of the Messiah in Jewish theology with the idea of the ‘future yet to come’, one of Derrida’s most important ideas. Elsewhere, Buse et al (2005) point out that some of the same passages from Marx appear in both The Arcades Project (Benjamin, 1999) and Specters of Marx (Derrida, 1994), primarily around the commodity. In the section titled ‘Dream

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house, museum, spa’, Benjamin describes a ‘ghost walk’ as relevant for understanding the arcades: The dread of doors that won’t close is something everyone knows from dreams. Stated more precisely: these are doors that appear closed without being so. It was with heightened senses that I learned of this phenomenon in a dream in which, while I was in the company of a friend, a ghost appeared to me in the window of the ground floor of a house to our right. And as we walked on, the ghost accompanied us from inside all the houses. It passed through all the walls and always remained at the same height with us. I saw this, though I was blind. The path we travel through arcades is fundamentally just such a ghost walk, on which doors give way and walls yield. (Benjamin, 1999, L2, 7: 409, emphasis added) The commodity, magic and ghosts constitute one set of connections that is being worked out in this conversation. While Benjamin was compelled to work out the secular magic of capitalist modernity, Derrida was keen to remind us of the ‘“counter-​magic” Marxism “still risks being” ’ (quoted in Buse et al, 2005: 60). This is the power of the dialectical image that Benjamin worked to create with his montage experiment: to bring a new critical awareness to the familiar world around us. The difficulty –​perhaps the impossibility –​of this operation makes it resemble deconstruction, which is also an impossible task, though one that we can never abandon. Benjamin’s archaeology and Derrida’s deconstruction, then, share something in their suspicion of the present and their unrelenting faith in a different future. The impossibility of (exiting) ruins If, as Edensor warns, the telling of the tale of ruins is ‘impossible’, we should nevertheless embrace this challenge.

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As Caputo (2021: 120) writes about impossibility in Derrida’s philosophy, it is ‘To move ahead in the midst of such an aporia, to proceed where the way seems blocked, that is to “experience the impossible” … to pass through, to travel through the aporia of impossibility.’ Yet, these ruins, as voids in the landscape, are never frozen; they never stand idyll. They spur on others to come to their side and change them, giving rise to something else. In a twist, they avoid being void, as the ghost rarely stays for long (but will always return).

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Spectacle, Haunted Introduction How can we write about spectacle and retail capital without essentializing them? Gibson-​Graham (1996) asked the same for capitalism itself, drawing on feminist and queer theories, though also including Derridian hauntology, to deconstruct the self-​certainty of such a phenomenon as ‘globalization’. Retail Ruins, similarly, attempts to look closely at these meta-​ concepts in a way that understands them as always in formation and never fixed, static, natural or guaranteed. The urban voids described in Chapter Two are meant to do just that: introduce us to this world and force a confrontation with its implications. By holding the focus on these ruinous sites, the text is meant to hold open a moment of inventive and spontaneous insight that gestures towards the many things this space could be and may already be. Hauntologically, the void holds open the door for de-​commodification. Edensor (2005a) finds something similar in industrial ruins. The difference with retail ruins is that those same tendencies and dynamics also unfold in what Edensor assumes is a structured and ordered totality. Maybe that is good news for us critics, being the prerequisite for something else to come, something we do not yet know. Goss (1999), despite the cleverness of his dialectical method, ends up obscuring the more radical potential of Benjaminian thinking on ruins and ruination, namely, the move towards a de-​commodified and post-​capitalist world. As Goss (1999) was critical of what he called a ‘failure in dialectical thinking’ among consumption-​oriented research at the time, he exhibits a lack of deconstructive thinking, as his dialectics

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fall back on themselves and turn into their own ruins, neatly wrapped in the return-​of-​the-​same in commodity culture, now dialectically inverted in imagination only. To put it bluntly, the risk is that we imagine ourselves as radical in everyday acts of consumption that are, in the end, not radical at all. Others like Gibson-​Graham (1996, 2006) keep the critical lens on capitalism, though in a multidimensional and expansive way. They simultaneously acknowledge other kinds of non-​ capitalist economic and social existence amid those ruins and ruinous processes. They also draw on Derrida, among others, to strike out on a more hopeful trajectory in the face of meta-​ criticism. Capitalism, we will see, works by way of an intimate relationship with the void and the haunting it entails, through so many exorcisms, also known as ‘creative destruction’. Gibson-​Graham (1996: ch 10), however, reminds us that it also remains haunted itself by the overwhelming plethora of alternative economies. As we will see in this chapter, there are alternatives to what might become of a retail ruin, other than simply becoming another shop if the investment returns. At the same time, building on Miller (2020), this project also encourages a careful re-theorization of spectacle, not its complete abandonment. This chapter unfolds in the following way. First, there are other aspects of the historical and regional context that help us understand the retail ruins more fully and therefore help us answer the question of ‘what happened to this place?’ (High, 2013, quoted in Emery, 2018: 8). After reviewing this material, we will then consider schemes from the broader urban literature on how retail capital and spectacle claw their way back against the void. In seeking to ward off the ghostly void, urban exorcisms take place all around us in different ways. These include urban trends like gentrification and the role of the heritage industries therein, as well as more recent phenomenon like temporary urbanism and its ‘pop-​up’ spatiality. Lastly, the chapter looks forward to life after spectacle, when something surprising and unexpected may someday arrive.

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Post-​industrial North-​East North-​East England was a crucially important region in the historical geography of the Industrial Revolution. As such, it has been hit hard by deindustrialization but has made some strides in transitioning to a post-​industrial economy and way of life, though not without contestation. With the remnants of heavy industry everywhere, the new industries and workplaces look and feel very different, resulting in a very different kind of built environment of nightclubs, shopping centres, hotels, museums, galleries, performance venues and restaurants instead of coal mines, shipyards and factories (though there is still some manufacturing in the region). Places like this that depend increasingly on tourism and leisure are intimately integrated into socio-​cultural logics that drive potential customers away or bring them near. As such, they may be more vulnerable to the whims of so-​called ‘markets’ and volatility in consumer confidence. Retail ruins, in other words, may have an extra sting in these regions where these kinds of activities are among those that have appeared as a replacement for the heavy industries of the past. This is a complex and contested urban landscape, bearing the mark of highly uneven development and the ongoing struggles in the face of austerity (Hall, 2019) and the trauma it inflicts on the most vulnerable (Pain, 2019). Vast coalfields made the North-​East a crucially important and strategic region. While coal was mined on a small scale in the region ‘for centuries’ according to Robinson (2002: 317–​18), it was in the 19th century that it ‘became a vital and valuable resource’. Collieries were set up across the region, which was now increasingly interconnected with other industrial activities. Robinson (2002: 318) summarizes that ‘Coal fuelled and fostered the related staple industries of “carboniferous capitalism”: iron and steel, shipbuilding, heavy engineering and chemicals’, a set of relations that had Newcastle as the ‘region’s commercial and administrative capital’. Technologies were invented in the region (such as the railways) and its

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products ‘had a dominant position in world markets’, leading Robinson (2002: 318) to place the North-​East as having ‘played a major role in securing Britain’s global economic supremacy’. Hatherley (2011) remarks on the contemporary urban landscape of Newcastle and its historic planned centre, attributed to developer Richard Grainger, who designed large parts of it in the middle of the 19th century. The result is that ‘Newcastle looks like a city that actually had an Enlightenment as well as industrial capitalism’ (Hatherley, 2011: 157). The city centre itself, then, has the imprints of its industrial past. Through the 20th century, these industries declined for a variety of reasons. By the end of the century a very different kind of economy was in the making, one that involved more service-​o riented and knowledge-​ or information-​based activities. Not surprisingly, some places benefitted more than others in this shift towards a post-​industrial landscape. In tracing this long historical arc, Robinson (2002) and Martin (2004), among others, criticize what has replaced heavy industry as largely inadequate, pointing to high levels of deprivation when compared with other regions. Notably, the bulk of the wealth created in this new system has concentrated in the South and around London. Martin (2004) details how the Thatcher government accelerated many of the trends associated with deindustrialization by way of an aggressive reform of state–​ society relations, known as the turn towards neoliberalism. The North-​East, Martin (2004: 40) points out, has a significant mismatch between industrial jobs loss and the creation of new jobs in the service sector. Martin (2004: 38) even laments the growth of a homogenizing retail built environment as a result of these shifts, shifts that are detrimental to small businesses, including ‘pubs, chemist shops, the family butchers, bookstores and numerous other retailers’. Again, retail change has a long history here. Amid this unevenness is the spread of a new kind of consumer culture that Martin (2004: 37) aligns with ‘a growing vein of individualism, consumerism and anti-​unionism’. It is worrying

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that the sector that we increasingly rely on –​retail –​has these social and political side effects. It also has impacts on the kind of town and city environment that we produce and inhabit on a daily basis. Martin (2004: 38) writes that in this region ‘the advent of mass consumption, and of those organs of mass consumption, the department store and chain store, dates back to the 1920s and 1930s’. This ‘first glimpse of the Good Life’ (Martin, 2004: 38) would be further extended in the post-​war era, when these and other new retail formats would expand aggressively. New kinds of retail and leisure spaces were expanding across the UK with this shift towards post-​ industrialization. While new mega retail spaces were being constructed rapidly in the US in this time (Crawford, 1992), some UK authorities were successful in restricting a similar overexpansion (Pacione, 2001: 234, 238). Between 1965 and 1980, out of 387 new shopping centres built, 81 per cent were located in town centres (Pancione, 2001: 242). However, in the 1980s, there was a ‘revival of interest in shopping center development’ (Pancione 2001: 243), partly due to the liberalization of land-​use controls by the Thatcher government. What would become one of the North-​East’s mega retail sites and, in fact, one of the largest shopping malls in Europe –​the Metrocentre in Gateshead –​was a result of this shift. ‘Liberalization of planning controls was taken furthest with enterprise zones (EZs)’, Pacione (2001: 243) reports, which led to the construction of this 1.63 million square feet (150,000 square metre) structure ‘built on the site of the ash-​ tip of a disused power station’. Despite the Metrocentre being located only 4 miles (6 km) west of Newcastle city centre, Pacione (2001) writes that its impact has not been as severe as other large regional shopping centres on the traditional town retail centres (see also Lowe, 2005). This out-​of-​town competition ‘has led to a compaction process in Newcastle, with a refocusing of the CBD [central business district] on the refurbished enclosed central mall (Eldon Square) and contraction of retailing in peripheral shopping streets’, Pacione

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(2001: 243) writes. As Pacione (2001: 243) summarizes further: ‘In general, however, large-​scale and prescient redevelopment of the city centre retailing area, together with insertion of an urban metro system in the 1970s, has enabled Newcastle to retain a thriving central retail function in the face of out of town competition.’ Pendlebury (1999, 2002) details some of these efforts to bring needed ‘regeneration’ to the city centre, while also conserving its historic architectural heritage, resulting in what is known today as ‘Grainger Town’, a term that did not previously exist. In line with these new logics and practices of consumption, Newcastle was also turning itself into a tourism destination. One early trend was to brand the city as a ‘party’ location (Nayak, 2003; Miles, 2005). Large groups of out-​of-​town visitors are frequently seen moving among the urban landscape, going from place to place in the rituals of so many stag-​and hen-​dos. Two large universities also attract many young people, sometimes using the ‘party city’ label in their advertising (Nayak, 2003). New student housing is making a significant impact on the city’s built environment and building stock. Hollands and Chatterton (2002: 293) detail the changes in the night-​time economy, which include new kinds of locations that cater to a wider variety of social groups and therefore illuminate ‘numerous conflicts and divisions’. Another more recent trend has focused more on culture-​led regeneration. Miles (2005) summarizes the major investments made to the Quayside area that are a clear example. Around £250 million went into three major ‘iconic’ sites that would seek to resonate with local identity while also fulfilling these urgent development needs: the BALTIC Contemporary Art Gallery, housed in an old flour mill; the Sage Gateshead Music Centre, with its unusual architecture; and the Gateshead Millennium Bridge linking Newcastle and Gateshead, a bridge that tilts. While it is notoriously difficult to determine what direct impacts these projects have had in terms of stimulating further economic development and benefits for local people,

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Miles (2005) does find evidence of the intangible impacts of these projects. ‘Local pride’ and optimism are among other positive emotions involved in the revitalization of ‘identities’ associated with these projects, giving support to the more general findings that culture-​led regeneration does not have to result in a ‘blandscape’ (Miles, 2005: 924, 921, 923), which has been criticized elsewhere. Other parts of the city, such as the Ouseburn valley, near the city centre, have pursued a more ‘arts-​led’ approach that has resulted in a textbook case of gentrification in this area of old warehouses and other ex-​ industrial buildings (Whiting and Hannam, 2017). The results of these kind of development have been mixed, with Hatherley (2011: 157) referring to Newcastle as a place of ‘wild contrasts’. Robinson (2002) warns that someone could look only at the most visible features of the landscape and deduce that the region has fully recovered, but that would be a mistake. The ‘restored classical city center’ (Robinson, 2002) is part of the spectacular landscape that gains much attention. However, Robinson (2002) wants us to know that the scene elsewhere is much more dire. Just a few miles away from the city centre and Quayside is the Walker neighbourhood where Mah (2012) conducted their ethnographic study of life in the area surrounding the recently shuttered shipyards. Here, the population has declined over the years, as nothing has replaced the yards in a comparable way. While there remains a sense of ‘community solidarity’ among the participants, that ‘is almost all that remains of a rich industrial heritage that grows dimmer with each passing generation’ (Mah, 2012: 92). Participants spoke also of ‘their fear of crime and vandalism, problems of drug and alcohol abuse, and rivalries between neighborhoods’, as well as lamenting the ‘decline of shops and services over the past thirty years’ (Mah, 2012: 92). Mah (2012: 76) also finds significant racial tension between the white population and the recently arrived ‘black African asylum seekers’ who have arrived in Walker since 2000. One participant noted there

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have been ‘problems with racism’ on the two main shopping areas of Walker, while others reported the same and that these problems ‘went unreported’ (Mah, 2012: 92). Robinson (2002) and others would further insist on acknowledging the conditions in some ex-​mining towns that are far outside these urban scenes. In the village of Horden in nearby County Durham, Rachel Pain (2019) has collaborated with local activists and artists to research the severe housing and infrastructure issues facing residents there. Rates of deprivation are high and conditions are so dire that Pain (2019: 393) refers to ‘chronic urban trauma’ as the outcome of this kind of ‘slow violence’, borrowing from Nixon (2011; see also Strangleman, 2001). Not every place is able to pursue the kinds of regeneration that Newcastle city centre has, with its vast offering of services. The impacts of the most recent crises in the retail landscape have been similarly uneven. The 2007–​08 Global Financial Crisis impacted directly and negatively on consumer confidence, which caused shockwaves in the retail world. In the UK, according to Wrigley and Lambiri (2015: 6-8), as household incomes stagnated, gross domestic product (GDP) declined and inflation drove up the cost of living, consumer confidence remained negative for several years and combined with other factors to produce an increase in vacant properties on the high street. The North-​East region experienced the highest change in unemployment rate from 2007 to 2012 of all UK regions (Wrigley and Lambiri, 2015: 20). In the data they examine, Wrigley and Lambiri (2015: 19) find evidence of a ‘North/​ South divide’, as northern locations had higher rates of vacancies on their high streets than the more ‘resilient’ southern regions (though the North-​East region does not seem to be included in their data, only the North-​West and West Yorkshire). By 2020, Newcastle had recovered enough of its retail activity that it ranked as one of the ‘strong’ cities in Enenkel and Quinio’s (2022) analysis, meaning that it had much to lose in the next crisis brought on by the COVID-​19 pandemic. Vacancy rates went from around 12 per cent pre-​March 2020

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to around 20 per cent in post-​June 2021. Enenkel and Quinio (2022) wrote on their Centre for Cities blog that ‘Places like Oxford, Newcastle or Cambridge which before COVID-​19 had relatively low numbers of empty shops on their high streets saw more closures than cities like Blackpool, Bradford or Doncaster, where the increase in vacancy rates was much more muted.’ Amid all these changes are new ownership trends that also play a role in producing vacancy, particularly overseas investment in UK high streets. According to an analysis of 22 top UK high streets, this category of ownership accounts for a 17.3 per cent share, topped only by the traditional property companies and real estate investment trusts (REITs) (Childs, 2019). Leigh Sparks (2021: 12) has recently written strongly against this trend of overseas ownership as damaging to the resiliency of high streets: ‘The widespread dominance of distant firms and businesses (and of that one model of operation) reduces local opportunities and leaves towns at the mercy of decisions taken hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. All this is damaging to health, well-​being, and local prosperity.’ According to the data in Child’s (2019) report, the top owners of the high street in Newcastle are still ‘UK REITs/​propcos (property companies)’, at 22.48 per cent. The next section reviews some of the strategies and trends that shape this type of landscape, looking beyond North-​East England. Urban voids demand attention, and as we will see, there are a complex set of relations that form around them. Urban exorcisms Reading Derrida (1994), politics is often about the tensions between conjuration and exorcism. We attempt to chase away what returns to trouble us, again and again. Some things never go away at all. There is a persistent void that runs through the world, a void that is constantly filled, vacated, refilled and so on, forever. Gordillo (2014) describes the lengths that some go to contain the negative power of these spaces, turning rubble

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to ruin, in a way that controls the narrative of what the site means and represents. Specifically, he finds state formation in these processes, as well as other socio-​cultural formations, such as that of the ‘gauchos’. These actors constitute themselves through a relationship with the void, identified by Gordillo (2014) as a complex geographic force that includes, in this case, Indigenous resistance to settler expansion. He puts it as follows, summarizing simply that ‘the gauchos of the Salta frontier and the Argentine nation-​state emerged through the destruction of the void’ (Gordillo, 2014: 54). This destruction, though, is never complete, as the legacies and traces of it linger on in so many hauntings. Edensor (2005a) uses the idea of exorcism to describe a similar dynamic in industrial ruins. In fact, it seems as if the familiar idea of capitalist ‘creative destruction’ operates through this unstable relationship with the void, as investment dynamics move to and fro across the globe. Disinvestment can result in a repopulation of urban ruins as ghostly voids, only to later be chased away if, and when, another investor or other agent comes along. This section reviews urban strategies of exorcism that impact on retail ruins, from temporary urbanism to trends in retail gentrification, and engages with the current conversations around what to do with retail ruins. Gentrification

Urban change known as ‘gentrification’ includes voids and ghosts. As a phase of reinvestment in the process of capitalist creative destruction, what was previously produced as ruinous material is now revalued for a new kind of urbanism. The origins of this contemporary process, interestingly, correlate with deindustrialization and its ruinous built environment. Neil Smith’s ‘rent gap’ involves a spatial and temporal operation that, first, finds ruinous voids and then goes to work on them to raise the value and therefore create a margin of profit (Lees et al, 2008: 28). While some explanations pay attention to the founding moment created by the ruinous void, the literature

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has now moved past these ‘consumption explanations’ to focus more on the production side. This first subsection, though, returns to the consumption explanations to consider the haunting force of the void itself, a haunting that creates the conditions of possibility for gentrification. Linking this to broader trends in deindustrialization and suburbanization aims to go some way in offering a more complex and historicized version of the consumption explanation, insofar as it conceptualizes consumer desire as intimately linked to these processes and not as an independent agent, somehow disembodied from space and time. As deindustrialization roiled through the 20th century, parts of cities were sometimes abandoned. Suburbanization and white flight characterized these trends as the more privileged fled from the city centres. Amid the construction of this new spectacle-​oriented consumer culture, there were some who were drawn back to the city. The destruction had resulted in a new kind of landscape that was attractive for a variety of reasons, including the search for a ‘nonconformist lifestyle’ (Lees et al, 2008: 34) and for what was missing from the sterile life of the suburbs. Lees et al (2008) describe these as ‘pioneer gentrifiers’, who, unknowingly, kick-​started a process that would soon overcome and replace the ruinous void that drew them back. The pioneer gentrifier typically ‘works in the cultural professions, is risk oblivious, wants to pursue a nonconformist lifestyle, wants a socially mixed environment, and rehabilitates his or her property using sweat equity’ (Lees et al, 2008: 34). This last bit points to an unresolved tension that these subjects have with the void: they are drawn to it in the form of dilapidated building stock that promises what is missing in suburbia, but its powerful force must be contained by way of ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘sweat equity’, the self-​congratulatory term used by these subjects to describe their ingenuity and even their ‘love’ for their new urban ruins. The ruin attracts, but it cannot be too ruinous, especially if the goal is to re-​ inhabit them.

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In short, all the exciting qualities of ruination identified by Edensor (2005a) were also exciting to the earliest gentrifiers decades ago and surely to some of those that followed, though the profile of this kind of urban subject often changes as subsequent rounds of activity become more capitalized (Lees et al, 2008: 175). Sharon Zukin’s (1982) groundbreaking work on Loft Living, Lees et al (2008: 118) point out, indicates the cultural imaginaries involved in this rapprochement with the urban void of industrial ruins, what they describe as the emergence of a ‘gentrification aesthetic’. This, of course, only applies to those who never worked in a factory (Zukin, 1982, cited in Lees et al, 2008: 121), thereby exemplifying a key challenge for conceptualizing ruins and retail ruins: the play of authenticity. For the gentrifiers, abandoned factory spaces are nevertheless signs of ‘authenticity’ (Lees et al, 2008: 120) that they seek out. The void of the ruin emits this kind of phantom energy, the promise of something more ‘real’ than what today’s built environment can offer, as it unashamedly accepts fantasy and the postmodern recreation of other times and places. The materiality of disinvestment and poverty are, therefore, semiotically reworked in the imaginaries of these subjects, who become consumers of the void. Neil Smith (1996: 16) would later refer to this set of aesthetic trends as a conversion of ‘urban dilapidation into ultra chic’. Areas that once fell into disuse due to disinvestment now become the focus again of reinvestment, often as various kinds of ‘regeneration’. Gentrification, then, is involved in these dynamics of capitalist ‘creative destruction’, a process that, not surprisingly, creates even more destruction for those who are dispossessed in the process. This is the cruel irony of the process: it is stimulated initially by an attraction to the void but, over time, results in its eradication. In terms of haunting, creative destruction is the process of simultaneously conjuring or producing ghosts, only to later go hunting for them to recapture or exorcise them. Capitalist creative destruction produces these ghosts that come back, again and again. It

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exists precisely at this frontier. There is no rent gap without this haunting, which emerges at the intersection of political economy and the socio-​cultural issues of identity, including race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and gender. Creative destruction is about chasing the void. However, it never faces it directly; rather, it is always chasing it off, without ever coming to grips with it. Retail gentrification

Neighbourhood change often includes retail change; yet, until recently, there has been little focus on retail as a potential domain where gentrification plays out. In recent years, researchers have increasingly focused on how the composition of shops and hospitality venues, such as cafes and restaurants, plays a vital role in the generation of everyday atmospheres that push some further away while embracing others (Zukin et al, 2009; González and Waley, 2013). Hubbard (2017) summarizes this literature and makes a strong case for reconsidering what we thought was retail ‘decline’ or ‘crisis’. Hubbard (2017) does not ignore or dismiss the vacancies and voids on the high street. However, he argues that policy too often mistakes functional working-​class establishments as sources of blight, or as otherwise problematic or even ‘toxic’ (see also Townshend, 2017). Too often, these discourses conceal a middle-​class sensibility and subject position that includes a thinly veiled sense of disgust towards the working class, resulting in this prejudice in the identification of what exactly is wrong with the high streets today. This is exemplified in the popular Portas Report (Portas, 2011), commissioned by the UK government, which recommended deregulating the high streets overall, except for the gambling shops that, Hubbard (2017) points out, are mostly working-​class establishments. Interestingly, at the same time, Hubbard (2017: 70) recognizes the abandoned shops of the UK high street ‘in terms of ruination’ and points to their ghostly qualities. He

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links these to the sites considered by Edensor (2005b: 829, quoted in Hubbard, 2017: 70) as ‘sites which have not been exorcised, where the supposedly over-​and-​done with remains … they seethe with memories [and] haunt the visitor with vague intimations of the past, refusing fixity, and they also haunt the desire to pin memory down in place’ (emphasis in original). Hubbard not only aligns these ghostly sites as part of the ‘new ruins’, but also points out important features that distinguish these from other ruins. In particular, since these are often tightly contained sites, there is less evidence of such alternative uses and ‘lively’ practices as those observed by Edensor (2005a), Gordillo (2014) and others. As such, a different kind of negative power emanates from them. Since the sites are often withheld from the prospect of alternative uses, they remain more tethered to the past than those that do exhibit signs of renovation or transformation. They are also centrally located in the centres of towns and cities, rather than isolated on the outskirts like industrial ruins. Hubbard (2017: 71) summarizes the linkages between these new ruins of retail, memory and the affects of decline: ‘This is to argue that vacant shops are more than just a statistical indicator of High Street vitality and viability: they produce profound imaginings of loss and abandonment’. Ruins of this kind are haunted, then, because of the persistence of these linkages to the recent past, the fragments of which are strung about haphazardly. Vacant shops, on the one hand, and businesses that serve the working class and minority ethnic communities, on the other, are not the same things and should not therefore be considered equally as ‘blight’ or ‘decline’. Focusing on vacancies specifically, as my study has done, gets around this problem in its definition of ruin. Ruins are often exorcised by transformation ‘through redevelopment’ (Degen and Hetherington, 2001: 5, cited in Edensor, 2005a), which may or may not include the signs, atmospheres and politics of heritage. However, considering the considerations about the negativity of retail ruins outlined

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earlier, is this possible in the same way the abandoned factories and warehouses were turned into chic lofts? Built retail environments are still alive today, even though they may not be what they once were. They are still living spaces, perhaps hovering between life and death, making their heritage-​led reincarnation a strange-​sounding proposition. How could they be resurrected if they have not really died yet? Yet, heritage-​ led redevelopment is now on the table and is at work in transforming some of the locations that have said goodbye to their lives as traditional retail spaces. Heritage-​led strategies

There is a complex and contentious relationship between ruins and heritage sites. Edensor (2005a) and Gordillo (2014) both criticize what they call the ‘heritage industries’ for imposing a particular kind of experience onto the visitors of the site. Indeed, the motivation for ‘urban exploration’ is precisely to circumvent these impositions and engender a different kind of experience (Dobraszczyk, 2017). Edensor (2005a: 136, emphasis added), in seeking to push past the ‘fixed narratives’ of the heritage industry, finds in De Certeau and Giard (1998) an exorcism: ‘Again, the past is being used to serve present ends through the construction of a somewhat fixed narrative which like all such stories eclipses the mystery of the past, so that, for instance, “the ghost is exorcised under the name of ‘national heritage’. Its strangeness is converted into legitimacy”.’ How do the retail ruins compare? We do not know much about these yet and need new empirical research. In what ways does the hyperreal landscape of spectacle inform, notwithstanding its alleged artificiality, an authentic experience whose loss may be lamented? This would be a kind of heritage formed out of the material of hyperreality, thereby grounding it and situating it in specific places and times. Can retail ruins have such a powerful resonance on the same scale as what we might today consider ‘ruins’?

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Pétursdóttir and Olsen (2014), in their ‘archaeology of ruins’, highlight the potential negativity of these kinds of ruinous spaces, a negativity that complicates their potential to become ‘heritage’ in the same way other sites are often treated. In reflecting on the ‘new ruins’, they write: The outcome is a modern ruin landscape of closed shopping malls, abandoned military sites, industrial wastelands, derelict amusement parks, empty apartment houses, withering capitalist and communist monuments. A ghostly world of decaying modern debris that for long was left out of academic concerns and conventional histories –​and also considered too recent, too grim and too repulsive to be embraced as heritage. (Pétursdóttir and Olsen, 2014: 3) Gordillo’s (2014) attention to the power of the negative, again, becomes helpful for understanding such a proposition. If the retail ruins are a kind of ‘destruction’, perhaps part of capitalism’s and modernity’s mythos of ‘creative destruction’, then it results in a kind of excessive negativity that is difficult for other players in the mainstream to deal with. As Gordillo (2014: 83) writes: ‘The destruction of space, in short, brings to light a negativity that is often silenced and disregarded because it unsettles dominant sensibilities about the positivity of space.’ With reference to this case study detailed in Chapter Two, the positivity of space exists in the existing retail landscape that seems to be buzzing along on the main high street, while there are pockets of voids throughout the city centre, in addition to more dire situations in other parts of the city and in the town and villages (Powe, 2012; Mah, 2012; Pain, 2019). As we saw earlier with gentrification, it can take a long time for investment to return to a disinvested area, something that is not even guaranteed. Not everyone is convinced in the necessary evil of heritage organizations and the ‘industry’. In fact, in the Walker

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neighbourhood discussed earlier, Mah (2012) notes the lack of heritage-​oriented efforts that might valorize the rich industrial heritage of the area. In the face of the decline produced by deindustrialization, heritage can perhaps play a more positive role. As Mah (2012: 95–​9) suggests: ‘It remains to be seen whether official memory in the future will mesh with local memory in Walker, and whether it can offer any kind of “closure” or gateway to a future, particularly one without jobs.’ Amid other policy failures, particularly around housing, Mah (2012: 97) summarizes their 2005–​06 fieldwork in the city by pointing out, with some disappointment, that ‘movements toward public commemoration of industrial heritage in the form of museums, cultural uses of old industrial sites, or the construction of monuments were absent at both the local and official levels during the period of my study’. These strategies would amount to a kind of incorporation of the living memory and heritage Mah (2012) describes, though harnessing it towards some kind of productive activity, perhaps mimicking the BALTIC Contemporary Art Gallery upstream on the Tyne in Gateshead, once a flour mill and now an art gallery and fine-​dining restaurant (Miles, 2005). Perhaps the shipyard memories and their emotional-​affective forcefield are just too raw for such operations. What is it that makes some ruinous spaces negative and other less so? If these strategies are to be relied upon, it is unclear how the retail ruin could be similarly diverted or exploited, as it has an uncertain status at the moment, somewhere between alive and dead. What would retail ruins as heritage even look like? It is a potentially frightful image, in which we reminisce about what shopping was like when we visited stores and shopping centres, carried around the purchases in heavy bags, and wore ourselves out searching for the best deals, collapsing in the food court and so on. Could there ever be a version of what is today’s shopping centre but somehow a replica of itself, maintained mostly for nostalgic heritage and tourist consumption, something between a mall and a mega historical

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recreation? Perhaps it would be personalized and scheduled, like a theme-​park visit in which we can again shop like we used to. Time would be a hot commodity here, as the next customer patiently awaits their turn to browse the aisles and breathe the hyperreal air of retail once again. Before we get there, there are more realistic and pressing issues concerning the intersection of heritage architecture and retail. With more vacancies, there are more questions about what to do with the existing spaces and the buildings they are often housed in. While there is one perspective that sees building conservation as a barrier to new investment, Plevoets and Van Cleempoel (2016) present what they call an ‘opportunity-​based approach’, in which the historic material helps generate new value. It does so, interestingly, by way of generating a particular kind of atmosphere (Plevoets and Van Cleempoel, 2016: 3–​5) that permeates the customer experience. In this approach, heritage is ‘a valuable asset’, and they point out how some brands, such as Apple, even ‘intentionally look for historical buildings for locating their store’ (Plevoets and Van Cleempoel, 2016: 3, 4). Their theory is that such historic architecture helps generate the sensations of authenticity, something consumers continue to search for as they are tossed about in the digital environments of the contemporary spectacle. This research is corroborated elsewhere, such as the recent Lichfields (2021) report on ‘heritage-​led regeneration’, which found that this was one of six major themes revealed in a recent analysis of over 100 bids to the funding streams linked with the government’s Levelling Up strategy unveiled in March 2021. The report speculates on how heritage can become valuable insofar as it can help sustain future flows of retail capital: Heritage assets are an important pull factor for new businesses and residents partly because of the intangible atmosphere, character and feel of historic places, which businesses want to capitalise on, and people want to

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experience. Historic England describes this as the ‘economics of uniqueness’ which can give places a competitive advantage. (Lichfields, 2021: 4) This thinking is replicated in the recent government responses to high street decline. Specifically, special funding is available through ‘High Street Heritage Action Zones’, which are meant to encourage the kind of fusion described earlier. These were first announced in 2019 but have received further funding in the £4.8 billion Levelling Up Fund announced in March 2021 (Lichfields, 2021: 7). Two of these have already been located in North Shields and Sunderland, the greater conurbation of which Newcastle is a part. Other studies have added evidence that this kind of investment can be beneficial for investors and business interests (Jayantha and Yung, 2018; van den Berg et al, 2021). But what about the kind of retail heritage that is embodied not in historic buildings, but in newer buildings that have housed retail in recent years? Some of the recently vacated department stores were housed in historic buildings, though not all of them. Debenhams in Newcastle, for example, is a mega ruin that stands as part of a more futuristic landscape of a five-​storey-​high curved wall of glass. This one part of the city is like a glass canyon, with what was Debenhams, one end of the Eldon Square shopping centre, directly across from a place called ‘The Gate’, also a glass surface, with a movie theatre, restaurants and bars inside. Other vacant buildings that once housed department stores are moving forward with new plans according to various approaches to ‘adaptive reuse’, often resulting in a new kind of retail offer that includes more than simply retail. These are complex areas in which everyday life and architecture come together and potentially form memories that can feed into future-​oriented schemes for what to do with buildings that mean something to those who use and rely on them. If we became so close to these spatial forms of consumer culture in the decades leading up to their collapse,

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then what can these memories do for the future forms that come to take their place? This is an area that deserves more attention, both theoretically and empirically. Even though the spectacle involves a kind of invasion of life by capitalism, what kind of authentic cultures do we nevertheless generate through our relations with the commodity form? What are the depths that the spectacle gets to in culture? What kind of boundary exists between the authentic and the alienated? What happens to these feelings and embodied memories as the infrastructure teeters and cracks? Temporary urbanism

Another trend in urban policy is towards what has been called ‘temporary urbanism’, that which encourages new kinds of uses that are meant for a short-​term and temporary filling of the void. Central to this is the idea of a ‘pop-​up’ space, by now a familiar concept, as these have become widespread. The idea is simple and seems innocent enough: it is better to have something occupy a vacant space than to have nothing persist for long periods of time. Various tools have been used to bring a wide range of activities into these voids, including arts and performance events. Local artists are often enrolled in these projects, which often use lighter and improvised building materials that can be whisked away at a moment’s notice. Ferreri (2021) notes how the impetus for these projects is precisely the negativity associated with vacant properties themselves. She points out a blind spot in policy discourse that sees vacancies in a particular way: Boarded-​u p shops are characterized as problems, not because they are symptomatic of broader and complex socio-​e conomic processes but because their presence ‘can be depressing’, causing negative perceptions and emotions. In these few sentences lies a central representation of vacant spaces in temporary

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urbanism: the emphasis on a problem of perception and their role as opportunities for a wide range of public-​ facing activities. (Ferreri, 2021: 32) Reading widely across many urban activities involved in temporary urbanism, Ferreri (2021) details a new mechanism of capitalist creative destruction, one that takes ‘ruins’ to be the potential source for new ventures. Interestingly, it extends the logic of spectacle through ‘theatre and performance’, something that has become policy, according to McLean (2010, cited in Ferreri, 2021: 91). If the industrial or retail landscape has fallen into disuse, then these spaces can be used simply as the backdrop for the production of the culture industries. The capitalist logic of spectacle, however, goes even deeper than merely utilizing artists and performers, instead of setting up mega spaces of retail magic. The problem with these activities is that they employ and enrol the artistic community but without properly compensating them by providing the means to move out of their precarious existence, which is the reality for many of them. In short, the main problem is that temporary has become the norm –​ permanent, in other words. For Ferreri (2015, 2021), in UK cities and elsewhere, what appears as an ‘innovative’ solution for the problem of retail ruins is another form of dispossession. These practices often lack vision beyond what spectacle in crisis has laid out for us: a landscape of temporary and always-​shifting spaces and mobilities, undercutting the ‘stability of place’ and the possibility of a ‘longer-​term relationship with a place’ (Ferreri, 2021: 85, 67). Others like O’Callaghan (2018: 433) write of similar processes in Ireland as being ‘part of a wider entrepreneurial strategy to target vacancy’. As was seen in Chapter Two, some vacant sites seem left out of these strategies for unknown reasons. Long-​ term vacancies suggest a kind of commercial strangulation that landlords and investors have on the cities where they own property. The ghost is conjured by way of a strangulation, one that restricts anything else from taking its place. As our cities

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have become increasingly privatized in recent decades, we now find a real force of restriction, as these powerful stakeholders can easily block alternative visions of how the city can and should be used. Surely, if these spaces were not private property, other forces would move in to do something else with them. In some recent UK government policies, such as ‘Levelling Up’, there is talk of giving councils more power to enact change in sites that have been vacant too long. Yet, Ferreri (2015) and many others have numerous other ideas about what could happen in these sites. Temporary solutions that aim at overall gentrifying forces are not an acceptable end point. One example is Midsteeple Quarter in Dumfries, Scotland, an example of ‘community-​led regeneration’ (see: www.midste​eple​quar​ter.org). As a ‘community benefit society’, independent from the council, this organization has come together to counteract the effects of ‘absentee landlords’ that have left parts of the high street vacant for long periods of time. Using community asset transfers, this group has taken ownership of previously vacant properties that were being used as pop-​up spaces in recent years. Since then, they have acquired several other properties and use them for various ‘community engagement projects’. Rather than just a space where capital and commodities circulate, creating so many cycles of catastrophe and potential alienation, these spaces can also assume a vital ‘social and civic role’ (Greenhalgh, 2020: 3). This grass-​roots effort, then, seems to provide a bright example of what we might be capable of in terms of claiming space back from the forces of retail capital and expanding the purview of public participation in the production of urban retail space. After spectacle (towards a conclusion) The critical ethos of Ferreri (2015, 2021) and others is driven by this desire for an alternative world in these spaces and not merely the forms that are preferred by the usual suspects (corporate developers, real estate investors and so on). In these

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vacant spaces, there is the glimmer of possibility that something else might take place, something completely unexpected that could fill the void in a way closer to what we mean by justice. Rather than an irresponsible approach to philosophy that undermines truth, institutions and science, Caputo (2021) is at pains to convince us that deconstruction is always about justice and is in no way a merely destructive force. Derrida even went further to say that ‘deconstruction is justice’ (Caputo, 2021: 131), insofar as it is always working against the closures and sedimentations that result in exclusion and oppression. The permanent flux of temporariness used as a political tool to exploit artists, for instance, is not what deconstruction and hauntology are about. Certainly, these energies are running through contemporary thinking about ruins and ruination, particularly thinking that is future oriented and concerned with a wide array of potential stakeholders and agents. Derrida, again, aims at creating space for difference and working against intolerance. This is often a central component in contemporary scholarship on ruins. The ruin may channel a set of forces, as a haunting, suggesting a disruption of some kind. Disrupting what? Haunting disrupts what appear to be stable, if not hegemonic, sets of socio-​ spatial relations. The ruin opens a passage into alterity, to a difference so different that we cannot fathom it. As such, the deconstruction of the ruin has a different kind of creative future, other than the ‘creative destruction’ of capitalism, trapped as it is in a death spiral. Gibson-​Graham (1996) finds Derrida useful to describe how capitalism, rather than an obvious juggernaut force that occludes all else, is in fact haunted by so many alternative economies that fall outside its reach. If we must be realistic about capitalism’s death spiral, we can also look past it to other existing ways of being in the world that are not capitalist. These alternative economies are what haunt capitalism, as they pull Derrida’s philosophy through more specific examples of social and economic organization. All claims that capital makes about

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itself –​claims of full presence, inevitability and so on –​have the rug pulled out from under them by way of a hauntological approach: ‘Each capitalist site is contaminated within a social and political context, and that contextualization is itself a contamination of any pure or essential and invariant attribute associated with the concept (“it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept” ’ (Gibson-​ Graham, 1996: 247). If capitalism is always contaminated, so are the sites of retail capital and its mundane spectacle. These would, of course, include the arcades and all the mythological power that Benjamin ascribed to them. As critics, we perhaps sometimes overstate the role spectacle plays in our lives. After all, Gibson-Graham’s (1996, 2006) overall feminist deconstruction of capitalism asks us to resist ascribing capitalism too central a role in a world of difference. More recently, anthropologist Anna Tsing has defined the study of ruins along similar lines. In The Mushroom at the End of the World, Tsing (2015) finds many capitalist ruins but is not content to merely denounce the wreckage and the forces behind it. Instead, Tsing (2015) finds life that goes on amid the wreckage, which is a much more hopeful ethos. In these commodity relations, Tsing (2015) finds much more than the stale logics of spectacle as only a kind of alienation. Scholars like Tsing (2015) emphasize this more hopeful future, one that may include commodities but without the heavy baggage of what they might mean. Rather than always finding false consciousness, commodities can also carry with them alternative dimensions and overtones. What if false consciousness did not always lead to alienation? What if we were able to re-​inhabit false consciousness and remake it from the inside? These promising potentials are brought to mind by Tsing (2015) and resonate with Benjamin’s and Derrida’s radical philosophies. There is much to learn from these approaches that embrace a post-​structuralist methodology, one that attends to structures but does not see them as the end of the story, nor assumes that

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they work seamlessly and without frustration. As the focus of this study is retail ruins, we turn again to the question of what spectacle is and what is happening to it in these ruinous times. Sadie Plant’s (1992) engagement with the Situationist International finds some important points of convergence with today’s conversations around the significance of ruins: that out of the ruins, something new and different can emerge. In reviewing the radical futures that Situationist praxis sought to instigate and, in some ways, was involved in (such as the May 1968 uprising in France), Plant (1992) returns to the radical subject position of Raoul Vaneigem and others, who speculated about what a post-​spectacle would look like. As the spectacle falls apart, people may reclaim a fuller kind of subjectivity that has been denied them by the spectacular techno-​sphere. For Plant (1992: 71), the hope is that ‘out of the ruins of commodified lifestyles and definition emerge new patterns of playfully chosen and flexible identities like those one fleetingly adopts when playing charades or childhood games of make-​believe’. Part of this victory would involve the proliferation of ‘play’, which would take place ‘in the ruins of the spectacle’ (Plant, 1992: 72). Is it possible that this ruin is now taking place and that this destabilizing force of potential ruin is now accelerating in its destruction? In the last 10 years or so, we have seen this process come to pass, as in the actual ruination of the built environments built by an evolving postmodern spectacle, one appropriate for post-​Fordist accumulation and that can accompany the rise of advanced finance and technology sectors (Harvey, 1990; cf Wark, 2019). The malls, shops, department stores and high streets that are barely hanging on, or already gone, are like so many voids in the landscape, so many ghosts that keep appearing. There is one major problem with interpreting today’s retail ruins as harbingers of some great liberation from the spectacle: the ruin of the spectacular built environment is intertwined with the construction of a new spectacular techno-​ sphere, referred to as ‘Spectacle 2.0’ by Briziarelli and Armano

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(2017). These include today’s most advanced interactive technology that constitutes powerful new frameworks for engagement and intervention. We may now be witnessing the ruination of retail in an urban archaeological way, which we know is a process enrolled in the context of post-​industrial relations, including the Internet. Unfortunately, the passage ‘out of the ruins of spectacle’ is not clear at all. Instead, spectacle has simply ushered us into new digital spaces of consumption that grasp around us tighter, even as we move further away from each other (our publics, communities, families and relationships) and deeper into an intensive hyperreality (social media, image management, Internet addictions and nervous collapse). This is not to suggest that this happens for everyone, everywhere, all the time; rather, it is to acknowledge that these trends are widespread enough for us to be having this conversation. In recent years, because we were confined to our homes for long periods of time during lockdowns, the COVID-​19 pandemic provided a great opportunity for us to step back and reassess our relationship to the spectacle. This potential, though, was quickly swallowed by the online industries that wrapped around us even tighter. There was a rare historical chance to ‘awake’ together, but that possibility was quickly neutralized, an opening that provided for new kinds of investment and intervention. The retail ruin is complicated because it emerges out of the materials and spatiality of what Millward (2017: 104) calls ‘supermodernity’, which is a way of existing in the present that makes such grand promises and projections for the future. As such, it sets itself up for great disappointment when those promises fall short (Berlant, 2011). For Millward (2017: 114), the ruinous ‘ghost airport’ (‘Mirabel’) in Canada gleams with a similar kind of hauntological resonance: Mirabel does not make any particular sense. Indeed, Laurin suggests that it would be impossible to fashion the story of Mirabel into one cohesive narrative. But it is still out there, waiting, a shimmering reminder that tells an

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incomplete tale not just about the fantasy of capitalism, but also of the limits of expansion, the shelf-​life of technological solutions, loss and the illusion of security. There is a similarity between this ghost airport and retail ruins, as both occupy a space that is historically loaded with ideological meanings that are crucial for contemporary subjectivity. The accelerating speeds of capitalism today throw us all into a fierce wind that potentially shatters whatever glimmer of hope and protection we thought we once had. This fracturing and fragmenting of subjectivity is perhaps best encapsulated in these darker spaces of the urban landscape that not only produce ghostly affects, but also continue to haunt the socio-​spatial system in a more troubling way. With the remnants of past usage, we are forced to confront the social and political significance of these vacancies: the system that relies on them is also prone to constant crisis. Retail ruins force an encounter with vulnerability and with the unrestrained, volatile logics of a ‘market’ economy, in which everything can change in an instant. Really, is this how we want to live?

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The idea of retail ruins is, admittedly, unusual. Ruins typically imply some temporal distance that allows for contemplation. The new ruins, including retail ruins, are different in this regard. We may remain absorbed by retail as a mundane version of spectacle, but we are now seeing it fade in brightness and in function, in some places more than others. With consumption and retail, we are still living in the socio-​cultural forms that are not so much dying or falling apart, as transforming into digital worlds, a process with great consequences for our cities and their built environments. Retail ruins force a confrontation with some nagging questions about authenticity, identity and selfhood that have dogged us ever since the commodity form invaded our lives. If ruins are typically spaces that contain spatial evidence of a previous way of life, then these void-​ like retail spaces should be considered as ruins insofar as they once had a particular function that is no longer present, even if the material pieces are still in place, and even if other bits of that infrastructure remain functioning alongside them. Even as the spectacle invades life, sending a tremor through the authenticity of our desires, a real fusion nevertheless takes place amid these landscapes of retail and consumption. We might not agree with it, but we must acknowledge it, even in its partiality. That is to say, not everyone is impacted in the same way evenly across space. In fact, the manipulative powers of spectacle sometimes fade into the background while other social lives unfold (Gibson-​Graham, 1996, 2006; Rose et al, 2010), adding further emotional texture to this contemporary scene of retail collapse. The retail ruins are potentially so disruptive not because they provide some escape from the alleged bores of capitalist spectacle (Garrett, 2013), but because they force us to

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acknowledge how meaningful the spectacle can become in everyday life. Personally, I continue thinking about theories of spectacle because I feel like something has been tampered with inside, in desire itself, a tampering that has ramifications, namely, for the formation of subjectivities that link us with wider environments, both human and non-​ human, across large populations. Engaging with retail ruins in this way, I urge us to look inwards at our own values, world views and expectations. More than finding the truths of authenticity ‘inside the dream’ (following Goss, 1999), which can lead to a calming status quo effect, I hope for these sensibilities to lead to the creation of alternatives. It may be a process of inaugurating a post-​authenticity era of consumer consciousness, in which we must recreate or rediscover authenticity, which may or may not include the kind of retail landscapes we are familiar with. Retail ruins hit a nerve because retail and spectacle have assumed such a powerful position in our intimate, everyday lives. Seeing them shatter could cascade into our consumer subjectivity, leading to a reassessment and dislodging of alienation as a cultural condition. Yet, we cannot assume that we will find an un-​alienated subject once this layer is removed. We may have to move through it at the same time, leading to a minefield of existential challenges. Engaging with retail ruins, then, includes all these twists and turns, navigating the messy terrain between alienation and authenticity. This book is not a kind of ‘devilish’ game (Caputo, 2021: 36–​44) meant to undermine other approaches to thinking about the dynamics of these spaces. The decision to include the bulk of the regional ‘context’ information in Chapter Three after the main empirical material presented in Chapter Two was meant as a methodological move to make sure the haunted materiality remained the focus of the analysis. Too much context, as Millward (2017) warns, can prefigure what the empirical findings might be trying to tell us. Regional context does matter, especially for the urban theories of exorcism

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discussed in Chapter Three, but it remains a challenge to link specific aspects of that broader historiography with each instance of retail haunting I encountered in the city during my observations. In any case, Chapter Two does return to historical contexts when appropriate, including the shopping memories of local inhabitants (thanks to Rogerson [2018]) and other expert contributions. The ethics of this project orient around the materiality of the sites not as full unto themselves and worthy of attention for some obscure aesthetic reasoning, but because of both (1) how these sites are haunted and (2) how they do the haunting. This greater attention is consistent with the ‘archaeological imagination’ (Hill, 2015), an area of convergence that future thinking might look to for inspiration. Thinking about the material world in these ways is, to put it bluntly, not about producing and consuming ‘ruin porn’, but thinking through the powers that objects and materials have in the world. As Pohl (2022) puts forward, criticism of this kind of research as pornographic moves too quickly past the thing that is allegedly being undermined: the material world itself. Retail ruins might require a degree of ‘getting with the fetish’ (Pohl, 2022), insofar as we imagine these spaces as meaningful socio-​spatial devices for nurturing and sustaining consumerist subjectivities and identities. At the same time, the negativity of the retail ruin is deeply destabilizing of that same machinery of fetish production. The void returns again and again, like the ghost, dogging retail capital wherever it goes. While some aspects of capitalism exist in a close embrace with the void (namely, creative destruction and gentrification), the logics of spectacle have increasingly gone digital, a decision that has impacted the flows of retail capital. The sites are haunted, a process that involves the materiality of entropy and the accumulation of materials that contest the order and stability of spectacular life. In other words, we may indeed need to ‘get with the fetish’ (Pohl, 2022), though with its haunted side.

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Lastly, the ethics of hauntology are always aimed at expanding space for difference. As we examine some of the ways that urban inhabitants and policy makers have addressed the haunting of the void, we witness moments when the possibility it offers is again swallowed whole by hegemonic structures, but we can also glimpse that opening and do something to grab a toe-​hold for the reclaiming of non-​ economic spaces, or at least economic spaces that have a better awareness of, and respect for, socio-​cultural and other kinds of difference. The role of public participation in the planning and governance of high streets and retail landscapes seems far too limited. Expanding the scope of this approach is in the purview of deconstruction and can be seen in action in the work of Hubbard (2017) and others. The ghosts of post-​ industrial spectacle invite us to think: what else could go in

Figure 22:  Last ghost, Grey Street

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that space? How could it be better than before? What would justice look like? How might it respond to multiple publics in a more democratic way? How can spaces be removed from the circulation of capital altogether? These require more haunting, hauntings yet to come.

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135

Index References to photographs appear in italic type.

surface assemblage  24, 26–​7 symmetrical archaeologies  24 authentic inventions of modernity  18, 19 authenticity  18, 100 awakening of things  46, 50–​3 Awcock, Hannah  36

A absentee landlords  110 actor–​network theory (ANT)  24 Adey, P.  28 ‘aestheticized’ approach to ruins and ruinous landscapes  26 affective/​affect  1 hauntings of retail ruins  4–​5 hauntology of retail ruins  5–​6 alienation  18, 58, 59 ‘antidote’ to spectacle  2, 17, 29 Apel, Dora  26 Arboleda, P.  21 Arcades Project, The (Benjamin)  6, 9, 12, 17–​18, 45, 63, 86 archaeological/​archaeology  deconstructive  85–​7 imagination  12, 118 of ruins  104 surface methodology  8 traditional  23 urban  85 see also contemporary archaeology of ruins archaeologies of contemporary past  see contemporary archaeology of ruins Armano, E.  7, 113–​14 assemblage theories  22 actor–​network theory  24 Bennett’s discussion of  25–​6 and contemporary archaeology of ruins  23–​4, 27 critical urban theory  22–​3 hauntology  27–​8 non-​representational theory  27

B Ballard, J.G.  49 BALTIC Contemporary Art Gallery  94, 105 Balzac, Honoré de  38 Barke, M.  35 Benjamin, Walter  6, 9, 12–​13, 16, 19, 27, 31, 37, 38, 67, 75 archaeology  87 awakening of things  46, 50–​3 describing ghost walk  87 proto-​deconstruction  86 radical theory  16–​17 redemption of things  46, 52, 59–​66 ruins and ruination  45–​50 ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’  17–​18 Bennett, Jane  24, 25 blandscape  95 boarded-​up shops  108–​9 Boym, S.  13 Brenner, N.  22 Briziarelli, M.  7, 113–​14 Buck-​Morss, S.  16 Buildings Must Die (Cairns and Jacobs)  38 Buse, P  38, 46, 86

136

INDEX

scenes of retail ruins  43–​4 splintering  43, 44 unplugged and shattered  40–​1, 42 see also Splatter Town site “counter-​magic” Marxism  87 ‘counter-​site’ to spectacle  see‘antidote’ to spectacle COVID-​19 pandemic  114 creative destruction  90, 98, 104, 118 capitalist  26, 98, 100–​1, 104, 109, 111–​12 logics of  10 critical urban theory  22–​3 Cuban Revolution  67, 69 culture-​led regeneration  94–​5

C Cairns, S.  15, 38, 81 capitalism  7, 59, 90 carboniferous  91 Post-​Fordist and neoliberal  18–​19 Caputo, J.D.  75, 76, 86, 88, 111 Castañeda, Quetzil  18 central business district (CBD)  93 Chatterton, P.  49–​50, 94 Childs, J  97 chronic urban trauma  96 Citing Brand  38 classical or archaic ruins  16 Collier, C.  82 commercial strangulation  109 commodity  74, 87, 112 aesthetic  52, 53, 59 capitalism  67 fetishism  16, 19, 33, 37, 46, 59 communism, specter of  76–​7 Communist Manifesto, The (Engels and Marx)  76 community  asset transfers  110 community-​led regeneration  110 solidarity  95 constitutive outside  4, 86 consumer/​consumerism  24 consciousness  117 practices  22 social relations of  7 of void  100 consumption-​based economy  49 contemporary archaeology of ruins  23–​4, 27, 37 contemporary ruins  5, 24, 64 context of ruins  14 historical  36, 90, 118 regional  36, 90, 117 ‘too much context’  14, 36–​7, 117–​18 contextualization  112 Corner Shop  81, 84 ceiling collapse  40, 41 falling in  39 random object and neglect  40, 40

D Debenhams in Newcastle  107 Debord, Guy  6, 19 De Certeau, M.  103 deconstruction  10, 28–​9, 82, 111 affirmative  75–​7 Derrida’s philosophy of  4 Goss’s views about  66–​9 deindustrialization  99, 105 Deleuze, G.  24 Derrida, Jacques  4, 28, 29, 31, 37, 66, 86, 111 deconstruction concept  87 ‘différance’ concept  76 hauntology  82, 89 ‘other, the’ concept  75 about politics  97 destabilization in industrial ruins  46 Di Feliciantonio, C.  2, 3, 11 ‘différance’ concept  76 Dobraszczyk, P.  5, 21, 26 dream messages  53–​9

E economics of uniqueness  107 Edensor, T.  2, 8, 15–​17, 18, 29, 39, 46, 87, 102 criticism on heritage industries  103

137

RETAIL RUINS

engagement with industrial ruins  73–​4 idea of exorcism  98 qualities of ruination  100 structured and ordered totality  89 Eldon Garden shopping centre  54–​5 ‘end of history’ thesis  76 Enenkel, K.  96–​7 enterprise zones (EZs)  93

criticism on heritage industries  103 about destruction of space  104 gauchos  98 Goss, J.  52 criticism for ‘failure of dialectical thinking’  60, 89–​90 dialectics of redemption  66–​7, 82–​3 ethics of deconstruction  66–​9 reading of Benjamin on ruin, ruination and spectacle  59 research on Mall of America  52–​3 Grainger, Richard  35, 92 gross domestic product (GDP)  96 Gruen Transfer  83 Guattari, F.  24

F false consciousness  53 Farnon’s (department store)  62 Ferreri, M.  108–​10 fieldwork for surveying ghostly voids  8, 31–​7, 85, 105 Fisher, Mark  28 Ford, Laura Grace  82–​3 formal habitation  21 frame ruins  13 Freud, Sigmund  51 Fukuyama, Francis  76

H Handyside arcade  55–​9 Harrison, R.  24, 25, 32 Hatherley, O.  92, 95 haunting of void  3, 22–​3, 29–​30, 37, 49, 77, 102 hauntological/​hauntology  3–​5, 8, 9, 12–​13, 27–​31, 37, 82 approach to buildings  14, 81–​4 capacities of retail ruins  4 ethics of  119 resonance  114–​15 Hell, J.  1, 18, 19–​20, 39 heritage  assets  106–​7 heritage-​led redevelopment  10 heritage-​led regeneration/​ strategies  103–​8 industries  17, 103 Herwitz, D.  19 High Rise (Ballard)  49 High Street Heritage Action Zones  107 Hill, Lisa  23, 27, 75 Hollands, R.  49–​50, 94 Hubbard, Phil  2, 101–​2, 119 human geography  23, 27

G gauchos  98 gentrification  10, 95, 98–​9 aesthetic  100 creative destruction  100–​1 pioneer gentrifiers  99–​100 retail  101–​3 ghosts  98 industrial  49–​50 of postindustrial spectacle  119, 119–​20 voids  31–​7 walk  87 Giard, L.  103 Gibson-​Graham, J.K.  89, 90, 111 Gilloch, G.  46, 85 globalization  89 Gordillo, G.  3, 5, 17, 18, 29–​30, 97, 102

138

INDEX

mud prints in retail ruins  69–​75 Mulholland Drive (film)  61 Mushroom at the End of the World, The (Tsing)  112

I industrial ruination  73–​4 industrial ruins  2, 8, 16, 17, 20, 46–​7

N

J

neoliberalism  30, 92 Newcastle: City Born to Shop! (Rogerson)  55 Newcastle upon Tyne, UK  31, 35, 36, 39, 44, 67, 93–​4 ghost vacancies  47 industrial ghosts  49–​50 night-​time economy  50, 94 recovering retail activity  96–​7 new materialism  1, 22, 81 new ruins  1, 2, 8–​9, 20, 104, 116 ‘new urban ruins’ literature  2–​3 night-​time economy in Newcastle upon Tyne  50, 94 Nixon, R.  96 non-​industrial ruins  16 non-​representational theory  27 North-​East England, post-​industrial  91 coalfields  91–​2 culture-​led regeneration  94–​5 impacts of crises in retail landscape  96 industrial decline  92 Metrocentre in Gateshead  93 Newcastle upon Tyne  93–​4, 96–​7 retail and leisure  92–​3 retail ruins in  91 tourism and leisure in  91 Walker neighbourhood  95–​6 Northumberland Street  34

Jacobs, J.M.  15, 38, 81

K Kingsbury, P.  28 Kinkaid, E.  22, 25

L Latour, B.  24 Lees, L.  99, 100 Leslie, Esther  63–​4 ‘Levelling Up’ policy  110 Lichfields report on heritage-​led regeneration  106 Loft Living (Zukin)  100 Lynch, David  61, 79

M Maddern, J.F.  28 Mah, Alice  14, 18, 26–​7, 95, 105 Majewski, T.  23–​4 Martin, R.L.  92–​3 materiality  of disinvestment and poverty  100 material world, meaning of  24–​5, 49, 118 of matter returns  47, 49 Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá in Mexico  18 McCarthy, Cormac  49 McFarlane, C.  22 McLean, H.E.  109 media-​induced bubble  20 Metrocentre in Gateshead  93 Midsteeple Quarter in Dumfries, Scotland  110 Miles, S.  94–​5 Miller, J.C.  90 Millward, Liz  36, 114, 117

O object-​oriented negativity  30 object-​oriented ontologies  22 objects and materiality  23, 30 O’Callaghan, C.  2, 3, 11, 109 ‘off-​limits’ space  8 Olsen, B.  23, 24, 104

139

RETAIL RUINS

ontology  66 opportunity-​based approach  106 organismic metaphor  25 ‘other, the’ concept  75

affective hauntings  4–​5 affective hauntology  5–​6 affirmative deconstruction  75–​7 assemblage theories  22–​8 awakening of things  46, 50–​3 burgers in dark  71–​3 carpet roll  68 carpet torn out  48 cobwebs and broom  68 combination all wrong  48 contemporary archaeology  23–​5, 27, 37 dark portal  60, 61–​2 deconstructive archaeology  85–​7 dirty old room  85 disruptive power  17 dream messages  53–​9 escalator night  64–​6, 65 fieldwork for surveying ghostly voids  31–​7 hauntology  4, 27–​31, 37 impossibility of  87–​8 insect cemetery in Bigg Market  47, 50 milkshake dust  50, 51 mud prints  69–​75 negativity of  3, 118 Newcastle upon Tyne  39–​44 in post-​industrial North-​East England  91 production  11 redemption of things  46, 52–​3, 59–​66 ruins and ruination  45–​50 between spectacle and void  21 supermodernity  114 temporality and rhythms of  84–​5 vacant shop  52 retail spaces, decline of  15 retail vacancies  15 Road, The (McCarthy)  49 Robinson, F.  91–​2, 95–​6 Rogerson, R.  55, 62, 63 Romaine, Scott  49 Rose  28, 86 rubble, ruins as  3, 16, 30–​1

P Pacione, M.  93–​4 Pain, Rachel  96 Pendlebury, J.  35, 94 Pétursdóttir, P.  23, 24, 104 Pile, S.  51 pioneer gentrifiers  99 place-​based communities  14 Plant, Sadie  113 Plevoets, B.  106 Pohl, L.  27, 37, 118 politics of urban becoming  16 ‘pop-​up’ space/​spatiality  10, 90, 108, 110 Portas Report  101 postmodern hyperreality  20 post-​phenomenology  22 post-​structuralist methodology  112–​13 proto-​deconstruction  86 psychogeography  82

Q Quinio, V.  96–​7

R radical theory  16–​17 real estate investment trusts (REITs)  97 redemption of things  46, 52–​3, 59–​66 rent gap  98, 101 retail capital  2, 6, 7, 21, 89, 118 retail crisis  38–​9, 101 retail gentrification  6, 101–​3 retail heritage  107 retail landscape  44–​5, 96, 117 retail ruination  73–​4 retail ruins  1–​2, 8, 11, 12, 14, 17, 31, 113, 115, 116

140

INDEX

ruination  29, 38–​9, 63–​4 Benjamin’s research on  45–​50 processes of  14–​15 qualities of  100 ruins and  14, 17 spectacle and  18–​22 ruinous voids  98–​9 ruin porn  5, 26, 27, 37 ruins  12, 13, 29, 39, 109 archaeology of  104 Benjamin’s research on  45–​50 exorcised by transformation  102–​3 haunting  102 industrial  16–​17 kinds of  14–​15 non-​industrial  16 popularity of  1 ruination and  14, 17, 18–​22 spectacle and  17–​22 Western idea of  3 see also retail ruins ‘ruins in reverse’  9, 21, 71

supermodernity of retail ruin  114–​15 Specters of Marx (Derrida)  76, 86 spectral turn  2, 9, 81 spectro-​geographies  28, 29 Splatter Town site  77, 84 debris on display  77–​81, 78 hauntological approach to buildings  81–​4 see also Corner Shop Stallabrass, J.  74 Stoler, Ann  13 suburbanization  99 supermodernity of retail ruin  114–​15 surface assemblage  24–​7 Swyngedouw, E.  5, 26 symmetrical archaeologies  24

T temporary urbanism  90, 108–​10 traditional archaeology  23 Tsing, Anna  112 Turner, D.C.  49

S Schiffer, M.B.  23–​4 Schönle, A.  1, 18, 19–​20, 39 Secor, A.J.  28 Situationist International  113 Smith, Neil  98, 100 Smithson, Robert  21 ‘society of the spectacle’  7 Society of the Spectacle, The (Debord)  6 Sontog, Susan  26 Sparks, Leigh  97 spatial subjectivity of city  50 ‘Spectacle 2.0’  7, 11, 15, 113–​14 spectacle  6–​7, 10, 15, 89, 113, 116 digital spaces of consumption  114 falls into ruins  17 logics of  7, 109, 112, 118 postmodern  113 and ruination  18–​22 as socio-​spatial formation  12

U urban archaeology  85 urban exorcisms  90, 97–​8, 117 gentrification  98–​101 heritage-​led strategies  103–​8 retail gentrification  101–​3 temporary urbanism  108–​10 urban exploration  8, 33, 103 urbanism  gentrification in  98 industrial ruins  29 temporary  10, 90, 108–​10 urban vacancy/​voids  3, 11, 97

V vacant spaces  2–​3 Van Cleempoel, K.  106 Vaneigem, Raoul  113 Vibrant Matter (Bennett)  25 visual ‘culture of display’  50

141

RETAIL RUINS

void(s)  10, 39, 49, 98, 118 consumers of  100 fieldwork for surveying ghostly voids  31–​7 figure of  28 haunting of  22–​3 urban  3, 11, 31, 97 voyeurism  33–​4

W Walker neighbourhood  95–​6, 104–​5 Whole Foods  82 Wylie, J.  77

Z Zukin, Sharon  100

142