The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay 9781350988583, 9781786732408

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Endorsement
Title page
Copyright information
Table of contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: urban ruins, imagination and exploration
Imagining the dead city
Ruin aesthetics
Ruin exploration
The sites
I Histories
1 Post-apocalyptic Londons: imagining the death of a city
The empty city
Emptiness as allegory
Emptiness with venom
Emptiness as illusion
The destroyed city
Destruction and invasion
Destruction and experience
Destruction and digitization
The submerged city
Submergence by sewage: After London
Submergence and regression
Death by water
2 Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-industrial Manchester
Ruins below
Remaindered flows: the Irk culvert
Remaindered space: the Manchester and Salford Junction Canal
The ruins of industry
Demolition: Royd Mill
Dereliction and decay: Hartford Mill
Salvage: Royal Mills and Brunswick Mill
The ruins of work
The persistence of ruins
The politics of ruins
Conclusion
II Explorations
3 Fantasy and experience: ruin gazing in Varosha
Urbicide
The last witness
The world without us
The future of ruins
4 Disaster and memory: the ruins of Chernobyl and Pripyat
Into the zone
Sarcophagus/shelter: monument as ruin
Pripyat: ruins as monuments
Ruins as voids
III Futures
5 Urban futures, art and the imagination of Detroit
The imagination of Detroit
Dystopian imaginaries
Utopian imaginaries
Cutting/pasting
Covering
Melding
Mouldering
6 Suspended futures: urban ruins in reverse
Abandoned futures
Suspended futures
Incomplete futures
The future of ruins
Notes
Bibliography
Printed sources
Online sources
Unpublished sources
Filmography
Index

Citation preview

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Paul Dobraszczyk is a visiting lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. His research focuses on visual culture and the built environment from the nineteenth century onwards, and he is author of Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain (2014) and London’s Sewers (2014), as well as co-editor of Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within (2016) and Function and Fantasy: Iron Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Century (2016).

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‘The Dead City is an elegantly argued and lacerating insight into our contemporary collective “ruin lust”. The book binds together stunning images and carefully crafted prose in an elegy to ruin aesthetics, moving adroitly between critical commentary to personal experience and propelling the reader into unexpected introspection.’ – Bradley L. Garrett, University of Sydney

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay PAUL DOBRASZCZYK

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Published in 2017 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright © 2017 Paul Dobraszczyk The right of Paul Dobraszczyk to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. International Library of Visual Culture 24 ISBN: 978 1 78453 716 6 eISBN: 978 1 78672 240 9 ePDF: 978 1 78673 240 8 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

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Contents Illustrations Acknowledgements

viii xiii

Introduction: urban ruins, imagination and exploration

1



Imagining the dead city

3



Ruin aesthetics

8



Ruin exploration

12

The sites

16

I HISTORIES

1 Post-​apocalyptic Londons: imagining the death of a city The empty city

23 27



The destroyed city

36



The submerged city

43





2 Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-​industrial Manchester

53

Ruins below

57



Remaindered flows: the Irk culvert

58



Remaindered space: the Manchester and Salford Junction Canal

63



The ruins of industry

68

Demolition: Royd Mill

69



Dereliction and decay: Hartford Mill

73



Salvage: Royal Mills and Brunswick Mill

78



The ruins of work

81 v

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Contents

The persistence of ruins

83



The politics of ruins

88

Conclusion

91

II EXPLORATIONS

3 Fantasy and experience: ruin gazing in Varosha



Urbicide

95 97



The last witness

106



The world without us

111



The future of ruins

117



4 Disaster and memory: the ruins of Chernobyl and Pripyat

119



Into the zone

122



Sarcophagus/​shelter: monument as ruin

124



Pripyat: ruins as monuments

133



Ruins as voids

145

III FUTURES



5 Urban futures, art and the imagination of Detroit

149



The imagination of Detroit

153



Dystopian imaginaries

155



Utopian imaginaries

157

Cutting/pasting

160

Covering

170

Melding

176

Mouldering

182



189

6 Suspended futures: urban ruins in reverse



Abandoned futures

192

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Contents

Suspended futures

198



Incomplete futures

204



The future of ruins

211

Notes 214 Bibliography 255 Filmography 276 Index 278

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Illustrations 1.1 Gustave Doré, ‘The New Zealander’, in Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (London, 1872), wood-​engraved print.

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1.2 Digital ‘wallpaper’ image by Alex Koshelkov showing the City of London submerged by flood waters, 2013. Reproduced by permission of the artist.

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1.3 Still from 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) showing a CGI statue above Queen Victoria Street in the City of London.

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1.4 Photograph of Dresden in the aftermath of the Allied air attacks, February 1945.

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1.5 The sunken dome of St Paul’s Cathedral after a nuclear war as seen in The Bed Sitting Room (Richard Lester, 1969).

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1.6 Rupert Jordan’s photograph of St Paul’s Cathedral from the River Thames, from his River London series, 2013. Reproduced by permission of the artist.

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2.1 Manchester’s tallest building, the Beetham Tower (2006), mirroring the form of a nineteenth-​century ruin on the Rochdale Canal in Castlefield.

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2.2 Subsidence of blocks of stone in the wall at the corner of Hunt’s Bank and Victoria Street, Manchester.

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2.3 Former cattle bridge suspended between the walls of the Irk culvert underneath Victoria Station, Manchester.

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2.4 Former World War II air-​raid shelters constructed beneath the Great Northern Warehouse, Manchester.

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2.5 Image of the devil on one of the walls of the former air-​raid shelters.

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2.6 ‘Manchester, getting up the steam’, Builder, October 1853. Wood-​engraved print. viii

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Illustrations 2.7 Demolition of Royd Mill, Oldham, September 2013.

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2.8 Still from A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961), showing Victoria Mill on the banks of the Rochdale Canal in Miles Platting.

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2.9 Interior of Hartford Mill, Oldham, March 2014.

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2.10 Festival at Hartford Mill in 1864, as shown in the Illustrated London News, celebrating the owner John Platt’s election as the Member of Parliament for Oldham.

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2.11 Brunswick Mill on Old Mill Street, Ancoats, March 2014.

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2.12 Private houses under construction in New Islington in June 2015 (top), compared with a promotional hoarding depicting Urban Splash’s original vision for the area (bottom).

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2.13 The former Ancoats Dispensary building on Old Mill Street, Ancoats, where a vigil by local residents took place for over three years from 2011, before they secured the property in 2015.

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3.1 The fence around Varosha marking the Forbidden Zone, 2013.

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3.2 Decaying frontage of one of Varosha’s high-​rise hotel buildings, as seen from Palm Beach, 2013.

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3.3 View of Varosha at night from the fence across Palm Beach, 2013.

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3.4 View of Varosha from the fifth-​floor terrace of an apartment building in Irakleos Street, 2013.

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3.5 View northwards along 16th of June Street, Varosha, Cyprus, 2013.

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3.6 First-​floor hallway in a former house in Galinou Street, Varosha, 2013.

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3.7 Remains of a motorcycle in a ground-​floor room in a building in Galinou Street, Varosha, 2013.

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Illustrations 3.8 Remains of an unidentified object in the first-​floor hallway of a house in Galinou Street, Varosha, 2013.

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3.9 Former workshop in Akropoleos Street, Varosha, Cyprus, 2013.

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4.1 View of the sarcophagus constructed around the remains of Chernobyl’s fourth reactor in 2007 before the new ‘Shelter’ was built from 2012 onwards, showing the author standing next to the 2006 monument to those who died in the clean-​up operation. Reproduced by permission of Quintin Lake.

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4.2 Detail of the model used to describe the Chernobyl accident to visitors, showing the destroyed reactor.

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4.3 1996 monument to the 28 firefighters killed in the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in 1986.

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4.4 View of Pripyat from the terrace of the Polyssia Hotel, 2007.

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4.5 Ferris wheel in Pripyat’s amusement park, due to open just days after Chernobyl’s reactor exploded on 26 April 1986 (photograph taken in 2007).

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4.6 Soviet socialist paintings stored in a room in the former Palace of Culture in Pripyat, 2007.

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4.7 Children’s education posters in a former classroom, Pripyat, 2007.

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4.8 Quintin Lake’s photograph of a silver birch tree growing through the floor of a room in the former Polyssia Hotel, Pripyat, 2007. Reproduced by permission of the photographer.

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4.9 Gynaecological chair and gas mask in the grounds of the former hospital in Pripyat, 2007.

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4.10 Children’s toys left on the seat of a rusting carousel in the amusement park in Pripyat, 2007.

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4.11 Still from S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat (2011).

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Illustrations 5.1 I-​94 Industrial Park, formerly the St Cyril neighbourhood in northeastern Detroit, 2015.

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5.2 House in northeastern Detroit transformed by the artist Monica Canilao, 2015.

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5.3 The Imagination Station, Corktown, 2015, created by the artist Catie Newell in 2011.

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5.4 Installation in one of the houses destroyed by arson in 2014 at the Heidelberg Project, Detroit, 2015.

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5.5 Structural cut in the Michigan Theater in downtown Detroit, 2015.

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5.6 One of the many concrete abutments preserved in the Dequindre Cut, Detroit, 2015.

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5.7 Mural in Detroit’s Eastern Market district, April 2015.

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5.8 Mural in Hamtramck, an ethnically-​diverse city within Detroit, 2015.

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5.9 Mural by Revok overpainted by Sintex in Detroit’s Grand River Creative Corridor, 2015.

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5.10 The African Language Wall, part of Olayami Dabls’s African Bead Museum, Detroit, 2015.

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5.11 Sculpture created from recycled waste in Detroit’s Lincoln Park, 2015.

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5.12 Scott Hocking, Ziggurat and Fisher Body 21 (2007–​2009), photographed by Hocking in 2009. Reproduced by permission of the artist.

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5.13 Graffiti in Detroit’s abandoned Southwest Hospital, 2015.

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5.14 Some of the many representations of clocks in the Heidelberg Project, Detroit, 2015.

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6.1 Unfinished plaza in Valdeluz, Spain, 2014.

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6.2 Part of the unfinished business park in Valdeluz, Spain, 2014.

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Illustrations 6.3 Abandoned (left) and renovated (right) sections of the Park Hill estate in Sheffield, 2015.

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6.4 Incomplete athletics and polo stadium in Giarre, Sicily, 2015.

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6.5 Unfinished Regional Swimming Pool in Trepunto, Sicily, 2015.

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6.6 Unfinished ‘Multifunctional Hall’ in Trepunto, Sicily, 2015.

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6.7 Incomplete children’s play area in Chico Mendez park, Giarre, Sicily, 2015.

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Unless otherwise stated, all photographs are by the author.

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Acknowledgements The research for this book has been carried out since 2007 and, in its final stages, was supported by an ISRF Independent Scholar Fellowship, which freed up time to complete the writing. Many people –​friends, family and colleagues –​have enriched the work as it has evolved. SoloEast Travel in Kiev kickstarted the whole project by taking me to Chernobyl and Pripyat, and Quintin Lake was game enough to come with me (and has produced his own wonderful photographic responses to that adventure). That trip led to much thinking and writing and I’m grateful to Bob Catterall, Dan Swanton and the anonymous reviewers at CITY for really pushing the work forward, and the same can be said for Katia Pizzi and Marjatta Hietala regarding the chapter they asked me to write for Cold War Cities. I’m also indebted to Baillie Card and Maddy Hamey-​Thomas at I.B.Tauris, and Ellen-​Raissa Jackson at Mish Mosh Media for being so committed to this project and for their exemplary editing, which has improved the text enormously. The work on Manchester grew out of a strong attachment to my adopted home city, and the research here greatly benefitted from input from Mark Watson, Linda Carver and all the volunteers at the Ancoats Dispensary Trust, particularly Patrick Sudlow, Chris Simpson and Jackie Marsden. Also in Manchester, I’ve been lucky enough to have found great support through colleagues that have also become friends: Anirudha Dhanawade, Marion Endt-​Jones, Clare O’Dowd, Lara Eggleton, Andy Hardman, and Anne Kirkham have all been terrific to work (and drink) with, and Clare and Andy also contributed much to the ‘Big Ruins’ conference that I organized in May 2014. That event, made possible by the generosity of Jackie Stacey, was also enriched by contributions from Luke Bennett, Mike Crang, Tim Edensor, Emma Fraser, Lee Hassall, Carl Lavery, Camilla Mörk Röstvik, Clare O’Dowd, and William Viney. I am particularly grateful to both Tim and Emma for our long chats about ruins, particularly the ruins of Detroit, and for their encouragement at critical points in the research. Our mutual friend Bradley Garrett has been equally generous in his support and I’ve xiii

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Acknowledgements particularly valued the contributions he has made to my teaching, research and general outlook on life, encouraging me in his inimitable way to take risks and to have fun at the same time. I’ve also been lucky enough to benefit from the coming together of friendship and work with Carlos López Galviz, whose Reconfiguring Ruins project in 2015 was a privilege to be involved with and which set the course for the approach I adopted in Detroit. In the workshops that Carlos organized in London and Newcastle, I benefitted enormously from conversations with Adam Stock, Mark Pendleton, Thomas Dekeyser, Nick Rush-​Cooper and Nadja Bartolini. Although my trepidation about staying in Detroit proved to be completely unfounded, it was allayed not least by the friendship of Jeremy Winn and the warmth and generosity of the people I met there, including Ingrid LaFleur, Eli Kabir, Scott Hocking, Kevin Ward, Jeffery Jimison, Joe Krause, and all at Hostel Detroit. The research on Varosha came together as a result of the generosity of three former residents –​George, Olia and Afghi –​who were kind enough to answer my questions about their understandably painful pasts. An earlier version of ­Chapter 3 was originally published as ‘Traversing the fantasies of urban destruction: ruin gazing in Varosha’, CITY 19/​1 (2015), pp. 44–​60; while parts of ­Chapter 4 have been published as ‘Petrified ruin: Chernobyl, Pripyat the death of the city’, CITY 14/​4 (2010), pp. 370–​89, and ‘Chernobyl diaries: monuments, ruins and memories’, in Katia Pizzi and Marjatta Hietala (eds), Cold War Cities: History, Culture and Memory (Oxford, 2016), pp. 145–​67. In addition, small segments of ­Chapter 2 formed parts of two articles for the edited collection Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within (Reaktion, 2016); and ­Chapter 6 for the article ‘Sheffield’s Park Hill: the tangled reality of an extraordinary Brutalist dream’, Guardian Cities, 14 August 2015. Finally, family have been extremely important in keeping me going in the long periods of solitary research for this book: Lisa in putting up with my anxieties, the results of some of my ill-​advised explorations, and my propensity to despair at the slightest disappointment; and Isla, who entered my life just at the point at which the research began, and has sometimes shared, sometimes laughed at, my strange obsession with ruins. Finally, my mother Anne has supported me throughout and in one way that I will always be grateful for and, for that reason (and many others), it is to her that I dedicate this book. xiv

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Introduction: urban ruins, imagination and exploration

In recent years a growing obsession with ruins has taken hold: a veritable Ruinenlust that seems to recall the earlier Romantic fascination with decay and ruination.1 The flourishing academic interest in ruins has centred on them as sites that undermine capitalist/​state manifestations of power, challenge conventional practices of ordering urban space, and suggest new ways of relating to the past, present and future.2 At the same time, popular culture has seen an onslaught of visualizations of large-​scale ruination. On the one hand, news reportage has pictured all the horrors of violent urban destruction, from the events of 9/​11 to the more recent destruction in cities of the Middle East, both ancient and modern, such as Damascus, Homs, Gaza, Nimrud and Palmyra, whether by civil war, Islamic State or the American-​led ‘War on Terror’. On the other hand, ruins have proliferated in recent (post)apocalyptic cinema and television, increasingly sophisticated ‘realist’ backdrops of video games, and in the work of contemporary artists as well as the subject of recent exhibitions, such as Ruin Lust, held at Tate Britain in 2014.3 How we imagine urban ruination impacts upon how we approach and plan for it in real life. So how might we negotiate the fine lines between fantasies of urban destruction and its manifestation in daily reality? In other words, how can imagining the city in ruins help us to face the inevitability of urban decay and destruction? 1

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay This book will address these questions by focusing on the relationship between realist and imaginary ways of representing urban ruins. Each of the book’s six chapters deals with different sites and visions of urban ruin: imagined apocalypses in London, ruins in post-​industrial Manchester, the ‘dead’ cities of Pripyat and Varosha, art and ruins in contemporary Detroit, and incomplete built environments in Sheffield, Spain and Sicily. The central aim of the book is to create a dialogue between the experience of urban ruination and the imagination. Cities throughout history have been subject to ruination, whether through war, natural disaster, or technological or social failure, but there has been a recent upsurge in anxiety in the affluent West about the vulnerability of cities given the multiple threats of climate change, intensifying social division, economic instability, explosive population growth, and wars and other acts of violence that deliberately target urban areas.4 At the same time, cities are just as likely to be subject to imagined acts of annihilation as they are in reality, manifest in the plethora of ruin representations we see today in photographs, literature, film and art.5 The tendency thus far, at least in the academic literature on ruins, has been to establish clear boundaries between the fictive and the real, and a related division between aesthetic and political readings of ruins.6 Yet, it should already be clear that we cannot make such a clear distinction between these categories because they are always entangled. Part of the problem today is negotiating the sheer numbers of images of urban ruination that characterize contemporary visual culture –​a barrage of photographs, computer-​generated spectacle and news footage that piles wreckage upon wreckage.7 It is understandable that academics have tried to make sense of this imagery, to explain its proliferation as a symptom of a pervasive ‘anxiety of decline’ or the mark of a decadent cultural pessimism;8 yet, what is generally missing in the current responses to such imagery is an acceptance of the vital role of the imagination in shaping both representations and experience of urban ruins. As historian Nick Yablon has argued, visions of modern cities in ruins are not necessarily ‘expressions of cultural pessimism or nihilism’ but can serve ‘as vehicles of spiritual pleasure’ that ‘preserve the redemptive potential of the past in such a way as to unmask the conceits of the present’.9 In this reading, imagining cities in ruins resonates with a long-​held utopian desire for a reconciliation between the human-​built urban world and what that world either destroys 2

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Introduction: urban ruins, imagination and exploration or keeps under strict control, namely nature. Thus, even as visions of cities in ruin show nature finally gaining the upper hand, they also channel the longing for a more peaceful coexistence of the human and non-​human. This book will chart a course through the rich and expanding spectacle of decay to seek out just such a redemptive path. By drawing together first-​ hand experiences of sites of ruin, in the form of photographs and texts that document my urban explorations and dark tourism, historical and political scholarship, the study of urban ruins in visual culture, and theories of post-​ apocalypse, I want to sketch out how employing a range of methodological approaches can enlarge and enrich the ways in which we negotiate urban ruins, both real and imagined. At the heart of the book’s method is a desire to open out the field of enquiry in how we think through endings in relation to cities and architecture. As Stephen Cairns and Jane Jacobs’s provocative book Buildings Must Die (2014) has argued, in a world so dominated by the prospect of ever-​more dire threats to urban life and particularly the worsening predictions of the catastrophic, perhaps even terminal, damage that will be wrought by unstoppable climate change, architects and urban planners have no choice but to develop a ‘receptiveness toward the negative realms of wasting and death’ in the built environment. Far from resulting in paralysis or pessimism, accepting ruin can ‘enrich the category of design through an expanded ethical horizon’.10 Indeed, accepting the inevitability of ruin might in fact break its grasp on us, just as can a full acceptance of human mortality.11 In a world increasingly dominated by a form of global capitalism that seems hell-​bent on continuing and accelerating its ‘creative’ destruction, and manufacturing disasters in order to impose its ‘shock doctrine’,12 there is an urgent need to foster a radically different approach to ruination, which regards it as an inevitable product not of capitalism, but rather of any society that fails to acknowledge and accept limits, vulnerabilities and endings. This introduction sketches out some of the paths by which such spaces might be created and which have guided the creation of this book, that is, through imagining the dead city, ruin aesthetics, and ruin exploration.

Imagining the dead city The city has always been haunted by the prospect of its own ruin, but increasingly so in the modern period, when the technology of warfare 3

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay developed in such a way as to make possible the ruination of entire cities, culminating in what is still the most significant urban destruction in history, namely, the Allied aerial bombardments of World War II, which saw the decimation of many German and Japanese cities.13 Throughout history, the imagination of urban destruction has taken many cultural forms: from the Biblical stories of the demise of the Tower of Babel and Sodom and Gomorrah to confrontations with the past in Chinese huaigu poetry of the first millennium CE.14 In the modern period in the West, imagined urban destruction often centred on aesthetic responses to natural disasters, such as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755,15 and intimations of imperial decline as seen in Edward Gibbon’s seminal text The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–​88), as well as countless other meditations on empire in both European and North American contexts throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and arguably with renewed force today in the United States.16 Although it is impossible to generalize about such a wide range of cultural, geographical and historical contexts, the fantasy of ruined cities has, in the West since the nineteenth century, come to represent a ‘counter-​ dream’ to the dominant progressive narrative of industrial modernity.17 In this sense, the imagination of urban ruin has bolstered a critique of progressive narratives, particularly amongst early twentieth-​century German Marxist theorists. For Ernst Bloch, ruins encapsulated utopian longings that transcended industrial modernity,18 while Georg Simmel’s equally utopian understanding of the ruin rested on experiencing it as a site of cosmic peace and temporal stasis.19 In a similar vein, Walter Benjamin’s engagement with urban ruins, particularly outmoded buildings like the Paris arcades, argued for their importance as sites to recover past utopian potentialities –​the longing for an urban life that is reconciled with nature and freed from the burden of social hostilities –​to challenge the illusion of progress.20 More recently, the imagining of dead cities has responded to the multiple threats now confronting urban life. Today, representations of dead cities remind us of the essential fragility of cities, leading to a healthy dissolution of hubris.21 They also allow us to confront the urban traumas of the past, particularly the massive scale of urban destruction carried out during World War II,22 or, more recently, as a way of framing collective responses to 9/11.23 Finally, as demonstrated by Mike Davis, dead cities can be a powerful 4

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Introduction: urban ruins, imagination and exploration imaginative tool for understanding the city–​nature dialectic, vital for coming to terms with the likely future impact of climate change on urban life.24 Collectively, these responses demonstrate that the imagination of dead cities offers rich potential for both reflective and critical thinking –​a mode of perception that has the capacity to open up a multitude of potentialities that suggest non-​linear forms of historical development.25 Representations of dead cities can also be related more generally to the apocalyptic imagination, particularly in popular cinema, photography and video games. Susan Sontag’s influential critique of the cinematic imagination of disaster, originally published in 1965, has remained a potent source in contemporary responses to imaginative representations of urban ruins. Sontag’s argument was that the motif of the dead city in disaster cinema of the 1950s invited viewers to gain a ‘dispassionate, aesthetic view of destruction’, thereby releasing them from any moral obligation to confront ‘what is psychologically unbearable’, namely the reality of such mass destruction.26 Resonating perhaps most clearly in critical responses to recent photographs of Detroit as a ‘dead’ city, Sontag’s argument has been used to bolster criticism of these images as reprehensible forms of aestheticizing (commonly called ‘ruin porn’) that distance viewers from both the human tragedy of Detroit and the causes of its ruin (see ­Chapter 5).27 In a similar vein, the cultural geographer Erik Swyngedouw has argued that apocalyptic imaginaries of climate change and the prospect of catastrophic flooding in many cities across the world are now tools that domesticate communal fears and prevent meaningful political action because they impose an idea of pure negativity on the world, namely the prospect of total extinction.28 However, popular spectacles of apocalyptic destruction, particularly cinematic ones, have always been much more varied and complex than critics such as Sontag and Swyngedouw have acknowledged, making it problematic to generalize about the effect they have on their audiences.29 Indeed, as the technical sophistication of computer-​generated imagery (CGI) increases, so too does the range of opportunity for visualizing spectacles of urban destruction, particularly in cinema and video games. Increasingly ‘realistic’ representations of dead cities such as New York in I am Legend (2007) can open up spaces of stillness that are necessary for new forms of thinking to emerge, precisely because these representations suspend in the imagination the mechanisms that sustain capitalism and its 5

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay progressive ideology. Indeed, some critics have argued that only if capitalism and its urban centres of production are already imagined in ruins can such new thinking emerge, whether in a practice of salvage that remakes the world out of its ruins,30 new forms of time that emancipate us from the constricting linear and ‘productive’ time of capitalism,31 or returns to past traumas in order to work through them towards healing.32 Although the motif of the dead city runs throughout this book, there are specific ways in which I employ it in response to such emancipatory readings. The first chapter examines literary and cinematic representations of London in ruins from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) to Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow (2014). In direct contrast to Sontag and others, I argue that imaginative representations of dead cities can be conceived as both a critical tool in their ‘flattening’ of social divisions and also a powerful way in which personal and social transformations can be conceptualized. Chapter 2 historicizes the image of the dead city in a different way to explore the variety of meanings that can be ascribed to ruins in post-​ industrial Manchester or, more generally, the lingering presence of the dead city within the living one. As I argue, the remnants of Manchester’s long history of decline and a persistent imaginary of disaster challenges the often superficial rhetoric of regeneration that characterizes the image of the city today. The middle section of the book focuses more squarely on how the imagination of dead cities informed my own explorations of the physical remains of two ‘ghost’ towns: Varosha, in Cyprus (­Chapter 3) and Pripyat, near Chernobyl (­Chapter 4). Both chapters bridge imagination and experience through an interrogation of the role of fantasy in apprehending large-​scale urban ruination. The chapter on Varosha tackles this head on, exploring how fantasy images of urban annihilation, of being the last witness to humanity, and of the world without humanity can promote and enrich an imaginative way of thinking that does not ignore the reality of urban ruination but rather develops an openness to the multiple voices that lay claim to such places. The chapter on Pripyat focuses on how memory might function as a redemptive trope in representations of this dead city, in order to open up a space of dialogue between the town’s contested histories and my personal memories of the site. The final two chapters explore how the imagination of urban ruins informs how we conceive of urban futures, 6

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Introduction: urban ruins, imagination and exploration whether through creative engagements with some of the tens of thousands of abandoned buildings and vacant sites in Detroit (­Chapter 5), or the ‘new’ ruins (unfinished buildings) that can be found in every city in the world –​my focus here being on the Park Hill estate in Sheffield, Valdeluz in Spain, and Giarre in Sicily (­Chapter 6). These final chapters suggest that the imagination has a powerful role to play in thinking through and enacting new uses for urban ruins, both now and in the future when such ruins are likely to become ever more prevalent. In arguing for the vital role of the imagination in reckoning with urban ruins, this book taps into an important current tendency in radical politics. According to the urban theorist Andy Merrifield, ‘reality’ as conceptualized by conventional Marxist critics has been overtaken by a cultural milieu saturated with images, where ‘innumerable fictions and false images of the world’ ceaselessly circulate and financial speculation has replaced ‘real’ capital. Thus, for Merrifield, the task of radical politics today is no longer to uncover the ‘real’ truth behind false appearances, but rather to imagine and invent other truths in order to reinvent the conditions of what is actually possible.33 Indeed, Fredric Jameson’s oft-​quoted remark that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism directly challenges the poverty of the contemporary imagination in its inability to generate genuinely new possibilities that go beyond mere escapist fantasies.34 Under the intense pressures of an accelerating pace of urban life and an equally accelerating rate of urban development, with its processes of demolition and construction, there is a pressing need to create both physical and temporal zones that can help reinvest the imagination with the ‘magical’ power that Merrifeld argues is necessary for an alternative vision to neoliberal capitalism to emerge and gain potency.35 Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls this process one of ‘authentic artistic passivity’, or, put more simply, stepping out of the ceaseless tumult of images and illusions in order to foster, through the imagination, a vision of the new.36 It is precisely the argument of this book that bringing together the experience and imagination of urban ruins has the potential to contribute to this process, where the contemplation of urban ends leads not to paralysis or cynicism but rather to new beginnings. An inevitable question remains: should we always integrate ruins into the present, or are there cases where we really are better off just levelling 7

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay the ground and moving on? Should failure –​and all ruins speak of failure of one kind or another –​always be remembered and incorporated into the city? In one of Sigmund Freud’s last works, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), he makes an explicit analogy between the history of the city and that of the mind. For Freud, the mind, like the city, is a palimpsest where ‘earlier phases of development [are] absorbed into the later ones, for which they supplied the material’.37 In this reading, the mind can never be free of anything that has hitherto contributed to its formation, however traumatic or painful. Indeed, the basis of a well-​integrated psyche lies precisely in accepting that past traumas cannot be moved on from but need to be continually worked through. It might be argued that the city is very different from the human mind, occupying as it does real physical space. Yet, as I have already argued, for human subjects, cities are a meld of matter and mind –​both the conception of the urban fabric in urban planning and design and our experience of it are always shaped by the human imagination. And if there can be no clear distinguishing of mind and city, it follows that, like minds, cities too must keep hold of all of their histories, no matter how traumatic or redolent of failure some of those may be.

Ruin aesthetics Critics of the contemporary obsession with decay have directed their attention to the proliferation of images of ruins, described by art historian Dora Apel and others as representing the overt aestheticizing of destruction.38 Indeed, criticism of the imagination of disaster feeds directly into the discourse of ‘ruin porn’ that has emerged in relation to images, principally photographs, of the ruins of Detroit. Drawing on Sontag’s argument, Apel has criticized such images as distancing the city’s human tragedy and its causes by means of an aesthetics that emphasizes the beautiful over the terrible.39 For Apel, the photographers of these images, and by implication their audiences, lack the nerve to face up to the real social conditions of those living with the ruins of Detroit. In a similar vein, but more specifically relating to post-​industrial ruination, Steven High has attacked what he regards as the overly aestheticizing approach of cultural geographer Tim Edensor, most notably in his 2005 book Industrial Ruins. In relation to this work, High has argued that when ruin aesthetics take precedence, wider social and political issues are 8

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Introduction: urban ruins, imagination and exploration inevitably subsumed.40 At heart, these are arguments about the morality of ruin aesthetics, a negative reaction to the idea that pleasure can be taken in tragedy. In both High and Apel’s work, much of this criticism has been levelled at photographs of ruins produced and disseminated by urban explorers, which have proliferated online, particularly in specialist forums and digital news media. Indeed, the tone of much of this critical work is iconoclastic, seeking to counter the seductive lure of such imagery. Whilst it is important to recognize the differences between the aesthetic and political in images of ruination, what these moral arguments enforce is an overly simplistic division between the two categories which, I would argue, does not serve to enrich either. A more inclusive approach would find affinities and attempt to build bridges between aesthetics and politics and, indeed, this has informed the work of some commentators and critics.41 As historian Nick Yablon has demonstrated in his work on urban destruction in the long nineteenth century in America, photographs of ruins –​even those that pictured the aftermath of disasters such as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake –​were not primarily concerned with domesticating the trauma of the disaster, but rather ‘confronting the impact of disaster on a modern, technologized city’.42 In this reading, a fixation on ruins, often manifest in multiple photographs of the same site, allowed survivors of that ruin to ‘work through their trauma over time’.43 Such an understanding of images of ruin acknowledges their important role in creating a space and a time for reflection –​a still point that is generative rather than repressive but fundamentally open in its interpretive capacity. The political resonances of such reflective images are more complex and radically uncertain than critics of ruin imagery would perhaps like to acknowledge; indeed, they vary greatly, generating both radical and reactionary visions precisely because of the very openness of the possible meanings of such ruin imagery.44 What any aesthetics of ruins –​whether in literature, art, photography, or film –​does is to provide a representation that forges a link between how we imagine ruins and how we relate to them as material objects. This melding of matter and mind is important because it chimes with philosopher Félix Guattari’s reading of ecology –​or what he terms ‘ecosophy’ –​as the coming together of individual subjectivity, social relations and the environment.45 For Guattari, an ecology of the mind means one that resists the 9

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay tendency of contemporary capitalism or, by implication, any dominating worldview, to limit the human imagination by subjugating it to ideological dictates. In this sense, the imagination is already politicized because, as a faculty that only flourishes when set free, it is inherently antithetical to such subjugation. Thus, the imaginative experience of ruins is a vital way in which we can resist what capitalism wants to impose on us; a mental ecology that learns to accept endings and to embrace the openness of ruins is fundamentally at odds with a way of thinking that is dominated by acquisition and progress. Furthermore, as an emancipatory tactic, the imagination gives credence to multiple subjectivities, making it harder for any single narrative to dominate our understanding of a given historical event, place or group of people. Of course, cohering these subjectivities into a collective form is intensely problematic and always risks diminishing the multiple into something lesser. Yet, in order to fully embrace what happens when we encounter ruins, we must begin in the only place we can, that is, facing outwards from our own subjective worlds, ready to engage with whatever we encounter. From that place, we can aim to find resonances with others’ subjectivities and build a collective basis for re-​inhabiting ruins in new and inventive ways. Whether or not the generative potential of ruin imagery leads to an emancipatory or regressive politics is dependent just as much on the ethics of the observer as it is on those that produce such imagery. An ethics that embraces openness and multiplicity is very different from one that seeks to polarize and shut down potentialities. As Edensor has argued, the knowledge that emerges from an openness towards ruins is not ‘empiricist, didactic or intellectual but empathetic and sensual, understood at an intuitive and affective level’. For Edensor, this approach implies ‘an ethics about confronting and understanding otherness which is tactile, imaginative and involuntary’ rather than narrowly political, social or even rational.46 This type of knowledge develops primarily by apprehending the temporality of the ruin. By their very nature, ruins gather together different moments in time: they are an obvious remnant of the past that stubbornly remains in the present, yet they also point to a future when the present will have become history. Walter Benjamin regarded this temporal gathering as critical to the redemptive capacity of ruins: ‘it’s not that what is past casts light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; 10

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Introduction: urban ruins, imagination and exploration rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation’.47 Benjamin’s constellation of meaning is apprehended intuitively rather than empirically, that is, as a magical image that momentarily changes the parameters of what is possible. This may seem a tenuous (and risky) way in which to bring about a radical politics out of ruin aesthetics, hinging as it does on a mystical subjective experience; yet, for Benjamin, the critic must take such risks if a genuine and transformative radical politics is to emerge, one that transcends divisions and opens up genuinely new possibilities. Indeed, Benjamin’s stress on the redemptive temporality of the ruin and the power of the ruin image has made itself felt in much of the recent academic literature on the subject, encompassing engagements with incompletion and obsolescence in architecture,48 re-​evaluations of historical, and particularly Romantic, responses to ruins,49 artists’ representations of ruins, both old and new,50 the value of the symbolic in responses to ruins,51 and a means by which rich repositories of urban memory might be both created and engaged.52 In an image-​saturated culture, aesthetics will continue to play an important role in how sites of ruination are both represented and experienced in a diverse range of visual media. Images –​principally my own photographs –​ also play a prominent role in this book, one that needs to be introduced here in the light of the discussion outlined above. During the eight years of research that led to this book, I used photography as both a research tool and a way of generating writing. The photographs selected for this book are thus meant to be read in conjunction with the text, not as standalone images, as they are in many other publications on ruin, the standalone image often being singled out by critics as emphasizing aesthetics over politics.53 Binding text and image together is an important way in which ruin aesthetics can be broadened to include more than just the visual, and serves to anchor the images in specific spaces and times.54 For example, in ­Chapter 4, I discuss the moment when, touring the ruins of Pripyat, I became aware of the vital human presences that still lay claim to this ‘ghost’ town. That moment and its power is documented in my photograph of new children’s toys that had been placed on a rusted carousel by former residents, who had visited the site after its abandonment (Figure 4.10). In other parts of the book, my photographs function, alongside the text, as images that illustrate processes, most notably in ­Chapter 5 where I discuss 11

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay artists’ engagements with the ruins of Detroit. Elsewhere, I use film stills to bring out the affinities between visual depictions and imagery drawn from literary fiction, again mediated through my own analysis. Whilst I make no claim to my images having the kind of political charge that Benjamin envisaged, they do perform an important role in elucidating, albeit only partially, the interweaving of experience, reflection and imagination that so characterized my own engagement with the sites laid out in this book. What I want to show is that the aesthetics of ruins encompass much more than simply the beautification of the terrible; they are the multiple and intertextual languages by which we engage with ruins and the means by which we talk about them.

Ruin exploration Contemporary ruin aesthetics, particularly in photographs, have a direct relationship with the practice known as urban exploration. Although people have always explored ruins and have done so for a wide variety of reasons, the labelling of this practice as ‘urban exploration’ and self-​conscious reflection on it only emerged in the mid-​1990s in Toronto around Jeff Chapman (his nom-​de-​plume ‘Ninjalicious’).55 Urban exploration has only gained mainstream media attention more recently, in the light of the ‘insider’ research of Bradley Garrett, published in his 2013 book Explore Everything: Place-​Hacking the City. Centred around the exploration of illicit and largely urban sites –​temporary, obsolete, abandoned or derelict spaces –​urban exploration embraces a wide diversity of practices that resist generalization but which are characterized by both intensely valuing subjective experience and also nurturing an exclusive and secretive community of fellow explorers.56 In Garrett’s case, there’s also an explicit political charge to the practice: he has argued that urban exploration challenges the increasing securitization of the city under neoliberal capitalism and undermines ‘singular, authoritative narratives over space’.57 Although the exploration of ruins is only one aspect of the practice, it is nevertheless an important starting point for most urban explorers and the source of much imagery that now proliferates in photographic collections both online and in print. As Garrett has argued, urban explorers’ fascination with ruins (and particularly industrial ruins) stems from a desire to engage with history 12

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Introduction: urban ruins, imagination and exploration on their own terms, free from interpretative schemas that change ruins into heritage.58 Although many urban explorers are drawn to the rich historical association of ruins, they resist being told how to interpret them, demonstrated perhaps most obviously in the approach adopted by the conservation group English Heritage, where the ruins they open up to visitors are almost always accompanied by interpretative plaques and signage. In contrast to this, urban explorers’ approach to history is often strongly imaginative, a meld of the real and the fictional which sees explorers casting themselves forward in time in ruins, imagining a post-​apocalyptic future in which they are perhaps the only human survivors.59 Such fantasies inform many photographs produced by urban explorers, from the cover image on the popular photographic book Beauty in Decay (2010), showing a lone, presumably male, explorer visiting a ruined building wearing a gas mask, to artfully arranged objects in ruins that suggest vanished human presences.60 Given that much of the criticism of ‘ruin porn’ concerns images produced by urban explorers, it should come as no surprise that the practice itself has also been subject to much negative critical scrutiny. Just as the work of Tim Edensor has been singled out by some as lacking an ethical and moral commitment to ruins, and particularly their past and present inhabitants, so urban explorers have been regarded as expressing a ‘cultural pessimism’, which, according to Apel, ‘abandons history and collective politics for subjective individualism’.61 In addition, the practice has been accused of voyeurism, with the explorer as outsider, finding pleasure in ‘looking at some exoticized and deliberately tragic other’ in abandoned or derelict buildings.62 Furthermore, feminist critics regard the practice as overly masculinist, given its characteristic emphasis on physical prowess and ‘hero shots’ –​photographs of illicit sites that also include predominantly male explorers in a variety of heroic poses.63 Finally, the self-​confessed desire of many urban explorers to escape the numbing spectacle of contemporary capitalism, which homogenizes and sanitizes urban life, is at odds with the way in which their images often feed directly back into that spectacle, demonstrated in the spectacularization and commercialization of ruin aesthetics in online photography and glossy coffee-​table publications, much of it produced by urban explorers themselves.64 Whilst some of these criticisms have been addressed by explorers such as Garrett,65 there remains 13

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay a frustrating lack of reflection by the community on both their practice and the representations they produce of ruins and other off-​limits urban spaces.66 Indeed, in a revealing passage in Explore Everything, Garrett refers to the unease he and his fellow explorers felt when visiting Cold War ruins in Eastern Europe, particularly when they encountered people forced by necessity to live in those ruins. Despite referring to his sense of guilt over his relative affluence and privilege, the abrupt vanishing of the pleasures he felt in previous ruin explorations, and his unease at being a comfortable voyeur of other people’s pain and misery, Garrett fails to critically reflect on these feelings and how they might have affected the practice of exploring ruins. Instead, in his book, the story simply moves elsewhere –​away from ruins to other less contested urban spaces.67 In one sense, this book continues at the point where Garrett and his fellow explorers stopped, working through precisely those feelings that he found so troubling in relation to experiencing ruins. Like many urban explorers, I am attracted by the lure of secret spaces in the city, the promise of a transformative experience, and the aesthetic and sensory pleasures of ruins, so vividly described in Edensor’s work.68 Yet, I have never joined a community of explorers. Indeed, in my sole attempt to contact one such community in Manchester through the well-​known online forum 28DaysLater, I was met with outright hostility, something that I subsequently discovered was a common experience for academics and writers approaching this and other explorer groups.69 Deeply suspicious of outsiders and intensely protective of fellow explorers, communities like 28DaysLater are notorious amongst some for the draconian measures they take in response to what they regard as bad practices and selling-​out to the media (and, for his work, Garrett has effectively been silenced on 28DaysLater, which does not allow his work even to be mentioned in discussion forums, let alone accept any contributions from him). Nevertheless, my own explorations have been aided and enriched by contact with more generous and open explorers, particularly Garrett himself. Some of my explorations were solitary (Varosha being the most notable example), others were undertaken with friends (Pripyat) and some were guided, whether by people (Pripyat and most of my site visits in Detroit) or texts (sites in Giarre and Manchester). Most urban explorers would balk at the idea of a guided tour of ruins as a pale shadow of the unmediated experience they value so highly. Yet, by 14

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Introduction: urban ruins, imagination and exploration including guided visits, this book offers a more inclusive and less ‘heroic’ notion of what might constitute ruin exploration, as well as an emphasis on the role of mediation in all experiences of ruins. Finally, I also want to broaden the idea of how we experience ruins. In including a chapter on representations of ruined London in fiction and film and many references to other ruined cities in cinema and literature in the other chapters, I stress the fact that when we watch a film or read a book that engages with sites of ruin, we experience those sites in a way that is not necessarily a poor substitute for the supposed unmediated experience of urban explorers. Although the nature of both forms of experience is very different, they nevertheless interact with each other in defining and enriching what it means to explore ruins. There is also value in the subjective experience of ruins. Whilst it is fair to be critical when urban explorers prioritize their own subjectivity over any wider engagement with history or collective politics, the intense focus on personal experience so prized in urban exploration practice does not necessarily lead to severing ties with wider issues, be they historical, political or social. As already stated above, a central argument of this book is that subjectivity can indeed be a fruitful way to begin such an engagement, so long as it does not become the raison d’être of one’s approach to ruins. Throughout the process of research for this book, and the numerous visits I undertook to sites of ruin, I was surprised by the richness and breadth of analysis that emerged from my own personal experiences, which are very much the focus of the chapters on Varosha and Pripyat. Perhaps a subjective and solitary experience of ruination is a necessary element in the realization of new possibilities beyond the destructive cycles of obsolescence and newness that dominate capitalist culture. It is not that such an experience is superior to one that is collective or more objective; rather that it should be valued alongside others in the struggle for change. Here, I would align the solitary experience of ruins to contemplative practices in religious traditions, which lay stress on the value of solitude as a powerful means by which the individual can focus intently on an inward transformation that also reaches outwards to the social sphere. Perhaps only when we are temporarily freed from the burden of social relations can we envisage how they might be transformed into something richer, as we ourselves also transform. 15

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay Of course the conditions of my own subjectivity –​white, male, middle-​class, middle-​aged and with enough disposable income to travel –​ will, for some, call into question any claim that I make for the value of my subjectivity; but it is my belief that the conditions of one’s own subjectivity, particularly those that are privileged, can be mitigated by an ethics of openness that begins precisely with embracing the essential vulnerability of one’s own position, a vulnerability that emerges through a critical awareness of one’s own privileges in relation to others. Only then can subjectivity expand outwards, maintaining, wherever possible, an ethics of openness. The first Romantic ruin gazers –​those ‘grand tourists’ who meditated on the ruins of ancient Rome in the eighteenth century –​may have gained their pleasure in, and a sense of ownership of, those ruins because of their multiple privileges –​financial, social and cultural –​and drawn comfort from their outsider status and feelings of superiority.70 But for this ruin gazer, I want my own subjectivity –​privileged yet vulnerable –​to result in a very different ethics of ruin gazing, namely one that listens, gathers and reflects upon the multiple human and non-​human claims on these sites; not to order or explain them, but rather to allow those multiplicities to grow and resonate with each other.71

The sites The research that resulted in this book evolved over eight years, beginning with a visit with a friend in October 2007 to the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl.72 As I was guided around the abandoned town of Pripyat, I was overwhelmed by the scale of the ruin and by my own discomfort at being a tourist of a devastating and on-​going human tragedy (see ­Chapter 4). Coupled with a robbery in Kiev the day after the visit which resulted in an early return home for both myself and my friend, the experience left me in a state of shock that I would eventually work through in a period of research and reflection.73 It was only in 2013 that the opportunity arose for a second visit, to the abandoned town of Varosha in the Turkish occupied area of north Cyprus. Varosha was chosen as a corollary to Pripyat –​a town roughly the same size and similarly classified as a ‘ghost’ city –​because it has been abandoned for decades, but also as a contrast, because, unlike Pripyat, which attracts thousands of ‘extreme’ 16

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Introduction: urban ruins, imagination and exploration tourists every year, Varosha is an almost invisible ‘Forbidden Zone’, rarely entered by urban explorers as it is guarded by armed Turkish soldiers. My experience of Varosha, as I relate in ­Chapter 3, was very different from that of Pripyat: solitary, unguided and illicit, the experience was as ecstatic as Pripyat was traumatic and it confirmed for me the value of a larger research project on the experience and imagination of the dead city. However, instead of a ‘grand tour’ of abandoned large-​scale urban ruins –​one which might have included Ağdam in the Nagorno Karabakh Republic,74 Hashima Island and Tomioka in Japan (the latter abandoned after the accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant in 2011),75 and others mentioned in countless online lists of spectacular abandonment around the world –​I chose instead to also include ruins within cities, particularly those associated with notions of decline and disaster. In choosing Manchester, my adopted home since 2011, I wanted to investigate, through an exploration of the city’s variety of ruins, how its once prevalent image as a ‘ghost’ city –​its abandoned buildings a sign of the intractable decline of its once dominant industry, cotton –​related to its contemporary image as a city regenerated and renewed (see ­Chapter 2). This work included both solitary experiences of ruins, such as explorations of prized urban exploration sites such as the Irk culvert, and also an engagement with those who lived and engaged with ruins, with a focus on the links between regeneration and ruin in the Ancoats district of the city. After undertaking the work on Manchester, I shifted the focus again to imagined representations of London’s ruin in literature and cinema, in order to flag up the central importance of a long history of fictional destructions of London in defining the post-​apocalyptic imagination, particularly in relation to the increasingly catastrophic discourse of climate change.76 Detroit –​the subject of ­Chapter 5 –​is a city still dealing with on-​going decline and innumerable abandoned buildings. Like Manchester it was a city dependent on one industry –​in Detroit’s case, automobile production –​the ruthless disinvestment of which, in combination with extreme racial segregation, has left the city with tens of thousands of abandoned buildings. A mecca for both urban explorers and ruin photographers alike, Detroit, in contrast to ‘invisible’ sites like Varosha, has become perhaps the most overexposed example of post-​industrial urban decline, 17

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay overshadowing a similar trend in many cities across the world, from other rust belt cities in the USA to ex-​Soviet manufacturing cities, such as Ivanovo in Russia.77 In choosing Detroit, I wanted to negotiate the intense contemporary focus on the city’s abandoned buildings and explore how creative engagements with some of those ruins are shaping the future trajectories of the city. As a corollary to this emphasis on ruins and urban futures, for the last chapter, I selected three urban sites dominated by unfinished architectures –​Valdeluz in Spain, the Park Hill estate in Sheffield, and Giarre in Sicily –​where conditions of ruination reflect the on-​going legacy of contemporary economic collapse, particularly the global financial crisis of 2007–​2008. Incomplete buildings, or ‘ruins in reverse’, not only challenge the conventional notion of ruins as evidence of past disasters, but also, in their proliferation after 2008, the future histories of many cities across the world today. There are clearly drawbacks to this book, which reflect my own limited resources, in terms of time, money and capabilities. First, due to a lack of travel time and funds, combined with my own linguistic deficiencies (I confidently speak and write only in English), the sites explored are all in Europe and the United States, which is also the principal locus of much of the contemporary obsession with ruins. As such, this book does little to shift discourse on ruins away from the geographic West, with all of its privileges, cultural biases and historical baggage. Although there are recent studies that deal with the relationship between ruins and urbanism in other global contexts –​China, Latin America and the Middle East, for example78 –​there is still a need for a more wide-​ranging global approach to the subject as well as more site-​specific ones that engage with rapid urbanization in the global South and the ruins this process both creates and destroys.79 Secondly, there is a need for more accounts of urban ruins by those who are directly affected by them, rather than ruin tourists like myself, however well intentioned the latter may be. The fact that the majority of people forced to live in or with urban ruins are disadvantaged in so many different ways should not preclude them participating in the current debates on the subject, dominated as they are by the privileged few. Thirdly, despite this book’s emphasis on the intertextuality of images of urban ruins, there is still a need to expand the remit of scholarship to popular media, particularly video games and related online imagery.80 18

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Introduction: urban ruins, imagination and exploration Finally, there are obvious limits to the overly subjective approach adopted in this book, ones that I try to openly acknowledge wherever possible. As the product of mainly solitary research and writing, this book offers only, at best, a partial view on the subject. It remains up to you, the book’s readers, to enrich that partial picture with your own responses, both imaginary and otherwise.

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I

Histories

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1 Post-​apocalyptic Londons: imagining the death of a city

One of the most enduring images of London in ruins is an engraving by Gustave Doré from 1872 (Figure  1.1), the final illustration in Blanchard Jerrold’s book London: A Pilgrimage. Depicting what was then the world’s largest city and the centre of a global empire, Doré’s image was a late expression of the nineteenth-​century obsession with the figure of the ‘New Zealander’, an imagined New World successor to the British who would, in the far distant future, come to gaze upon the ruins of London just as Victorian travellers gazed upon those of ancient Rome.1 Yet, far from being a hackneyed image embodying the all-​too-​obvious fears of imperial decline, this engraving contains within it multiple ruin imaginaries that cannot be resolved into a single narrative. For some Victorians, London was a monstrous city –​a chaotic and socially divided urban environment –​that required some form of apocalyptic destruction to create a blank slate for the building of a cleaner, more ordered and socially inclusive city.2 For others, its monstrosity was equated with sin:  London was the new Babylon and, like its biblical namesake, would be subject to violent destruction as a form of judgment.3 For still others, Victorian London was so divorced from and exploitative of nature that the latter would some day have its revenge, swallowing the city’s ruins in a new kind of jungle.4 In short, for Victorians, the imagination of London’s ruin reflected many ways of thinking about 23

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay

Figure 1.1  Gustave Doré, ‘The New Zealander’, in Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (London, 1872), wood-​engraved print.

the city, ones that drew together past, present and future in an allegorical mode of expression. In this mode, London’s ruins were not a spectacle to be enjoyed, or a romantic escape into an imagined future, but rather had a direct, if ambiguous, relationship to the anxieties and traumas experienced 24

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Post-apocalyptic Londons: imagining the death of a city in the city.5 Imagining London’s ruin thus opened the door to a redemptive way of thinking about and working through the very possibility of that ruin. This chapter will trace genealogies of the imagination of London’s destruction from the early nineteenth century to the present day, focusing on images in literature and cinema.6 Today, London, like many other low-​lying cities across the world, is regularly warned of its future destruction by the catastrophic flooding that will inevitably result from rising global temperatures, and those warnings are often accompanied by images of the city’s death by water (Figure 1.2).7 However, it is seldom acknowledged by those producing or disseminating such images that they are part of a long genealogy of narratives that have already imagined the city’s demise.8 This chapter will redress this omission by bringing out the multiple meanings embedded in the historical imagination of London’s destruction and showing how they might have a direct bearing on how we think about the future of the city today. It fleshes out the contours of the historical makeup of the imagination of London’s ruin in relation to three principal typologies  –​the empty city, the destroyed city, and the submerged city  –​with

Figure  1.2 Digital ‘wallpaper’ image by Alex Koshelkov showing the City of London submerged by flood waters, 2013. Reproduced by permission of the artist.

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay urban ruination conceived in a variety of ways: the emptying out of the city through a decimating pandemic; catastrophic urban destruction from the air, whether human-​or alien-​led; and the obliteration of the city by natural forces. My exploration of imagined visions of London’s ruin is significant in four distinct ways. Firstly, establishing connections between the real and the imagined in relation to urban ruins is important because, as geographer Stephen Graham has argued, ‘cities are unmade and annihilated discursively’ as much as they are by embodied acts of ruination, whether carried out by humans or non-​human agents.9 Secondly, imaginative visions of urban ruin are significant because they allow readers/​viewers to inhabit those spaces vicariously. The extent to which they are convincing comes out of this ability to situate readers/​viewers within the ruined urban landscape being imagined. In this sense, the imagination of urban disaster is important because it provides alternative ways of thinking through urban ruin, ones that will have some effect on lived experience in the real city itself, both now and in the future. Thirdly, imaginative visions of urban ruin tend to flatten out the predominately vertical structure of the city and, by doing so, provide a pertinent critique of social and spatial hierarchies in the city which, at least in the case of London, are becoming ever more pronounced, as its property values escalate and the urban poor suffer most from the on-​going politics of austerity. To imagine those divisions obliterated by apocalyptic ruination may seem an extreme way of envisaging a more socially just city, yet the apocalyptic imagination nevertheless exposes critical truths about modern urban life that can be strongly expressed in this mode of thinking.10 Finally, the imagination of disaster can be conceived as a powerful way in which personal transformation can be worked out; as argued time and again by J. G. Ballard, disaster may be a catalyst for a radical reworking of the relationship between the external urban world and the ‘inner space’ of its inhabitants’ minds –​a ‘very potent, very powerful area’ for the imagination.11 Following Ballard, this chapter will show just how important the imagination of disaster is to any formulation of the legacy, experience and possible future prospect of urban ruin in London and, by extension, other vulnerable cities across the globe. 26

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Post-apocalyptic Londons: imagining the death of a city

The empty city Emptiness as allegory The deserted city is an enduring image in post-​apocalyptic literature and cinema; it is rooted in the straightforward power of contrast, that is, between the normally bustling daytime city and its empty double –​a city which is only buildings, both strangely familiar and also uncanny.12 Representations of empty cities are also dependent on a pervasive fantasy trope: that of being the last witness to a world in ruins, or a lone survivor after an apocalyptic event (see also ­Chapter 3). Dating back at least to Edward Gibbon’s retrospective claim to have conceived of his monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1764 as he ‘sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol’,13 the trope of the solitary ruin-​gazer of the future became enormously popular in the nineteenth century, usually as a way of questioning imperial hubris –​Gibbon’s notion of inevitable decline and fall –​particularly in Britain and the United States.14 It was first brought to life in literature in Cousin de Grainville’s novel Le Dernier Homme (1806) in French and, in English fiction, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826).15 These foundational texts provided the overarching template for virtually all city-​based, post-​apocalyptic fantasies to come and particularly the many cinematic narratives of a lone, and almost always male, survivor coming to terms with the emptying out of the urban world by a cataclysmic force, whether man-​made, natural or extraterrestrial. In The Last Man, that force is a worldwide pandemic –​a plague that originates in the Far East and spreads inexorably towards Europe. The story tells of the gradual decimation of the world’s population by disease, leaving a dwindling group of aristocratic survivors who move between Windsor and London as the population plummets, before finally leaving London for continental Europe. Lionel, the eponymous last man, is eventually left alone to tell his story.16 London features in the novel sporadically as a way of framing the impact of the plague –​periodic visits by Lionel and others from a rural idyll show the city gradually emptying out and falling into despair. As the narrator describes, London slowly dies: on an early visit, the city seems at first to be functioning normally, its shops open and its streets filled with people; yet, the signs of ruin are already apparent –​‘grass had 27

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay sprung high in the streets; the houses had a desolate look’.17 A few months later, ‘[t]‌he overgrown metropolis, the great heart of mighty Britain, was pulseless. Commerce had ceased […] the streets were grass-​grown, the houses empty.’18 Later, with its population down to only 1,000, London feels like ‘the ruins of an anthill immediately after its destruction’, with the former inhabitants ‘running hither and thither in search of their lost companions.’19 Lionel’s final visit, with the group preparing to leave England, is to a completely deserted city: churches are open ‘but no prayer was offered at the altars’, while birds have built their nests in their ‘consecrated spots’. Packs of dogs, as well as horses and cattle, roam the city’s streets, while the great symbol of city and empire –​St Paul’s Cathedral –​is now not a temple ‘but a tomb’. Yet, this ruin of London is not marked by collapse and decay; rather the ‘medley of undamaged buildings, and luxurious accommodation, in trim and fresh youth, was contrasted with the lonely silence of the unpeopled streets’.20 This iconography of the empty city, which had undergone ruin without destruction, marked the beginning of a preoccupation with the future imagined as post-​imperial. The pre-​eminent city of the British empire, London, initially took the symbolic weight of this imagination, which later transferred to the great cities of the new empire of the United States. Yet, in the case of The Last Man, there is a powerful subtext of personal loss that underpins the imperial fantasy: Shelley conceived of the novel in the immediate aftermath of the death of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who drowned at sea in 1822, just before his 30th birthday. Indeed, the novel is at least in part a personal memorial to the poet and the central characters are based on the married couple: the narrator, Lionel, modelled on Mary Shelley herself. Thus, the novel can be read as an allegory of human loss; grief turned into a symbolic portrait of the end of the world (as it was more recently in Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia). Read as allegory, the death of London in The Last Man seems more like a mirror of the author’s own incommensurable loss, the hollowing out of the city an architectural equivalent to the stages of human grief –​London’s dead buildings functioning as gigantic memento mori for one lost life. With these transposed architectural images, Shelley’s imaginative vision of London in ruins goes beyond mere aesthetic effect; instead, it is 28

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Post-apocalyptic Londons: imagining the death of a city grounded in the phenomenal world of her own experience. In effect, she posits a direct link between the ‘inner’ space of the mind and the ‘outer’ space of the city, their point of intersection representing reality in all its fullness. With this understanding, the gradual emptying out of London in The Last Man might not just be interpreted as having a personal meaning –​a mirror-​image of Shelley’s overwhelming grief –​but also reflecting a more universal truth, namely, what J.  G. Ballard has referred to as the ‘tremendous catastrophe’ of human existence itself: a state where ‘each day millions of cells die in our bodies [… and] every time we […] look out across a landscape […] millions of minute displacements of time and space are occurring’.21 In short, the gradual ruin of London in The Last Man is an allegory of our own entropic existence.

Emptiness with venom The Last Man may be regarded as a foundational text of post-​apocalypse; yet, it is unusual in the wider genre for its pessimistic conclusion, namely, the death of the last man resulting in the end of humankind. Post-​ apocalyptic narratives that end in the total extinction of the human species are rare, with most positing the survival of humanity as a viable and essential end point in their post-​catastrophic scenarios.22 Indeed, contrary to what one might expect, the postwar era, even with its new threat of nuclear annihilation, witnessed an upsurge in post-​apocalyptic narratives with fundamentally positive endings.23 Such ‘cosy’ catastrophe, as it has been termed by the science-​fiction novelist Brian Aldiss, was perhaps given most sustained expression in John Wyndham’s novels of the early 1950s, that is, in the immediate aftermath of World War II at the beginning of the atomic age.24 His series of novels dealing with future disasters –​whether the aftermath of a nuclear war in The Chrysalids (1955), an underwater alien invasion in The Kraken Awakes (1953), or the triple disaster of blindness, mutant homicidal plants and plague in The Day of the Triffids (1951) –​conform to Aldiss’s notion of cosy catastrophe in that each posits an eventual ‘victory’ over the cataclysmic forces, usually by a small group of survivors, even if that is achieved at great cost to humanity.25 Nevertheless, in their forensic depiction of unfolding disasters, particularly in The Kraken Awakes and The Day of the Triffids, Wyndham’s 29

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay texts render imaginative scenarios in a realist mode that force readers to engage rather than distance themselves from the effects of disaster. Indeed, The Day of the Triffids provides perhaps the most sustained representation of a post-​disaster London in literature, with over half the novel’s narrative played out in the city in the aftermath of multiple catastrophes: first mass blindness caused by unexplained bright lights in the high atmosphere; then the appearance of the triffids (genetically-​modified carnivorous plants that terrorize the blind); and, finally, a deadly plague that kills off many people. The story of London’s ruin is told through Bill Masen, a triffid specialist who, temporarily rendered sightless by one of the murderous plants he was studying, wakes up in a central London hospital to find that the majority of the city’s inhabitants have been blinded –​a scenario mimicked in several subsequent post-​disaster fictions, most notably Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later (see below). The first half of the novel recounts Masen’s experiences in London in the immediate aftermath of this disaster, before he and others leave the city, eventually taking up residence in rural strongholds against the encroaching triffids. Masen’s experience of the post-​disaster city is grounded both in his physical senses and in his imagination, which draws on images of the past and future city. Thus, the actual ‘necrosis’ of London, which Masen witnesses in the days and weeks following the disaster, is described in language that emphasizes the full sensory experience of a city in decay. Masen refers several times to the putrid smell of death that ‘rose from every city and town for weeks’ after the disaster,26 while the sight of a blind survivor clutching ‘a side of bacon from which he was hacking a ragged slice with a blunt knife’ presents a powerfully embodied image of desperate hunger.27 At the same time, as he witnesses fires beginning to take hold of ‘still living’ buildings, Masen imagines what London will become in the future, namely, a ‘visibly dead and abandoned’ city. In projecting time forward, Masen mourns not only London’s inevitable passing, but also the similar fate of countless cities in history and, he assumes, across the rest of the world in the present moment.28 Finally, Wyndham’s image of a putrefying London was directly informed by the reality of life in London in the long aftermath of World War II, when many of the city’s bombed-​out buildings continued to exist as ruins and which would have been pervasive 30

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Post-apocalyptic Londons: imagining the death of a city reminders of London’s vulnerability to destruction. So, in the drawn-​out moment when Masen contemplates the future ruin of London, he also recalls his own father’s similar feeling just before the war, when he ‘used to go round London with his eyes more widely open than ever before, seeing the beauties of buildings that he had never noticed before and saying good-​bye to them’.29 The sometimes oblique, sometimes direct references to London’s war ruins in The Day of the Triffids demonstrate that Wyndham’s ostensibly realist text can also be read as an allegory of the pervasive feeling of anxiety in the early 1950s about the vulnerability of London to disaster, both in terms of the ruin that had already been created in the city during World War II and the new Cold-​War threat of nuclear annihilation. Indeed, even the fantastic triffids might be seen as allegorical images of the verdant vegetation  –​the ‘wild green of nature’  –​that quickly covered over the city’s World War II ruins. With those ruins pervading everyday life in London during the period in which Wyndham conceived and wrote his novel, the triffids are, in sublimated form, indicative of an imagination steeped in the actual experience of the city’s bombsites (see below).30 Indeed, towards the end of the novel, just before the survivors band together to create a stronghold against the triffids on the Isle of Wight, Masen returns to London, years after the first disaster, and finds a city at once petrified and teeming with natural abundance –​a world in which buildings were ‘beginning to wear a green wig’ of moss and grass, where the ‘gardens of the parks and squares were wildernesses creeping out across the bordering streets’, and ‘growing things seemed … to press out everywhere’, ‘encroaching to repossess themselves of the arid spaces that man had created.’31 This violent return of nature to the city seems as hostile as the multiplying hoards of triffids that now roam the rural landscapes of Britain. When Masen returns for his final visit to the city, this all-​encompassing blanket of nature obliterates even his memory of London before the disaster. Standing in Piccadilly Circus, the symbolic heart of the West End, Masen could not re-​create in his ‘mind’s eye the crowds that once swarmed there’; instead the entire city had become a ‘back cloth of history’ that seemed as ancient and far removed as the ruins of the Roman empire.32 Far from being a ‘cosy’ catastrophe, Wyndham’s imagination of London in ruins provides a powerful allegory of both the city’s and humans’ vulnerability in the face of a 31

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay resurgent nature, whether that nature is actively hostile or simply indifferent to humanity.

Emptiness as illusion Piccadilly Circus also features as the final destination in another journey through empty London, namely, in the early stages of 28 Days Later. Taking advantage of newly-​available high-​definition digital cameras, the sequence in Boyle’s film when Jim, a former bicycle courier, walks through London’s deserted streets after waking up in St Thomas’s Hospital, was filmed in small windows of time around dawn over several days in mid-​summer, enabling the city to appear to be deserted, or ruined with only minimal signs of destruction, such as an upturned bus on Whitehall, discarded souvenirs scattered on Westminster Bridge, and assorted piles of rubbish on the streets (Figure 1.2).33 Before the advent of digital technology, rendering a convincing portrait of a deserted city in cinema was problematic because cities are usually bustling places that are full of people;​it is far easier to remove those people in the imagination than in reality. Significant precursors to Boyle’s film are few and date from an era before the 24/​7 culture that predominates urban life today. Thus, the London-​based Seven Days to Noon (John and Roy Boulting, 1950) took advantage of the city’s post-​Blitz war ruins to represent its desertion,34 while the sense of emptiness in London in The Day the Earth Caught Fire (Val Guest, 1961), New York in The World, The Flesh and the Devil (Ranald MacDougall, 1959), and Los Angeles in The Omega Man (Boris Sagal, 1971) was facilitated by the police, who cleared people from the streets during early-​morning filming. In addition, most of these cinematic depictions of urban emptiness are based on significant literary precedents, giving them an intertextuality that post-​CGI filmic representations of deserted cities tend to lack, perhaps because CGI can now visualize afresh any imagined post-​apocalyptic scenario.35 Throughout the four-​minute montage sequence in 28 Days Later that sees Jim wandering a deserted London (before he discovers that the city’s emptiness is an illusion, with a new population of rage-​infected zombies hiding in London’s shadows), there are strong references in the film’s mis-​ en-​scène to Wyndham’s literary depiction of empty London in The Day of 32

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Post-apocalyptic Londons: imagining the death of a city the Triffids. These include the film’s narrative itself –​a lone male figure waking in a central London hospital –​an emphasis on ‘landmark’ London, the focus on well-​known buildings and urban spaces such as Big Ben and Piccadilly Circus, and the powerful motif of an upturned London bus, chillingly anticipating the terrorist attacks of 7 July 2005.36 The effect of interweaving contemporary and historical references in this sequence is to open up a space for questioning the supposed permanence of landmark buildings and the cultural meanings of monuments, particularly those that symbolize the state, military and empire. As we might expect, the cultural anxieties underpinning such questioning in the 2002 film stem from very different concerns than those that characterized 1950s London. First, the nuclear fear that informed Wyndham’s oeuvre is replaced in the film by anxieties about infectious disease, which, in recent years have centred on the SARS outbreak of 2003, the swine flu scare in 2008 and the more recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014–​2015. In all of these cases, the fear of contagion stemmed from a popular belief that uncontrolled population growth in cities in the developing world, coupled with international air travel, will inevitably lead to global pandemics. Secondly, Boyle has stated that some of the details in the London sequence of the film were inspired by news footage of the aftermath of the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, while the scene where Jim scans a large notice board hiding the Eros sculpture in Piccadilly Circus and covered in messages to lost relatives, refers directly to the now iconic images of a similar notice board in the aftermath of the 9/​11 terrorist attacks in New York.37 Finally, the film uses the empty urban landscape to heighten a sense of anxiety about invasion –​in this case invasion from within, namely, by London’s post-​human, rage-​infected citizens. Fear of invasion is a common theme in contemporary horror cinema, one that reflects the wider traumatic memory of the end of empire and the real ‘living dead’ of the twentieth century, namely the survivors of the death camps of World War II and the German and Japanese cities annihilated by fire bombing.38 Indeed, the latter is clearly referenced in the iconography of empty London in 28 Days Later, specifically in an aerial view from the top of No. 1 Poultry in the City of London, where a supplicating statue looks down on the streets below, deserted bar the lone figure of Jim walking up Queen Victoria Street (Figure 1.3). Given that the statue is a CGI insertion (No. 1 Poultry is a postmodern building completed in 1985), there is a 33

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay

Figure  1.3  Still from 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002)  showing a CGI statue above Queen Victoria Street in the City of London.

direct and entirely intentional visual reference being made here to an iconic photograph of the ruins of central Dresden in the immediate aftermath of the Allied fire bombings of February 1945 (Figure 1.4). Why does the image of a deserted London in 28 Days Later resonate on so many allegorical levels? The welter of historical references gathered in Boyle’s vision of empty London, some recent, others more distant, creates, to use Walter Benjamin’s term, an ‘optical unconscious’ that holds a whole series of traumatic memories that have been collectively repressed,39 not least the deliberate annihilation of dozens of German cities by Allied bombers at the end of World War II, a strategy that originated in Britain in the upper echelons of its political and military war government.40 Clearly, the deliberate insertion of a visual reference to ruined Dresden flags up a sense of repressed national guilt haunting the empty city, one that keys into the central focus of 28 Days Later, namely the post-​human subjects that now live in the city, themselves a transposed image of the German survivors of the allied destruction of Berlin seen in the series of Trümmerfilm (literally ‘Rubble films’) of the late-​1940s.41 Yet, the sense of repressed memory haunting the image of empty London in 28 Days Later reaches even further back than World 34

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Post-apocalyptic Londons: imagining the death of a city

Figure 1.4 Photograph of Dresden in the aftermath of the Allied air attacks, February 1945.

War II, perhaps to one of the earliest images of London’s ruin in Doré’s 1872 engraving (Figure 1.1). For, like that image, the series of buildings and sites moved through by Jim in his traverse of the deserted urban landscape evoke nothing but the hollowing out of Britain’s once powerful symbols of imperial dominance: the seats of government (the Palace of Westminster and Whitehall), royalty (the Mall), and trade (the Bank of England); the monuments to ‘victorious’ conflicts (the Cenotaph and Horse Guards Parade); and the visual reminders of London as a ‘centre’ of empire (Centrepoint and Piccadilly Circus). We are not led through these traditional landmarks of London for nothing –​it seems that, even in the early twenty-​first century, long after Britain’s empire has crumbled, the power of that symbolic architectural landscape has far from disappeared. It is perhaps the emptying out of London in this sequence that allows us to experience more clearly the otherwise mute presence of the city’s forgotten histories; it also prompts us to question what the current powers-​that-​be will leave as enduring monuments once their empires have crumbled. 35

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay

The destroyed city Destruction and invasion If the passing of the British empire is a subtext in contemporary London-​ based films such as 28 Days Later, then it was an intense preoccupation –​ obsession, even  –​at the turn of the twentieth century. Although largely forgotten today, the period from around 1870 to 1914 witnessed a veritable inundation of speculative fictions dealing with the destruction of London by foreign invaders: from the relative serenity of Doré’s contemplative New Zealander in 1872 to the sensationalist novels of William Le Queux, whose unashamedly graphic The Invasion of 1910 (1906) predicted a barbaric German onslaught on London that resulted in many of the city’s landmarks being reduced to dust.42 These visions of apocalyptic London were grounded in a late-​century anxiety about the vulnerability of the overstretched British empire and its symbolic heart, London, and, later, the deteriorating political climate in continental Europe, but they were also related to more specific fears about London itself which, in the late-​nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was the largest city in the world, its population growing from just under three million in 1861 to over seven million by 1914 (peaking at 8.6 million in 1939). If inverted or reverse colonization moulded the narratives of many apocalyptic texts, then others showed London as already overgrown, unwieldy, even monstrous –​a city that required some form of destruction to rid it of its Babylonian excesses.43 Such moral rhetoric over a bloated city and empire would appear most powerfully in H. G. Wells’s turn-​ of-​the-​century fantasy, The War of the Worlds (1898). While almost all of Wells’s contemporary doom-​mongers have now been forgotten, his apocalyptic text lives on today –​an enduring influential vision that has directly informed the imagination of disaster in post-​9/​11 America, perhaps most notably in Steven Spielberg’s re-​imagining of Wells’s text as an invasion of New York City (replete with many oblique visual references to the events of 9/​11) in his 2005 film, War of the Worlds.44 Wells’s text was the first to posit invasion by extraterrestrials, namely, Martians who mercilessly destroy London to harvest the planet’s resources for their own needs. Towards the end of the novel, the principal protagonist, an unnamed first-​person narrator, walks into a ‘Dead London’ of catastrophic ruination.45 Wells’s text employs different viewpoints to render 36

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Post-apocalyptic Londons: imagining the death of a city this destruction. On the one hand, he uses high vantage points –​rooftops, hills, and an imagined view from a hot-​air balloon  –​to reveal a panorama of citywide ruin: by day, an unintelligible mass of blackened destruction ‘as if some monstrous pen had flung ink upon […] a huge map’;46 by night, a phantasmagoria suffused with a ‘violet purple fluorescent glow’ and ‘orange-​red tongues of flame’ consuming the city. On the other hand, Wells situates his narrator within the urban ruins themselves: he travels on foot across the dead centre of London from South Kensington to Primrose Hill. In this zone, the city’s ruins are both familiar and alien –​well-​known streets (Exhibition Road, Baker Street, St John’s Wood Road) and landmarks (Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, Primrose Hill) contrast with the omnipresent ‘red weed’ created by the Martian invaders that chokes both streets and buildings, the pitch-​blackness of fire-​ravaged ruins, gruesome ‘contorted shapes’ lying in the road, and everywhere a ‘gaunt’ silence and stillness that is only offset by the constant ‘howling’ of the dying Martians in their machines.47 Throughout this description of ‘dead’ London, the vision of the narrator seems to be returned by the city itself: ‘London about me gazed at me spectrally. The windows in the white houses were like the eye sockets of skulls.’48 This ghostly gaze both humanizes the ruined city and also fills it with horror, breaking down the boundary between the imagination of the observer and the concrete reality of ruination. This conflation of the inner and outer worlds of mind and city gives Wells’s description of London’s ruin a peculiar power, one that anticipates the work of novelists like J. G. Ballard. It suggests that the city, and particularly the city in ruins, is an image that haunts and that stays with us even after the material traces of past traumatic destruction have long been erased. Indeed, in the novel’s final pages, Wells makes this point explicit when he describes the narrator’s experience of London after the Martian destruction has been repaired and the bustling, confident city reinstated. For the narrator, the invasion ‘left an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity’ in his mind; he would go to London ‘and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand’ but would imagine these to be ‘the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantoms in a dead city, mockery of life in a galvanised body’.49 Wells’s emphasis on the continuing force of the memory of ruination in its aftermath was probably intended as a warning against imperial hubris that 37

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay characterized turn-​of-​the-​century Britain; yet, it also speaks to us today of how the past traumas of the city still remain as spectral presences that have the power to haunt us even as the city appears to be unaware of (or perhaps just insensitive to) those ghosts.

Destruction and experience With hindsight, Wells’s vision of a ruined London in The War of the Worlds foresees the vulnerability of the modern city to aerial bombardment. Indeed, his later novel The War in the Air (1908) reworked the earlier invasion scenario into a tale of the near future that sees catastrophic urban destruction brought about by just such an attack, a chilling prediction of the unprecedented damage that would be done to cities across the world during World War II.50 In fact, as literary historian Leo Mellor has shown, such ‘predictive’ texts were common in the years leading up to that conflict, some of which actively informed British military strategists both before and during the war.51 The obsession with imagining ruin from above demonstrated a collective attempt to picture and understand the perceived certainty of future urban ruination on an unprecedented scale. At the same time, these imagined aerial viewpoints chillingly mirrored those of the German pilots who would eventually unload their payloads of bombs onto London during World War II.52 Indeed, representations of the extent of the damage caused by such bombs, whether those dropped during the Blitz of 1940–19​41 and the ‘Little Blitz’ of 1943–​1944, or the V1 and V2 rocket attacks, later became a part of this obsession with aerial views, particularly in the series of bomb damage maps produced by the London County Council in 1945, which meticulously charted the buildings in London damaged or destroyed by German bombs –​ up to 50 per cent of the total building stock in many areas.53 The almost unbroken swathe of destruction northwards from St Paul’s to Smithfield was the setting for Rose Macaulay’s novel The World My Wilderness (1951), a semi-​autographical account of life in London in the months immediately after the end of World War II, in May 1945. Written in 1948–19​ 49, the novel is both retrospective and experiential, via attention to the war ruins as lived-​in spaces and Macaulay’s own detailed explorations of the city’s bombsites. Unlike the aerial views epitomized in the council’s bomb damage maps, with their 38

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Post-apocalyptic Londons: imagining the death of a city sense of scientific detachment from the city’s destruction, Macaulay’s novel places readers inside the ruins themselves, largely through the experiences of her leading character, the teenage girl Barbary. Together with her younger half-​brother Raoul, Barbary has run wild with the Maquis (the former French Resistance) in the south of France, before being sent to London to civilize her into respectable adulthood. Drawn to the Blitz ruins in the City of London, Barbary and Raoul encounter an alternate city with its own resistant culture of criminals, deserters and runaways; there, they find release from the stifling social conformity of their respective families and also a way to work through their multiple traumas, namely an inability to adjust to the demands of class, money and propriety in London, the breakdown of their families, and their complicity in the murder of a collaborator in France, who is revealed to be their mother’s second husband. In this context, according to Leo Mellor, the war ruins of London in Macaulay’s novel function as ‘zones of possibility’; precisely described and grounded in accurate topography, the ruins reveal ‘palimpsestic layers: of past lives, hidden meanings and references to literary works’.54 In these ruins, new possibilities are revealed through the actual material remnants that are exposed by the bombs because those remnants show how the traces of the past persist, and how those traces can be integrated with the present moment. The war ruins in The World My Wilderness reveal a mysterious London that melds concrete materiality and the imagination  –​a liminal zone in the city that is paradoxically more real than the ‘solid, improbable world’ of London beyond the bombsites.55 As Barbary walks in the ruins around St Paul’s Cathedral at dusk, she imagines the site before the bombs fell: in a great stream of history stretching right back to the medieval period, before London’s greatest pre-​war trauma, the Great Fire of 1666. In this world, the human and non-​human intermingle: … among the hidden Companies’ Hall, deep below where guildmen had for centuries feasted and conferred, among the medieval bases and only a few feet now above the Roman stones, the lion and the lizard kept the courts where merchants gloried and drunk deep, the wild ass stamps, the wild cats scream, and the new traders, the pirates, the racketeers, the black marketer, the robber bands, roam and lurk.56

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay Such a rich seam of imaginative history, generated by the exposure of London’s hidden layers by the bombs, lends a subversive quality to Macaulay’s text; the bombs have literally blown apart the conventional vertical structure of the city and its attendant social hierarchy, so that now all is mingled in a rich confusion. Here, Macaulay’s imagined ruins highlight how the built environment of the city enforces social hierarchies and how, once the spatial controls and the social codes attached to those hierarchies are removed, the construction of those divisions is laid bare. The verdancy of London’s bombsites is heightened by Macaulay’s detailed descriptions of the dense vegetation that has overtaken the former buildings  –​descriptions that encompass litanies of lyrical plant names:  ‘golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble, and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs.’57 More disturbing is Macaulay’s assertion that the ruins harbour ‘the irremediable barbarism that comes up from the depths of the earth’, sites where you realize that it is ‘your own roots that clutch this stony rubbish, the branches of your own being that grow from it and from nowhere else’.58 Echoing and elsewhere also directly quoting the tragic mood of T. S. Eliot’s interwar poem The Waste Land (1922), Macaulay’s text suggests that the ruins of London expose an unpalatable truth about the human condition, one that must be confronted and accepted if past and future traumas are to be worked through. Indeed, just as Wells’s narrative of London’s destruction ends with a memory of ruin haunting the restored city, so Macaulay’s text leaves us with a sense of London’s bomb ruins as ‘wild’ sites that cannot be tamed. As Barbary’s respectable brother wanders through the ruins, watching archaeologists excavate for newly-​revealed relics, Macaulay warns that these ‘men’s will to recovery strove against the drifting wilderness to halt and tame it; but the wilderness might slip from their hands … seeking the primeval chaos and old night which had been before Londinium was, which would be when cities were ghosts before the ancestral dreams of memory’.59

Destruction and digitization London’s bombsites remained tangible presences in the city for many decades after World War II, the last being cleared only in the mid-​1980s; 40

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Post-apocalyptic Londons: imagining the death of a city moreover, they also haunted the imagination of London’s future because they were a potent reminder of the city’s vulnerability to destruction and perhaps even of the long-​distant wilderness from which London originally arose. Indeed, at the same time that Macaulay was completing her novel set in the city’s ruins, George Orwell published perhaps the most influential work of dystopian fiction ever realized:  Nineteen Eighty-​Four (1949). Just as Macaulay’s narrative posits the ruins of London as both signifying a remembered history and also the imagination of time immemorial, whether past or future, so Orwell’s fiction articulates London as a city caught in a fluid timezone that contains within it both the recent past –​the experience of wartime London and its ruins  –​and an alternative nightmare future stemming from that past: a time of social and political chaos, followed, in the 1970s, by the rise of a totalitarian government that seizes power and engages in a continuous war with other global forces. Indeed, the London of Nineteen Eighty-​Four is a city that still bears the traces of its World War II ruins, as if that conflict had simply continued on past 1945 and mutated into something far more disturbing and intractable in the decades that followed.60 Where Macaulay’s remembered ruins gather historical memory and create a psychological space for working through trauma, so the recollection of London’s war ruins in Orwell’s imagined future becomes a way of keeping hold of memory that is rooted in individual experience rather than the duplicitous reality of the totalitarian present, with its ‘newspeak’ and ‘doublethink’. Thus, in the proletariat zones of London, where the protagonist Winston wanders, the city exists as if untouched after the Blitz:  a ‘vast and ruinous’ place of ‘patched-​up nineteenth-​ century houses’, ‘brown-​ coloured slums’ and innumerable bombsites created by the on-​going war.61 Here, Winston finds comfort in the material reminders of his own childhood spent amidst the real ruins of postwar London. More explicitly visualized in the 1984 film of the novel, Winston’s memories are infused with flashbacks of ‘sheltering in Tube stations’ and ‘piles of rubble everywhere’ –​memories of ruin that are an anchoring point within the context of a political power that is deliberately erasing history as a means of total domination.62 Although Orwell’s vision of a future London ends on a despairing note, there is nevertheless a strong sense of the city’s ruins as mnemonic sites that stubbornly resist the erasing power of the totalitarian state. 41

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay Throughout the postwar period, London’s bombsites have figured in dystopian and apocalyptic fictions as a remembered image of destruction that informs an imagined future city, even as the real ruins gradually disappeared from view. Whilst post-​apocalyptic British fictions in the wake of Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids have tended to focus on aftermaths in the countryside –​prominent novels being John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956) and Christopher Priest’s Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972) –​ more recent examples, especially after 9/​11 and the 2004 Iraq war, have returned to London as a site of anxiety about the threat of invasion, with a few notable blockbuster disaster/​invasion films set in the city.63 These films present a host of invading forces: in Reign of Fire (Rob Bowman, 2002), giant dragons are inadvertently released from underground London; in 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007), rage-​infected post-​humans swarm the city; in Thor: The Dark World (Alan Taylor, 2013), mythic figures from ancient history and the far future return to attack; and, in Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014), outsized octopus-​like aliens stand in for Nazis and other potential invaders. Dominated by computer generated imagery, the imagination of London’s ruin in these films focuses on spectacular scenes of destruction, including the fire-​ravaged blackened ruins of the Houses of Parliament in Reign of Fire, the carpet-​bombing of the Isle of Dogs in 28 Weeks Later, and the cleaving of the Royal Naval College in Greenwich by a gigantic spaceship from the future in Thor: The Dark World. As bombastic and fantastical as these films undoubtedly are, they nonetheless bear witness to a renewed sense of anxiety about invasion, whether from pathogens, terrorists, asylum seekers or illegal immigrants. Partly as a consequence of their CGI effects, which allow cinematic fantasy without the need for material objects or even imaginative precedents, the disaster sequences in these films seem far removed from their literary or indeed cinematic predecessors. Yet, their general focus on the destruction of key landmarks, whether the seat of government in Reign of Fire or the headquarters of the British navy in Thor: The Dark World, provide a link to invasion narratives stretching right back to Doré’s image of the New Zealander. Indeed, the CGI-​created fire ruins of Reign of Fire and 28 Days Later strongly evoke fearful urban holocausts of the past, whether the immediate past  –​the ‘shock and awe’ bombings of Baghdad in 2004  –​or the 42

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Post-apocalyptic Londons: imagining the death of a city more distant traumatic social memories of the Vietnam war or the London Blitz.64 The short sequence in Edge of Tomorrow where the leading protagonist William Cage (played by Tom Cruise), in one of his endless repetitions of a single segment of time, travels to London on the brink of an alien invasion, demonstrates the intertextuality of even the most outlandish CGI. In this sequence, Cage overhears a conversation in a pub by a World War II veteran about Britain’s doughty resistance against what was regarded as the probable invasion of the country by the German army, the new alien threat seen to directly mirror that earlier conflict. The sequence immediately after the pub scene, when Cage stands on Waterloo Bridge and witnesses the giant tentacled aliens emerging from the river Thames, has its literary origins in Wells’s The War of the Worlds, where one of the first Martian tripods to enter the city does so by wading up the Thames.65 In a film that seems to reflect on the difficulties of sustaining any kind of memory in the digital age, the inclusion of this sequence shows how a certain kind of memory of disaster might be transmitted even within the almost entirely virtual world of CGI spectacle.

The submerged city Submergence by sewage: After London If Doré’s image of ruined London contained within it the seeds of what would become an enduring anxiety about the emptying out of the city or its repopulation by foreign invaders, then it also provided a powerful representation of the city’s submergence, whether smothered by the vegetation that can be seen sprouting amongst the ruined buildings or drowned in the waters of its tidal river, which have presumably escaped the confines of its man-​made banks. Such a vision of submergence, or sinking, also became an enduring motif in the imagination of London in ruins, whether that sinking was metaphorical –​a return to savagery –​or literal, namely the return of nature, as both vegetation and unbounded waters.66 The imagination of London’s future submergence is clearly a product of the city’s location on a tidal river; yet, it also reflects an anxiety about, or even a desire for, the revenge of nature against the city. The first writer to develop this trope in a sustained way was the naturalist Richard Jefferies, in 43

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay his 1884 fantasia After London. An elegiac meditation on loss, After London imagines an ecological disaster –​the cause unspecified –​that results in the inundation of London and half the country by sea and river waters, creating an enormous inland lake in England’s lowlands and a return to a pre-​industrial life of subsistence farming, peasantry and medieval chivalric codes of honour, not unlike the utopian vision of William Morris in News From Nowhere (1890), which Jefferies’s novel inspired.67 Yet Jefferies’s novel is remarkable for the forensic way in which it describes the recolonization of London and the wider countryside by untamed nature, from the first plants springing up in cracked pavements to the overtaking of the entire city by dense vegetation and hordes of wild animals.68 Indeed, so meticulous are the descriptions in After London that, in 1996, the New Scientist asked leading botanists, animal ethnologists and material scientists to reconsider Jefferies’s thought experiment, the result confirming its remarkable level of accuracy as well as its application to the modern urban built environment of concrete and steel.69 When the hero of After London, the courtly and chivalrous Felix, eventually reaches what was London, he finds not an ecological paradise but a deadly toxic wasteland: a ‘vast stagnant swamp’, where the jet-​black waters were topped with ‘a greenish-​brown floating scum’, their toxicity created by the city’s crumbling buildings, millions of rotting corpses and all the waste and sewage of the once great metropolis.70 Over this dead landscape, devoid of any flora or fauna, hangs an ever-​present miasma, yellow in colour and foul in aroma, sustained by mephitic bubbles of gas that emerge from the black waters. Where these waters subside, flat banks of land emerge, the surfaces of which are ‘hard, black and burned, resembling iron’.71 Here, the remains of the city appear to Felix as phantasmagoria: ghostly impressions of skeletons that had long since disappeared; phosphorescent footprints; and petrified houses that seem to be made of salt crystals and which crumbled to dust when disturbed.72 Only when Felix stumbles upon a ‘heap of blackened money’ does he at last realize where he is: striking a ‘chord of memory’ in his mind, the filthy lucre confirms that he is in London. Yet, as Felix realizes, this is a submerged city. London is no longer here; rather it is literally ‘under his feet’.73 When he finally escapes the toxic swamp, narcotized by its siren vapours and very close to death, he witnesses from afar explosions of gas caused by the 44

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Post-apocalyptic Londons: imagining the death of a city ancient city being undermined by its ‘vast sewers’ conduits and tunnels that communicated with the sea’.74 Jefferies’s portrait of a ‘deserted and utterly extinct city of London’ is notable for its pessimism and it reflects his deep hatred of the nineteenth-​ century metropolis, with its basis in industrial modernity. In one sense, Jefferies’s vision of the future sinking of London projects forward some of the problems of the late-​nineteenth-century city, most notably its reliance on a massive underground network of sewers built in the 1860s to remove the waste generated by its huge population.75 Jefferies’s sunken London reveals how vulnerable the city’s infrastructure might be if left unmaintained and also, in that state, how hidden networks like sewers might themselves contribute to a future catastrophe. Indeed, in After London, it is the contents of the sewers, rising up to meet the flood waters of the rising seas, that end up making the city almost unreadable, sinking London in its own wastes –​so unreadable, in fact, that Felix has no clue he is in the city until his memory is at last activated by the sight of money. As I pointed out in the introduction to this chapter, this radical flattening out of the former vertical structure of the city can be said to offer, in extreme form, a vision of London liberated from its social hierarchies, namely, the deep divisions between those at the top and those at the bottom. Yet so extreme is Jefferies’s annihilation of London’s familiar topography that the city becomes entropic –​gradually decaying into a landscape without features, very much like the end-​of-​the-​world vision in the final pages of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) where the sun is dying and the world is sinking into darkness and life into formlessness.76 Indeed, the erasure of the city in After London is so total that it gives Jefferies’s vision an extraordinary prescience in the nuclear era. Urban destruction by nuclear weapons has largely been represented in similar terms to Jefferies’s, from the photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the aftermath of the two atomic blasts, which showed those urban landscapes literally vaporized, to the imagined obliteration of London in the satirical film The Bed Sitting Room (Richard Lester, 1969), where the whole city is an unrecognizable landscape of mud and clay, with even the largest buildings such as St Paul’s almost completely buried, the bombed out dome of the cathedral resembling the iconic Hiroshima Atom Bomb Dome (Figure 1.5). Indeed, the biting satire of The Bed 45

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay

Figure 1.5  The sunken dome of St Paul’s Cathedral after a nuclear war as seen in The Bed Sitting Room (Richard Lester, 1969).

Sitting Room is predicated on the survival of the very social hierarchy that the nuclear bombs should have obliterated along with the city, the British class system becoming an absurdist parody of itself in the post-​apocalyptic urban landscape.77 Jefferies may have imagined perhaps the most extreme picture of London’s annihilation; yet, even he probably realized that the city would live on in other ways even if its built environment became unrecognisable.

Submergence and regression Just as Jefferies’ unreadable entropic city is only identified as London almost by chance, so the submerged city that forms the setting for J. G. Ballard’s early novel The Drowned World (1962) is only named as London around half way through the text. Part of Ballard’s quartet of ‘disaster’ novels based around the four elements –​wind, water, fire and earth –​The Drowned World presents a hallucinatory vision of the future city that has been sunk beneath vast flood waters created by the melting of the polar ice sheets, caused by rapid global warming that resulted from a sudden increase in solar radiation.78 Informed by Ballard’s fascination with Surrealist painting 46

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Post-apocalyptic Londons: imagining the death of a city (examples of which appear in the novel),79 prescient anxieties about nuclear annihilation, and the author’s own memories of wartime Shanghai, where he spent his youth,80 The Drowned World presents London as a city that has been literally swamped by exotic flora and fauna that has reverted back to resemble that of the Paleozoic era. In this future London, an ‘impenetrable Matto Grosso sometimes three hundred feet high’ consumes the city’s half-​submerged steel-​framed tower blocks, while giant iguanas make their homes in the boardrooms of former offices and outsized bats create their eyries in the ruined buildings. In between the last vestiges of the city is a network of lagoons filled with rotting vegetation and the carcasses of dead animals.81 Living in the former Ritz Hotel, the novel’s isolated protagonist, Kerans, is part of a group of scientists that are gathering information about the world’s drowned cities before heading to the last place fit for human habitation –​the Arctic –​where the remnants of humanity have gathered. With air temperatures and humidity rising each day, Kerans experiences his own psychic equivalent of regression, eventually embracing the new jungle before him, the novel concluding with this ‘second Adam’ heading south towards his certain death. In Ballard’s novel, London functions as a mirror image of the processes in Kerans’s psyche. Like the phantasmagoric cities in Max Ernst’s paintings  –​one of which hangs in Kerans’s colleague Beatrice’s apartment  –​ London is both a physical city and a construct in the imagination. The fact that the city is not initially named as London gives Ballard’s descriptions a dreamlike quality that is mirrored in Ernst’s paintings, the latter producing a ‘curious feeling of memory and recognition’ in Kerans’s mind.82 This memory is not of any specific past trauma or disaster, but rather part of a larger collective unconscious that recalls the source of humanity in the deep past, a process that results in the obliteration of individual consciousness. Throughout the novel, it is the transformed landscape of the city that provokes Kerans’s psychic regression, whether in his constant confrontation with the submerged city itself, which functions as an obvious metaphor for the unconscious mind, the abandoned clock towers he sees, their faces without hands,83 or a chalk-​white colonnade visited by Kerans that reminds him of an Egyptian necropolis.84 When the grotesque pirate-​ like figure of Strangeman arrives and drains the lagoon in order to loot London’s submerged treasures, the revealing of the city beneath the waters 47

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay leads not to salvation but rather the dissolution of Kerans’s ability to accept the transformed world. In the end, Kerans re-​floods the city and starts his own suicidal journey southwards into the jungle. The Drowned World may seem, as it has done to some critics, to embody a form of nihilism:  a ‘death-​worshipping’ imagination that has its roots in a romantic revelling in decay or a sublimated obsession with the end of the British empire.85 Yet, as Ballard himself was at pains to point out, the term ‘disaster’ as applied to his fiction is misleading; for he referred to The Drowned World and his other early novels as ‘transformation stories rather than disaster stories’. Comparing his work to Wyndham’s The Day of Triffids, Ballard argued that the latter contained no psychological depth –​the disaster occurs, transforming the urban landscape, but there is no corresponding transformation in the human subject living in that new landscape, hence Wyndham’s final emphasis in that novel on survival and rebuilding. In a very different vein from Wyndham, The Drowned World uses ‘the external transformation of the [urban] landscape to reflect and marry with the internal transformation’ of Kerans, who is the only character in the novel to fully embrace both of these transformed worlds.86 Indeed, as Ballard has also argued, perhaps the extreme urban transformation he depicted in The Drowned World (by any other estimation a catastrophe) might provide the only environment in which genuine human transformation can occur.87 In this sense, Ballard’s future London shares much with the Surrealists’ reading of cities, particularly in Lee Miller’s photographs of London during the Blitz, which show the startling visual effects produced by the bombing.88 Surrealist images of London’s ruins made it possible to see the city anew, to work with the damaged city to reimagine its reconstruction as a process integrating the partial and damaged.89 As Ballard himself acknowledged, images of London’s war ruins with their surreal effects –​‘the bus on top of a block of apartments […] the whole wall of a tall building collapsed, so you can see dozens of flats, like a doll’s house, with the furniture still in place’ –​together with his own childhood experiences in war-​torn Shanghai, profoundly affected his imaginative engagement with the city and the formation of his early fiction. In the Surrealist urban imagination, as in Ballard’s, dream and reality merge, ceaselessly intertwined in mutual transformation. 48

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Post-apocalyptic Londons: imagining the death of a city

Death by water With periodic warnings issued by official bodies and the press as to the almost certain flooding of London in a future dominated by rising sea levels, it is no wonder that The Drowned World has come to be seen, like so much of Ballard’s other fiction, as eerily prophetic. Yet the novel was written long before the term ‘global warming’ was even coined (in 1975) and contains no sense that human activity was to blame for its catastrophic rise in global temperatures.90 On the other hand, geographer Matthew Gandy has argued that the London depicted in The Drowned World bears ‘a striking similarity with the actual experience of New Orleans’ in the wake of hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the ensuing enactment of ‘disaster capitalism’ in the city, when, in the absence of a cohesive government response, the private sector exploited the disaster for enormous profits through the almost exclusive control of rebuilding.91 Indeed, in a late interview published in 2009, Ballard did indeed admit the parallels between his own ‘disaster’ scenarios and the social breakdown seen in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina.92 In addition, Ballard’s climate fiction has strong resonance with contemporary visualizations of a future London inundated by water. These include: Jeffrey Linn’s London Bay (2014), a map view indicating how the city might be affected if sea levels rose by 80 metres;93 digitally manipulated images and online simulations of the city’s landmarks submerged by flood waters (Figure 1.2);94 Rupert Jordan’s photographs taken in the River Thames that, due to their viewpoint, seem to show the city overwhelmed by water (Figure 1.6);95 and literary and cinematic imaginings of catastrophic flood, from the execrable TV film Flood (2007) to the more imaginative graphic novel Freak Angels (2008–​), and novels such as Maggie Gee’s The Flood (2004), Stephen Baxter’s Flood (2008), Will Self ’s savage satire The Book Of Dave (2006), Saci Lloyd’s Carbon Diaries 2015 (2008) and its 2010 sequel. Within this contemporary imagination of London’s submergence there is a tendency, particularly in the visual images distributed by the online press, to sensationalize post-​catastrophic scenarios at the expense of reflection on just what it might mean to live in such a drowned city. Indeed, geographer Erik Swyngedouw has identified a certain attraction in such apocalyptic images, one in which environmental problems are staged as 49

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay

Figure 1.6 Rupert Jordan’s photograph of St Paul’s Cathedral from the River Thames, from his River London series, 2013. Reproduced by permission of the artist.

universally catastrophic, rather than manageable, in order to sustain what he terms ‘ecologies of fear’.96 This continuous evocation of fear and danger, according to Swyngedouw, has the effect of obscuring the real environmental damage that has already been done by neoliberal global capitalism. Thus, by cultivating a ‘particular set of phantasmagorical imaginaries’ like images of London under water, any meaningful action to mitigate such threats or to even acknowledge their real effects is subsumed by a thoroughly ‘depoliticized imaginary’ that cuts off the ability to think about the problem beyond the horizons of the global capitalist order that has arguably created that problem in the first place.97 From this perspective, The Drowned World might be seen as merely offering another kind of phantasmagoric imaginary that takes us away from really thinking about our collective responsibility for the disastrous effects of climate change. Yet, as Ballard has made clear, this reading misconstrues the nature of disaster in his novel. As discussed above, Ballard’s disaster scenario in The Drowned World is in fact a way in which he envisages radical individual transformation, one that only comes about through a full acceptance of the post-​catastrophic urban environment. If this might 50

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Post-apocalyptic Londons: imagining the death of a city be understood as an heroic form of resignation, it is also an attitude that is profoundly at odds with the contemporary imagination of climate change; for not only does Ballard’s novel challenge the positivist drive of most climate change rhetoric –​no matter how wrapped up this might be in catastrophic imagery –​it also undermines the notion of a future apocalypse because it shows a radical transformation already at work in the post-​disaster psyche of Kerans. Indeed, although ostensibly set in the future, The Drowned World posits a world that is already catastrophic and that already requires us to adapt –​an apocalypse that is in the here and now. As such, it chimes with contemporary critics who argue that the catastrophe that is constantly being predicted and imagined is already here and is nothing less than the contemporary metropolis itself. In this view, our global cities of shining skyscrapers are perhaps the most ostentatious products of an accelerating capitalism seemingly hell-​bent on the destruction of the planet: symbols of ‘our time of utter decadence [when] the only thing imposing about temples is the dismal truth that they are already in ruins’.98 If Ballard’s fiction offers a prescient counter to the contemporary imagination of disaster in relation to climate change, what can we draw together from the host of other ruin imaginaries of London explored in this chapter? By identifying three broad genealogies of the imagined ruin of London –​the empty city, the destroyed city and the submerged city –​ I have brought out several ways in which the imagination of disaster might enrich the way in which we think about and experience our cities. First, imagining the city as empty can create allegorical representations of human vulnerability, from individual loss writ large in The Last Man to the loss of empire in 28 Days Later, and spaces that question the hubris of power structures that presume themselves to be permanent. Secondly, imagining the city in ruins can facilitate connections between urban histories, particularly traumatic ones, and the city as experienced in the present, as demonstrated perhaps most vividly in The World My Wilderness. The image of the city in ruins also reveals the pervasive anxiety of invasion that underpins much urban experience, whether manifest as alien invaders in The War of the Worlds and Edge of Tomorrow or monstrous nature in The Day of the Triffids and Reign of Fire. Finally, the imagination of submerged cities chimes most directly with contemporary anxieties about climate change, increasing social division in cities across the world, and perhaps, 51

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay even, the renewed threat of a nuclear conflagration. By flattening out the city’s layers, as in After London or The Bed Sitting Room, this strand of the imagination of disaster offers a powerful critique of contemporary social, political and economic conditions that increasingly divide the city. In The Drowned World, it also turns submergence into a metaphor for inner transformation, providing a useful antidote to the superficial nature of many representations of the possible effects of climate change on vulnerable cities like London. In short, far from being a form of escape or inviting audiences to revel in urban destruction, these imaginaries have the capacity to deepen our understanding of both ourselves as citizens of the present and future city and of our cities themselves, with all their rich seams of history, lived presents, and possible futures, disastrous or otherwise.

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2 Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-​industrial Manchester

The imagination of disaster may be conventionally associated with the range of fictions outlined in the previous chapter; yet, it can also be inscribed into real and existing cities, particularly those, like Manchester, that have seemingly moved on from a time of decline to a new era of regeneration and rebirth. Perhaps no building in Manchester best encapsulates this transition than the Beetham Tower, opened in 2006. A strident visualization of the recurrent image of Manchester as a phoenix rising from the ruins of post-​industrial decline,1 the skyscraper features 47 storeys of shimmering glass, within which are housed a luxury hotel and apartments –​a building that could not be more different than the defunct Victorian brick railway viaduct it replaced.2 And yet this beacon of hope gains a new layer of meaning when viewed from the Rochdale Canal in the Castlefield Basin (Figure 2.1). For here –​the original heartland of industrial Manchester –​ the otherwise brazenly incongruous form of the Beetham Tower seems to mirror that of a much older industrial structure: the ruins of a canal-​side brick mill dating from the early nineteenth century. This architectural conversation across time is probably accidental but it nevertheless suggests that the Beetham Tower might be a symbol of the hidden decay, and inevitable future ruin, that haunts even our most transparent and polished contemporary glass towers. In this sense, the Beetham Tower is not so unlike the 53

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Figure 2.1  Manchester’s tallest building, the Beetham Tower (2006), mirroring the form of a nineteenth-​century ruin on the Rochdale Canal in Castlefield.

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Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-industrial Manchester ‘new ruins’ of the Labour Party’s decade-​long regeneration drive described by architectural critic Owen Hatherley: namely, the many apartment and office buildings that were constructed post-​1997, but which have failed to achieve full occupancy.3 Like a slip of the tongue in the otherwise confident, sleek narrative of contemporary post-​industrial Manchester, this accidental architectural conversation suggests the bursting forth of its past ruins –​the city’s own imagination of disaster –​into the regenerated city. Drawing on this richly suggestive example, this chapter will consider the significance of ruins in contemporary Manchester, focusing on three themes: underground space and ruins; post-​industrial ruins and work; and ruins and regeneration. The first section will consider underground spaces in Manchester as the ruins left over by modernization, concentrating on the culverted section of the River Irk under Victoria Station and the former Manchester and Salford Junction Canal tunnel under Deansgate in the city centre. The second part of the chapter will shift attention to Manchester’s mills as remnants of the city’s history when it dominated the world’s cotton industry; while the final section addresses the contemporary discourse of urban regeneration in Ancoats, an inner-​city district that was once the world’s first industrial suburb, or ‘the cradle of industrialization’ in early nineteenth-​century Manchester, and is now in the throes of comprehensive redevelopment.4 Taken together, these themes will build up a sense of the variety of types of ruin that persist in post-​industrial Manchester –​ruins that challenge the now dominant rhetoric of regeneration in the city that began in the late-​1980s and has continued to this day.5 Although Manchester has always, at least since the onset of rapid industrialization in the late eighteenth century, been a city in ‘an almost perpetual state of restructuring’, that process accelerated in the 1990s, when, first the city centre and then the inner suburbs, were subject to wholesale rebuilding and incorporation into an aggressive form of urban boosterism that has tended to show little patience with nostalgia or tradition.6 Yet there is, of course, another story to be told; one that engages with ruins as a way of challenging the tendency of regeneration to either gloss over periods of decline in Manchester’s history or to cast itself in a phoenix-​like image, that is, as a decisive break with a long period of de-​industrial ruination. As I will demonstrate, such a discourse obscures the fact that regeneration is not only itself a form of ruination, namely, of the existing built environment, 55

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay but also that it covers over the ‘real’ history of the city, particularly its long period of decline from the 1940s to the 1990s, when much of the city was characterized by widespread ruination, whether as ‘cleared’ areas of designated slum housing, empty former industrial buildings, or new buildings left semi-​abandoned by a shrinking population. If one cares to look, ruins are everywhere. From the countless cobbles that lie beneath the tarmac and concrete of Manchester’s roads to the remorseless processes of decay that always threaten the city’s buildings and infrastructure alike, ruins are inescapable presences in the urban environment that need to be acknowledged and accepted. In addition to their spatial omnipresence, ruins are also everywhere in time. Cities are predicated on ruin: not only do cities ruin the landscape from which they rise, but the successive waves of destruction and rebuilding that define the history of all cities create a tableaux of ruins in time, whether those ruins are ‘erased’ or not from the urban fabric.7 Thus, forgetting or deliberately airbrushing ruins out of urban history is detrimental to collective memory –​in Rebecca Solnit’s words, ‘to erase the ruins is to erase the visible public triggers of memory; a city without ruins […] is like a mind without memories’.8 Collective memory is valuable in cities because it contributes much to a cohesive sense of community. This, in turn, can act as a powerful tool against the tendency of neoliberal regeneration strategies to ‘rebrand’ the built environment as a site for financial investment from corporations, property developers and wealthy homebuyers, displacing poorer residents and erasing any signs of deprivation. As reminders of the past, ruins focus our attention precisely on these triggers of public memory. Such forms of urban memory inevitably challenge and rebuke both what architectural historian Mark Crinson terms the ‘heritage time’ of urban conservation (arresting decay or preserving memory) and also the ‘developers’ time’ of urban regeneration (forgetting the memory of decay). They do so because they unsettle both the dominant discourse of progressive urban expansion that has characterized cities since the onset of the industrial revolution and also the more recent rhetoric of regeneration that tends to either ‘freeze’ decay in the name of conservation or project the city forward in time at the expense of its rich seams of history.9 As this chapter will demonstrate, in cities, time is not like an arrow always pointing forward; rather, in philosopher Michel Serres’s 56

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Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-industrial Manchester evocative reading, ‘it percolates’, flowing in ‘a chaotic and turbulent manner’ that creates a palimpsest of spaces that are always predicated on ruins, whether those ruins are beneath or above the surface of the city.10

Ruins below The spectacular growth of the Manchester region in the nineteenth century, from an estimated population of 322,000 in 1801 to 2.1  million by 1901, was the result of the rapid industrialization of the cotton spinning and weaving industries, which had been a significant part of Manchester’s identity since the medieval period, but which came to dominate the whole region in the nineteenth century.11 The conurbation of Manchester, formally granted city status by Queen Victoria in 1853, was not only a centre of cotton production but also the commercial urban centre for scores of cotton manufacturing towns in the region, all of which relied upon Manchester as a transport and marketing hub right up to the peak of production in 1931.12 As generally understood by historians, Manchester’s rapid urban growth made it the quintessential ‘shock’ industrial city of its time, with a chaotic and seemingly unplanned built environment characterized by hundreds of mills, interspersed with dense working-​class housing, warehouses and other industrial premises, all of which were surrounded by the salubrious suburbs of the mercantile classes who oversaw these industries.13 With the overriding goal of productive efficiency governing the expansion of this industrial built environment, it is no wonder that Manchester’s subsurface was developed at an equally rapid pace as the city above ground.14 An early example was the Duke’s Tunnel (1789–17​99) which, before the construction of the Rochdale and Ashton canals through the city in 1796 and 1804 respectively, allowed coal coming into Manchester from the Bridgwater Canal at Castlefield to be transported directly to the town centre through an underground waterway that branched off the River Medlock.15 In fact, even after the Rochdale and Ashton canals were constructed, many smaller subterranean canal branches were excavated to serve individual mill complexes or create more efficient transport links across the congested city centre, while the city’s pre-​industrial watercourses were either culverted or carefully managed to be exploited by industry. After the railways arrived in Manchester in 1830, the entire 57

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay urban environment became dominated by vast brick viaducts, which created a new layer in the city’s fabric and, in their arches and tunnels within, a new type of ‘underground’ space.16 With a plethora of vaults constructed beneath many buildings and the proliferation of cellar dwellings used to house tens of thousands of workers, Manchester’s underground was perhaps exploited to a far greater extent than any other British city in the nineteenth century, including London.17 And just as industrialization created ruination in its wake above ground, so it did below the surface of the city.

Remaindered flows: the Irk culvert At the corner of Hunt’s Bank and Victoria Street near Victoria Station in central Manchester is a stone wall that betrays the otherwise invisible presence of one of the city’s principal rivers –​the Irk (Figure 2.2). The obvious visual signs of subsidence  –​sunken blocks of stone  –​were brought into being by what lies beneath the ground:  a massive culverted section of the River Irk than runs nearly a kilometre from the railway viaduct that emerges northwards from Victoria Station to the point where the

Figure 2.2  Subsidence of blocks of stone in the wall at the corner of Hunt’s Bank and Victoria Street, Manchester.

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Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-industrial Manchester Irk empties itself into the River Irwell, just a few yards east of this sunken wall. This peculiar half-​ruined wall makes visible a presence of absence, a reminder of something hidden; perhaps even, like most ruins, a gentle admonition to those who would forget what has been lost. Yet, this ruin also tells us, uncontrovertibly, that the river is not lost; indeed, in its very ruin, it betrays the river’s continuing presence and influence on the city. As Manchester grew rapidly in the nineteenth century, so its many watercourses –​nearly 100 miles of small streams, brooks and rivers –​that used to flow unobstructed through open fields and small villages were gradually overtaken by the wastes of both a rapidly growing population and also of industries that were often located on the banks of those watercourses.18 In time, these ruined streams were culverted and many survive today underground as sewers, their presence often only indicated above ground in the names of the streets under which they flow.19 Culverting allowed urban development above the former watercourses and also facilitated the rapid removal of rain-​water, which became a pressing issue after a series of catastrophic floods affected the city in the second half of the nineteenth century.20 For Manchester’s larger rivers, the Irk and the Medlock, culverting was only ever partial because they continued to be important sources of water for the industries that lined their banks; nevertheless, both rivers were increasingly hidden from view in the city centre and its environs. The Medlock was first culverted in a 1 km stretch over the Bradford gas works (now the car park of the Manchester City football club stadium) and, in the 1960s, in much of the city centre; while the now hidden section of the River Irk was culverted in several stages from the mid-​1840s to the 1900s, principally because of the periodic expansion of the Victoria railway station. The culverting of urban watercourses in the nineteenth century was not only a pragmatic response to the need to create more space to build on; it was also part of a larger process of turning what was once considered ‘nature’ into a regulated commodity that was made subservient to the demands of industrial modernity. As these rivers were buried, so were the older memories associated with them, being replaced with meanings dominated by function in line with their new status as infrastructure.21 In this reading, rivers are ‘lost’ as cities are modernized, becoming part of just that confined and hidden nature that is written into the very discourse of modernization. 59

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay Yet, these apparently reductive narratives about ‘lost’ or ruined rivers have been consistently challenged by those who would imagine them otherwise. Thus, in Isabella Varley Banks’s 1895 novel The Manchester Man, the soon-​to-​be buried River Irk is re-​imagined a century earlier in 1799 just after a heavy thunder​storm, its waters surging ‘like a hungry giant, greedy for fresh food’.22 From the medieval Tanner’s bridge, which was removed in the early nineteenth century, Banks dramatizes the rescue of the baby Jabez Clegg, the novel’s leading character who fell into the river in his cradle after his parents’ house was flooded.23 In this frantic opening scene, the River Irk is pictured as a living, albeit fearsome, presence in the city, one that captured, for Banks’s late-​Victorian readers, several memories of the river: of the time when the Irk flowed freely before the onset of industrialization; of the series of floods which traumatized the city in the second half of the nineteenth century; and of the Irk’s imminent disappearance below ground –​in 1901, 800 yards of the river were culverted beneath the expanded Victoria Station.24 Within this rich memory-​scape, the river is cast as a ruinous force and the medieval cluster of houses that overhung its banks in the late eighteenth century are described as semi-​ruinous, partly a result of the destructive power of the river itself when in spate.25 There is also another layer of memory within Banks’s imagining of the Irk, that is, the memory of Friedrich Engels’s famous description of the river in the early 1840s in his The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. As documented by Engels and mirrored in the opening of Banks’s novel, the Irk was once one of the foulest watercourses in Manchester, polluted with the wastes of the tanneries, bone mills, gasworks and the privies of innumerable half-​ruined medieval houses that used to line its banks. In 1842, standing on Ducie bridge, 40 feet above the surface of the river, Engels described the Irk as a ‘coal-​black, foul-​smelling stream’ that was filled with horrible slime and refuse and whose waters produced bubbles of ‘miasmatic’ gas that ‘gave forth a stench unendurable’ even high up on the bridge.26 Just like Banks’s half a century later, Engels’s description of the Irk was published just before part of the river was culverted: in 1845, when the section flanking Chetham’s School was bricked over.27 Thus, within both of these accounts of the Irk, the river breaks out of a fixed functional narrative: in Engels’s account, the polluted river is revealed even as it is about to be covered over, consigned to oblivion, whereas in Banks’s, it is a palimpsest, in which the layers of 60

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Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-industrial Manchester meaning that accrue over time can be unearthed and formed into further layers of meaning. As the sunken blocks in the ruined wall on Hunt’s Bank illustrate, the fact that the Irk has disappeared beneath the city centre does not preclude its re-​emergence in other forms, even if its ‘official’ memory is now confined to a symbolic recreation of part of the river in a fountain sculpture in what is now Cathedral Gardens, redeveloped after the IRA bomb in 1996 and opened in 2002.28 Today, those who wish to explore alternative memories of the ruined river might choose, as I did, to negotiate the space of the culvert itself –​the source of that invisible presence which continues to make itself felt as partial ruins in the city above. Like many urban river culverts, that of the Irk is deliberately hostile to would-​be explorers. Its entrance, seen from the steps that descend into Manchester’s new Green Quarter from Cheetham Hill Road, is a forbidding black hole into which the fast-​flowing river rushes over a two-​metre-​high weir. As I discovered myself, getting into that black hole is difficult even at the driest of times: it involves wading in chest-​high murky water before descending the slippery weir into complete darkness.29 Flanking the river before it disappears are the shiny new skyscrapers of the Green Quarter –​a characteristic (if extreme) juxtaposition of high technology and ‘low’ nature in the post-​industrial city. Once inside the culvert, the space seems to grow –​the 20-​foot span arch seen at the entrance now supported on immensely high brick walls; while the noise of the rushing water is magnified by the cavernous space. The sights and sounds recorded by Engels may have (thankfully) disappeared, but the river still has a fearsome quality to it: a smell that makes one light-​headed (dangerous, as all urban explorers know); a furious velocity; and, as if testifying to the latter, a channel lined with tree branches, shopping trolleys, car tyres and other forms of urban detritus that the river has brought here over the years. Such accumulated ruin is counterbalanced by what has been preserved: a bricked-​up arched space in one of the walls that was once used as a chute for depositing dead cattle onto boats; the half-​ruined remains of a brick and stone bridge that used to link buildings in Chetham’s College and which dates from the 1820s; and, perhaps most extraordinary of all, an intact wooden bridge suspended between the walls of the culvert (Figure 2.3). For hundreds of years, this bridge, now bricked up inside and used as a utility tunnel, used to carry cattle from the fields on 61

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Figure  2.3  Former cattle bridge suspended between the walls of the Irk culvert underneath Victoria Station, Manchester.

the north side of the Irk to the markets in Shudehill and it probably dates, at least in part, to around 1650, when Manchester was little more than a large village clustered around the medieval cathedral (then, the Collegiate Church) and Chetham’s College.30 For this bridge to have survived so long after its pre-​industrial function has been extinguished is testament to its power as a petrified ruin. It is paradoxically the ruin of the river and its subsequent banishment that have preserved this ancient relic intact; out of sight and mind it has been allowed to escape the relentless modernization that has dominated the development of Manchester’s urban fabric from the late eighteenth century onwards. If urban modernity requires the city to develop by a process of ‘creative destruction’ –​deliberate ruination and rebuilding –​then this preserved ruin directly challenges that process. Its continuing existence speaks rather of the residues of modernity, or the ruins that do not yield to modernity because they continue to serve it in some unforeseen way. It is as if, from that bridge, the rushing river below described by Engels and Banks somehow refuses to be expunged from Manchester’s urban memory. In Tim Edensor’s words, this culvert and its entombed ruins are ‘metonymic 62

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Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-industrial Manchester vestiges’ that summon up in material and immaterial forms what the river and its surrounding spaces used to be.31 Modernization in cities like Manchester always leaves remainders, leftover spaces and architectural vestiges that suffuse the present with the ruins of the past.32 Confronting such remainders provides a necessary check on classifications that try to fix understandings of place. Perhaps the name given to the Irk culvert by urban explorers –​Optimus Prime, after a character from the Transformers franchise –​is more than a rather infantile pseudonym; for has the culvert truly not transformed the river and its entombed ruins into something mythic, something from below that offers rich layers of meaning to the city above?

Remaindered space: the Manchester and Salford Junction Canal Manchester’s river culverts are spaces that are not designed to be explored, which is partly why they are so highly prized by urban explorers. Yet many of the city’s other underground spaces have left traces of former modes of habitation that endure to this day. If Engels described a whole sub-​section of the city’s population living in dark and dirty cellars in the 1840s, then a century later, many of their descendants would have taken refuge in one of the city’s hundreds of air-​raid shelters, particularly during the so-​called ‘Manchester Blitz’ –​three nights of intensive bombardment of the city by the Luftwaffe in the run up to Christmas 1940 that left hundreds of buildings in the city centre either in ruins or severely damaged.33 As documented exhaustively by historian Keith Warrender, these air-​raid shelters, which numbered at least 1,185, ranged from single property basements and large cellars to entire underground complexes such as the Victoria Arches and the Manchester and Salford Junction Canal tunnel.34 Many of these shelters were spaces that were requisitioned from a former industrial usage (principally storage) to provide shelter for a few families; while the larger tunnel complexes were modified by the City Council to accommodate thousands of shelterers. The Victoria Arches were originally constructed within the river wall of the Irwell and, when the wall was completed in 1839, were let to businesses including wine merchants, printers and machine makers.35 In 1939, these spaces were approved for 63

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay use as an air-​raid shelter by the Home Office and supplied with wooden bunks and seats, and water, electricity and sewer networks for the estimated 1,619 local residents who could be accommodated. At the same time, the Manchester and Salford Junction Canal tunnel (originally opened in 1839 as a 1,600 foot underground tunnel that formed part of a canal linking the river Irwell with the Rochdale Canal) was drained and converted into another shelter –​with a dam constructed at one end of the tunnel and 16 chambers for shelterers along its length, each one divided by reinforced walls and filled with wooden plank beds –​that could accommodate over 1,300 people in total.36 As reported by The Guardian newspaper in 1939, the normally uninviting ‘dank air’ of the tunnel was transformed by the threat above ground and gained ‘a feeling of security and a sense of deep protection’37 that led to hundreds of people sheltering there even before the Manchester Blitz reached its terrifying apogee in December 1940.38 Until maintenance works in 2014 forced the suspension of visits, the tourist agency Manchester Walks offered regular guided trips to the former air raid shelters in the canal tunnel. Titled ‘Underground Manchester’, the tour promised to give visitors a unique experience of the ‘damp, dank and dismal’ world and ‘vast chasmic chambers’ under the city that supposedly provided aromas ‘of the dark recesses of the planet’.39 From my past experiences in London, these kinds of tours promise much in their titles but usually deliver very little actual subterranean space, so beset are they with stringent safety regulations and fear of litigation. At its start, the Underground Manchester tour seemed to fit the pattern: a long ramble through the city’s streets, with the guide talking about Manchester’s underground and revealing portals to the subterranean now sealed off and inaccessible, such as the bunker-​like entrance to the Guardian Exchange tunnels, built as a nuclear shelter in the 1950s, near the city’s iconic Town Hall. However, half way through the tour, things took a dramatic turn as the party of 35 mainly elderly visitors descended an 80-​foot staircase beneath the Great Northern entertainment complex, an ultra-​modern, innocuous building housed inside what was previously the gargantuan Great Northern Railway warehouse –​a late-​Victorian building that handled industrial quantities of cotton until its closure in the 1970s. At the bottom of the stairs of the warehouse, we entered the tunnel of the former Manchester and Salford Junction Canal that ran from the 64

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Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-industrial Manchester warehouse on Deansgate to Grape Street, near to what was, for many years, the Granada Studios –​site of the famous set for the long-​running television soap Coronation Street. The 17-​foot-​high tunnel of the former canal still visibly sweats and drips, as if in memory of its former function, fogging camera lenses immediately and making photography difficult. Sparsely lit, this fetid space was where thousands of Mancunians would have sheltered for sometimes weeks on end during the German bombing raids of 1940 and 1941. Inscribed on the walls are the remains of the official instructions to these reluctant troglodytes –​rules as to how to behave in this most unusual of environments, now almost illegible after years of gentle scouring by the humid atmosphere. In fact, the first underground space entered on the tour, the former transshipment dock of the canal, was but a portal into an extraordinary and mysterious subterranean world, shrouded in darkness, slippery underfoot, and filled with the ruins of both the former canal and rubble from the Blitz –​the transshipment dock and hoist shafts –​and the tunnel as air-​raid shelter, including the wardens’ lookouts, first-​aid posts, toilet booths and faded signage (Figure 2.4). That the group was allowed to enter these spaces was remarkable enough, and

Figure 2.4  Former World War II air-​raid shelters constructed beneath the Great Northern Warehouse, Manchester.

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay they felt every bit as wild and alien as other underground spaces that are usually shut off from public view, such as the Irk culvert described above. With hostile indifference to my high-​specification camera, the cavernous spaces appeared and reappeared in phantasmagoric spectacles of sublime architecture, including a giant brick arch spanning the upper reaches of one of the caverns as if holding together the vast forces of the substructure of the city. Indeed, the overwhelming dominance of brick in these subterranean spaces testifies, in extreme form, to what Mark Crinson has termed the ‘old nightmare’ of Manchester, ‘the horror of dampness, darkness and unrelenting labour’ of the Victorian city.40 The characteristic architectural brickwork of Victorian Manchester, seen in the city’s countless mills, warehouses, railway viaducts and streets of terraced housing, takes on more elemental forms in these spaces below ground: the arches seemingly merging with the substructure of the city itself, its former bedrock turned to bedbrick. These spaces are a ‘ruins memory’ of Manchester, unusually taking a durable material form, a remainder of the violent process of industrialization that gave rise to the city above ground, the ruins of which were normally quickly eradicated.41 Even if the canal tunnel was built many years after Manchester began to industrialize, its half-​ruined forms now seem much older than they really are, perhaps a product of the fact that these spaces have remained largely untouched since they were closed as a shelter in 1948.42 For me, the archaic and sublime quality of these spaces rested uneasily alongside the knowledge that they used to shelter many hundreds of anxious wartime residents (in contrast to the rather more homely chalk tunnels of the Chislehurst caves in London, also used to shelter thousands during the Blitz).43 In fact, one anonymous artist, perhaps even one of the unfortunate wartime shelterers or a later infiltrator, has scrawled an image of the devil on one of the brick walls, as if representing the infernal being most well-​suited to dwell in this nightmarish world (Figure  2.5). If the Victorians modernized cities like Manchester by remaking their subterranean spaces, they also created, through those very spaces, a world that seemed paradoxically archaic and atavistic. This coming together of the modern and the ancient characterized perceptions of many underground spaces in Victorian cities, unsettling smoothed-​over notions of urban 66

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Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-industrial Manchester

Figure 2.5  Image of the devil on one of the walls of the former air-​raid shelters.

development of progressive modernization that dominate the contemporary discourse of regeneration in Manchester.44 This simultaneously modern and archaic space is an underground of spectres, ghosts and demons: an urban space that is no less real than the tangible, material ruins from which these ghosts arise.45 If the petrified wooden bridge in the Irk culvert summons up the ghosts of countless animals that crossed this bridge over the centuries, dead or alive, then those in the Manchester and Salford Junction Canal tunnel conjure a host of human habitués: infiltrators and tourists like myself in the postwar period; the huddled crowds of family groups sheltering during the Blitz; the working men and horses who used to haul, load and unload the canal boats; and the men who dug the tunnel and laid the thousands of bricks. As argued by 67

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay geographer Steve Pile, in the ghostly city, as in the mind, ‘many histories occupy the same space’ creating a ‘dense weave to the emotional fabric of the city’.46 Thus, in this underground space, the oppressively humid atmosphere gathers together many layers of meaning. In frustrating the photographic gaze (by fogging lenses) the watery miasma seems to demand to be perceived as a powerful material trace of urban memory, the collective exhalations of successive habitués: from the sweat and toil of the men who built the tunnel in the late 1830s to the anxious (or reassured) breathing of the huddled shelterers during the Blitz. In this context, the knowledge of an outbreak of scarlet fever amongst the shelterers in January 1941 lends a peculiar kind of horror to the memory embodied in the miasma today, one that forces an awareness of the past that speaks forcibly of danger, trauma and loss;47 in Pile’s evocative words, ‘the fractured and fragmented times of traumatic events as they seek to posses and haunt the present.’48

The ruins of industry In October 1853, the Builder pictured Manchester ‘getting up the steam’ (Figure 2.6), an image of the city’s forest of tall smoking chimneys, interspersed by large unadorned mill buildings, with their repetitive rows of identical windows, and diminutive groups of terraced houses. This engraving still sums up what for many is the dominant image of Manchester’s

Figure  2.6 ‘Manchester, getting up the steam’, Builder, October 1853. Wood-​ engraved print.

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Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-industrial Manchester Victorian and more recent history as a soot-​filled city of polluting industry, damp and unrelenting monotony. Within this imagined Manchester, epitomized in the paintings of L. S. Lowry, mills tower over all other buildings, dominating the visual appearance of the cityscape. Today, in some parts of the Greater Manchester region, such as Bolton and Oldham, mill buildings still dominate in this way, even if their chimneys have long since ceased belching smoke. From the late eighteenth ​century onwards, over 2,400 mills and cloth-​ finishing works were built in what would become the Greater Manchester region: a territory approximately 25 miles north to south and 30 miles east to west. In their exhaustive survey of these structures, which was begun in 1985, Farnie and Williams found that less than half (1,112) of these factories had survived, with many either derelict or awaiting grant-​aided demolition.49 Since the mid-​1980s, many more mills have been lost: the sheer number and vast size of these structures make them particularly difficult to convert to non-​industrial uses. The result is that all across the Great Manchester region, former mill buildings offer an exemplary demonstration of all of the varied stages of ruination: from demolition and dereliction to partial occupation and stalled regeneration. The fate of Manchester’s mills highlights the variety of strategies adopted to come to terms with these ruins, which are always also the ruins of a distinct type of work that has now practically disappeared from the region. Manchester’s mill buildings, as suggested in the Builder image and in the popular imagination of the industrial city, offer a kind of ‘afterimage’ of ‘mythic’ Manchester, the city defined by writers such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, in which the mill building represents not only a certain type of work but also the entire industrial system, as perhaps most powerfully imagined in Dickens’s Coketown of Hard Times (1854).50 In this sense, the ruins of Manchester’s mills are also the ruins of a collective way of life and of the potent imaginaries of industrialization that continue to haunt the present-​day city.

Demolition: Royd Mill On a sunny early a​ utumn afternoon in 2013, I visited the Hollins district of Oldham to walk around the giant mill buildings I had previously seen from 69

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay the nearby M60 motorway. Still dominating this area of Oldham, a series of large mills was built in the first decade of the twentieth century, with almost 18 million spindles housed in Oldham’s dozens of mills in 1926, the town’s peak year of production. Still bearing the company names on their towers and chimneys –​Devon (1908), Durban (1905), Heron (1905), Royd (1907) –​these mills were part of a wave of new factories constructed in Oldham during the manufacturing boom of 1904 to 1908, when the town became the largest single centre of cotton spinning in the world.51 Many were designed by the same family of architects, particularly A. H. and P. S. Stott, and this accounts for their largely uniform appearance characterized by long frontages of identical windows stacked up in four or five storeys of red Accrington brick walls topped with terracotta ornament, flat concrete roofs, and prominent stair and water towers.52 As I rounded the corner of Chamber Road in Hollins, I came across the sight of one of these mills, Royd Mill, in the process of being demolished (Figure 2.7). With just the water tower and chimney left intact, the rest of the building lay in shattered fragments, the interior of the mill torn away to reveal the fittings and fixtures for a brief moment before they too joined the accumulating rubble beneath. Meanwhile, bulldozers and diggers picked away

Figure 2.7  Demolition of Royd Mill, Oldham, September 2013.

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Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-industrial Manchester at the remaining walls, creating dust clouds and the characteristic dry, musty smell of shredded building materials. Demolition is perhaps the most commonplace form of what Marshall Berman has termed ‘urbicide’, that is, the deliberate destruction of the built environment of cities (see ­Chapter 3).53 Yet, unlike architectural annihilation by acts of war, demolition rarely receives much attention: many buildings that are demolished are unmourned ‘eyesores’, their deaths usually heralded by long periods of decline, marked by the failure to find new uses for obviously defunct structures.54 Royd Mill followed this familiar trajectory when production ceased in 1981, a relatively recent date compared to many other mills in Greater Manchester. Although the building continued to be used for processing textiles and storage until very recently, it was advertised for sale for many years until April 2013, when the property developer DifRent finally purchased and then suddenly demolished it, despite its still-​sound structure. The developer went on to build 52 family homes on the site in 2014.55 Unlike the staged and almost instantaneous demolitions of modernist high-​rise mass housing blocks –​most famously the televised destruction of Pruitt-​Igoe in St Louis in 1972 and, in Salford, the Kersal flats in 1990 –​ deliberately contemplating buildings like Royd Mill undergoing rather more slow-​motion demolition is a transgressive form of looking.56 For me, seeing Royd Mill being killed was a discomforting, even shocking experience. Buildings, even long-​empty ones, are essentially anthropomorphic structures, designed to be either lived in or to be shared spaces of work or leisure. In buildings, particularly domestic ones, we recognize ourselves in their formal elements. For example, in young children’s drawings of houses, architectural features are equated with faces: windows are the eyes, the roof is the head and the door is the nose or mouth. In adulthood, these anthropomorphisms become more generalized: we often speak of buildings as possessing ‘character’ as a person does. In the case of Royd Mill, this character stemmed from the building’s former industrial function, a sense of energy and strength imbued its rows of identical windows and enormous brick walls. Here, demolition seemed to annihilate both the energy involved in the building’s construction and that of the production that filled its spaces for decades –​a profligate throwing away of the resources that made and sustained the building, particularly as its demolition has 71

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay made way for new housing, repudiating any possible return to a ‘productive’ function.57 The violence of demolition also contrasts with the serenity of the ruin. Where, with the ruin, nature is allowed to re-​establish her former claims to the building, producing a peaceful sense of equilibrium, the building undergoing demolition is violently annihilated by the very tools that raised it up in the first place.58 No wonder that most demolitions are shielded from public view behind makeshift screens or locked gates. Representations of demolition transgress this concealment in that they both expose and attenuate the violence of architectural annihilation. In the case of Royd Mill, with demolition pending, urban explorers accessed the building to photograph its spaces as a way of recording what was about to be lost, in effect an ethical act of preservation.59 On the one hand, these photographs articulate the building as somehow still existent, even in the moment of its death –​the architectural equivalent of a coroner’s report perhaps –​on the other, the exposure of the building’s insides during demolition produce revelatory views of architecture: glimpses of the otherwise invisible ‘soft’ interiors.60 The violent destruction of mills has been and continues to be a recurring image in histories of Manchester. Many of the earliest timber-​built mills succumbed to fire, ignited by the highly flammable cotton fibres that filled their interiors;61 others were deliberately destroyed by disaffected workers in the turbulent years of Luddite insurrection.62 In the twentieth century, German incendiary bombs destroyed many mills during World War II, while some of those that escaped were subsequently demolished in the waves of ‘slum’ clearances in the 1960s, as seen in the leitmotif of the wrecking ball in the film Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963).63 In recent years, some abandoned mills have been targeted by arsonists, which usually leads to their demolition. As I experienced recently, when returning to Salford to explore the derelict but listed Overbridge and Springfield Mill (1845), only to find it almost completely levelled by bulldozers after an arson attack, demolition can and often does produce a sense of stinging loss in the observer, one that cannot help but imaginatively reconstruct the absent building as a spectral presence on its former site, especially as many of these sites are never rebuilt on, serving for many years as impromptu car parks.64 These spectral presences of former buildings –​representations 72

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Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-industrial Manchester of them before, during or after demolition –​create a valuable archive of the city in their own right: an archaeology of modernity that shows that the latter is always haunted by the ghosts of the past. In Manchester, these representations also draw attention to issues that are very specific to the city, namely the problematic legacy of its one dominating building type, the cotton mill, in a contemporary service-​and leisure-​focused urban environment. Their ubiquity poses significant problems for those who try to conceive of alternative uses for historic buildings whilst also respecting the city’s once monolithic textile industry. In this sense, ascribing value to the partial presences of demolished mill buildings, even when they exist only as car parks, opens up a space where practical questions about redevelopment can be enriched, even as they are also complicated by, symbolic meanings.

Dereliction and decay: Hartford Mill Despite many losses through demolition, Manchester’s mills have long featured in postwar images of the city as a landscape of lingering dereliction and decay. As the German emigré Max Ferber recalled in W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (1993), his arrival in Manchester in 1942 summoned up the memory of thousands of smoking chimneys that he saw on viewing the city from the surrounding hills. Yet, by the mid-​1960s, when Sebald met Frank Auerbach, the artist who had inspired the fictional Ferber, ‘almost every one of those chimneys [… had] now been demolished or taken out of use.’65 However, the remnants of this landscape of mills continued to persist in the city in the 1960s, as evidenced in a scene filmed in Oldham in the film Hell Is A City (Val Guest, 1960), where the town’s half-​ruined millscape is revealed panoramically when a group of illegal gamblers flee from a police raid on a moor on Oldham Edge;66 or in a more sustained way in A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961), where the Victorian mills of Ancoats, Stockport and Miles Platting dominate the still-​industrial landscape that frames the poignant story of young social outcasts in a bleak, half-​ruined city (Figure 2.8).67 Despite comprehensive redevelopment of much inner-​city housing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Manchester was still experiencing seemingly inexorable decline: during the period 1961 to 1983, the city lost over 73

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Figure 2.8  Still from A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961), showing Victoria Mill on the banks of the Rochdale Canal in Miles Platting.

150,000 jobs in manufacturing with the inner core worst affected, with one in three jobs lost in the same period.68 As documented by music journalist Jon Savage in the late-​1970s, inner-​city Manchester was widely seen as a decaying ‘ghost town’, with the ring of inner-​city former industrial areas slowly emptying of their residents, allowing the burgeoning post-​punk counterculture in the city to flower in condemned buildings like the Hulme Crescents, the Electric Circus club in the blasted suburb of Collyhurst, and the Haçienda, a nightclub housed in a derelict city-​centre warehouse.69 Meanwhile, the city and region’s mills continued to slide towards redundancy, with textile production in almost all of these buildings ceasing by the early 1980s. Whilst the move towards regeneration in the 1990s saved some of the more iconic mill structures, particularly those that were listed or located near to the city centre, many others fell into a state of suspended animation, either being partially reused or succumbing to dereliction and decay. Today, very few mill buildings in the Greater Manchester region are left as ruins; fewer still are easily accessible to urban explorers. As in many other post-​industrial cities, derelict factories are conventionally designated as ‘eyesores’, an obviously pejorative term that signals that a building has 74

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Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-industrial Manchester

Figure 2.9  Interior of Hartford Mill, Oldham, March 2014.

been rejected, both in the sense of its obvious visual repugnance and also of its supposedly ‘corrupt’ influence on its surroundings.70 Hartford Mill in the Chadderton area of Oldham, built in 1907 (the same year as Royd Mill), and abandoned by the retailers Littlewoods in 1992, has gradually become a ruin, through successive acts of arson, theft, and vandalism (Figure  2.9). Despite its Grade II listed status, Hartford Mill has, in the words of the Labour ward councillor Shoab Akhtar, become a ‘derelict eyesore’, and a particularly visible one on account of it being situated right next to Freehold Station on the Metrolink line that links Manchester city centre with Oldham and Rochdale. Under imminent threat of demolition in late 2016, the mill has been subject to repeated attempts by Oldham Council to find a buyer for the group of buildings, but without success.71 However, the public’s responses to Akhtar’s claims showed that the ruined mill is not universally disliked, mainly because it signifies the memory of Oldham once being the world centre of cotton production. Moreover, for urban explorers and many geographers, the ruination of industrial buildings like Hartford Mill presents opportunities for reflection on the memories of industry itself.72 These memories are highly valued by many in relation to Greater Manchester’s existing cotton mills, including a few textile companies that 75

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay continue to use and care for these buildings, for example the Grade II listed Kearsley Mill in Prestolee that is still occupied and well-​maintained by its original owner, Richard Haworth Ltd. Local conservation groups, such as the Ancoats Buildings Preservation Trust, campaign to preserve historic mills (see below), while the National Trust owns Quarry Bank Mill to the south of Manchester and the site’s many volunteers dramatically re-​enact its social history for visitors. Finally, arts events like Angel Meadow, the audience-​immersive theatre production held in Ancoats in June 2014, provide insights into the lives of former textile-​workers (in the case of Angel Meadow, Irish immigrants who dominated the area in the nineteenth century). Hartford Mill is a magnet for urban explorers because of the ease of access to the site: unlike most of Oldham’s redundant mills, until early 2015 the building was not secured by fences. The building’s openness has also contributed to its advanced state of ruin: only a few windows remain intact, virtually all of the machinery has gone, and there is very little else left to suggest the building’s former industrial function. Indeed, the absence of obvious mnemonic devices characterizes its interior spaces, from the forests of thin cast-​iron columns on the upper floors that used to house vast numbers of cotton-​spinning machines (Figure 2.9), to the lack of any material remnants of the production process itself, such as paperwork, bobbins and leftover textiles. Unlike some industrial ruins where some of the material remnants of production are still extant –​for example, the wool-​spinning Bailey Mill in Delph –​the gutted nature of Hartford Mill is strongly suggestive of the absent work and workers that once filled its spaces. Such suggestions take on allegorical meaning when the empty spaces of the mill are compared with an engraving published in the Illustrated London News in 1864, depicting thousands of workers and their families gathered in celebration of John Platt’s –​the owner of the then Hartford Works –​election as the Member of Parliament for Oldham (Figure 2.10).73 Located in the older mill buildings (c.1850) that still stand as partially-​occupied commercial premises adjacent to the ruined Hartford Mill, the engraving shows the interior spaces of the nineteenth-​century mill filled with finely-​dressed middle-​class men and women in the foreground and dancing workers in the background –​a poignant reminder of the manufacturing dominance of the Platt family’s company in Oldham, which grew from humble origins 76

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Figure 2.10  Festival at Hartford Mill in 1864, as shown in the Illustrated London News, celebrating the owner John Platt’s election as the Member of Parliament for Oldham.

in the eighteenth century to become the largest textile manufacturer in the world when Hartford Mill was constructed in 1907.74 As the final expression of their supreme confidence, the ruined and empty Hartford Mill now stands as a reminder of the folly of overreaching ambition, in effect an industrial equivalent of the romantic notion of ruins as the result of imperial hubris, particularly those of Imperial Rome.75 Moreover, the very emptiness of the interior spaces of the building summon up an innumerable ‘ghostly cast’ of human presences that includes not just the founders of the textile company and the workers shown in the engraving in the Illustrated London News, but also their descendants who continued to work in and manage the mill right up until it ceased production in 1959.76 As idealized as the image of social harmony presented in the Illustrated London News might be, it nevertheless suggests, in juxtaposition with the now ruined mill, ‘unrealised possibilities that might have emerged from comradely, shared struggles and an elusive wider sense of collectivity, a utopian potential which still lingers on.’77 When Hartford Mill is demolished –​in March 2016 Oldham Council put forward its plan to finally pull down the building 77

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay and redevelop the site into around 370 new homes –​the memory of those unrealized possibilities will also disappear. For me, these possibilities are not primarily concerned with preserving the building on account of its historical and mnemonic value, important though those are but rather of integrating what remains with what is to come. It seems a given that we recognize the rich quality of historic built environments that have achieved this –​for example, the incorporation of medieval remnants into later buildings in many cathedral cities; yet, we seem unable to imagine similar outcomes for industrial and post-​industrial built environments. The fact that demolition and rebuilding are such normative processes in the contemporary city flags up not just the overwhelming success of capitalist modes of urban development, but also the paucity of our imaginations to think and act otherwise.

Salvage: Royal Mills and Brunswick Mill If many of Greater Manchester’s mills have either been demolished or fallen into a state of ruin, others have found alternative uses, including, in addition to heritage sites like Quarry Bank Mill: children’s play areas (for example Run of the Mill, located in Pear Mill in Stockport); self-​storage or warehousing facilities (Chadderton Mill, Oldham); nightclubs (Beehive Mill, Ancoats); apartments (Royal Mills, Ancoats); and even public sector services (a health and education centre in Victoria Mill, Miles Platting). These conversions offer insights into how otherwise defunct industrial buildings might be salvaged and reused and also how the historical development of these buildings might be remembered, particularly those that involve the conversion of high-​profile listed buildings, such as Royal Mills in Ancoats. A flagship project in the recent regeneration of part of Ancoats, Royal Mills was one of two groups of mill buildings (the other being Murrays’ Mills) fronting the Rochdale Canal.78 Founded in the 1780s, these mills, which evolved into large complexes of buildings arranged around central courtyards entered by one main portal, dominated the industrial landscape of Ancoats throughout the nineteenth century. Only after the boom years of the 1920s did the area’s textile industry start to decline, with cotton spinning virtually ceasing in its mills by the mid-​1960s, far earlier than their equivalents in outlying towns like Oldham. Standing empty for decades, both the Royal and Murrays’ mill complexes were saved from almost 78

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Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-industrial Manchester certain demolition after the Ancoats Urban Village Company (established in 1996) was supported by grants from the North West Regional Development Agency in 2002 and property developers Urban Splash to oversee the conversion of the buildings into apartments, shops, offices and leisure outlets.79 Only Royal Mills has been fully refurbished, the adjacent Murrays’ Mills standing for over a decade in a state of suspended animation awaiting regeneration –​the process finally getting underway in May 2016.80 Both Crinson and Tyrer have argued that the renovation of Royal Mills evidences both ‘heritage time’ and ‘developers’ time’ being applied to transform a semi-​ruined building that had been empty for decades.81 The once prison-​like mill, where workers were effectively shut in by a lock-​ out system at the beginning of each shift, has been preserved to create a new kind of enclosed environment: a truly ‘defensible space’ for the occupiers of the high-​end apartments that have been inserted into the former industrial spaces.82 Within the courtyard of Royal Mills, now covered by a glass canopy, are reminders of the building’s former industrial function: a timeline of the mill from its founding in the 1780s to the present day; a preserved cast-​iron flywheel from one of the building’s giant steam-​engines; and several pieces of machinery associated with cotton production. Yet, like the carefully sandblasted brickwork that dominates this building, this machinery has been thoroughly sanitized, painted green and dissociated from the social aspects of industrial history, functioning more as a series of sculptural objects. It is clear that the buyers of Royal Mills’s 198 apartments do not come from the residual working-​class population that surrounds this part of Ancoats: with prices starting at around £150,000 for a one-​bedroom apartment (as of late 2015), these spaces have been mainly bought or rented by property investors and young professionals.83 It is perhaps not surprising therefore that the memory of the former ruinous state of Royal Mills has been effectively obliterated from its newly-​renovated spaces, despite the property owner’s claim that the mill has been ‘carefully restored’.84 Here, the focus on producing an historic aesthetic, seen in the sandblasting of the once soot-​covered bricks, for example, reflects a superficial approach to the preservation of historical memory. The most obvious way for the regenerated Royal Mills to engage more richly with social memory is to highlight the stories of workers who 79

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay formerly occupied the building. Yet, for a wealthier audience, this might provoke discomfort and is hardly a selling point to prospective buyers. Nonetheless, attempts to acknowledge the working-​class legacies of redesigned historic buildings could build empathy between its old and new users. Even if difficult to achieve and at the micro-​level of a single development, this could have a profound influence on the wider Ancoats area, which is currently experiencing intense historical erasure. Indeed, it might be argued that like so many other gentrification projects, such as the redevelopment of the former Battersea Power Station in London or the Park Hill estate in Sheffield (see ­Chapter 6), the emphasis on history as a kind of ornament to the ‘restored’ building avoids social histories precisely to sidestep any implication of displacement. Yet, are those memories really now completely exorcized? On one of my explorations of Ancoats and Miles Platting in March 2014, I  walked into Brunswick Mill, built around 1840 to a design similar to the Royal Mills complex, but on an even larger scale.85 In 2008, it was proposed to convert Brunswick Mill (which ceased cotton production in the 1960s) into a mixture of apartments, offices and retail units, but this came to nothing and the building has continued to exist in a state of semi-​abandonment. The seven-​ story spinning mill is now boarded-​up while the former offices of the mill company have remained in use as commercial spaces for bedding manufacturers and as rehearsal spaces for musicians (Figure 2.11).86 During my visit to the building, I met John Parke who worked for the Dreamtex company, which assembled duvets from textiles imported from China. Remarkably, John, who was in his late 50s, has worked in Manchester’s textile industry since he was 15 and was employed in Sedgwick Mill (the oldest section of the Royal Mills complex, completed in 1820) for 27 years. Although he complained about the poor working conditions in the semi-​ruined Brunswick Mill, John still maintained that the building could be saved, possibly in a conversion similar to that undertaken at Royal Mills, which he approved of –​surprisingly to my mind –​perhaps on account of his memory of the building’s dilapidated condition during his time working there.87 In one sense, John’s story chimes with cultural critic Evan Calder Williams’s assertion that ‘there is no new construction, just the occupation of other architectures’.88 John’s own memory of work in these mill buildings is a living testament to a form of salvage very different from that adopted 80

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Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-industrial Manchester

Figure 2.11  Brunswick Mill on Old Mill Street, Ancoats, March 2014.

in heritage-​led developments like Royal Mills. In a very real sense, he is a living remnant of Manchester’s industrial past, salvaging that past through his work in the city’s supposedly defunct mills. This notion of salvage as the retrieving and reusing of outmoded things and spaces derives its power from the fact that, unlike Royal Mills, the spaces in which John works are ‘still marked by the peculiar imprint of their time of production and the store of labour and energy frozen in their form[s]‌’.89 Indeed, the challenge John’s testimony presented to me was of the urgent need to salvage the memory of work not just in relation to Manchester’s industrial buildings but also in terms of the social relations embedded in that work. For me, John’s work challenged the common understanding today of Manchester’s industrial legacy as heritage; rather, John carried a living memory of that history within the ruins he continues to inhabit and salvage.

The ruins of work Located just beyond the fashionable and increasingly gentrified Northern Quarter, Ancoats has occupied a critical role in the recent expansion of regeneration in Manchester beyond the city centre. In addition to the 81

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay Ancoats Urban Village Company, which oversees redevelopment in the small area of Ancoats designated as a conservation area, the wider area of East Manchester (incorporating Ancoats, Bradford, Clayton, Gorton, Miles Platting, and Newton) has seen successive regeneration initiatives since the 1990s.90 These have been characterized by a bewildering array of public–​private sector partnerships that have all been affected by changes in government and fluctuations in the economy. Regeneration began with the formation of the New East Manchester Urban Development Company in 1999, which, in conjunction with Manchester City Council, has overseen development in this part of Manchester since 2004 (but, since 2010, the company has been wholly owned by the council). East of Ancoats in Bradford, the Sportcity development came in the wake of the 2002 Commonwealth Games, while further east in Clayton, the North West Development Agency (disbanded in 2010) funded the Medlock Valley programme, which is re-​greening the area around the river Medlock. Finally, in Ancoats itself, the New Islington Millennium Community was founded in 2000 as the third of the Labour government’s designated millennium communities. All of these initiatives, guided by the overarching policies of the New East Manchester Urban Development Company, have included consultations with existing residents in the area, brought together in the creation of the East Manchester Residents’ Forum in 1998.91 Indeed, the main emphasis of the publicity issued by the parties overseeing regeneration has been that of community-​led development, rather than the older, now pejorative term ‘slum clearance’.92 Ancoats has long been characterized by ruination. When it was first developed in the late eighteenth century from green fields to the world’s first industrial suburb, the process left many ‘ruins in reverse’ in its wake, such as half-​finished rows of houses described in Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton (1848),93 speculative-​built workers’ housing of such low quality that it became ruinous within a few years (as described by Engels in 1844),94 and the ruin of older mills and factories that had become redundant.95 By the 1930s, much of the early-​Victorian housing stock persisted, including many back-​to-​back blocks that were actually outlawed in 1844,96 while small pockets of the worst housing had been replaced by ‘model’ dwellings such as those from the 1890s that still remain in Anita Street, George Leigh Street and Victoria Square. 82

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Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-industrial Manchester As shown in Ordnance Survey maps of the area from the mid-​1960s and in scenes in the 1961 film A Taste of Honey (Figure 2.8), the built fabric of Ancoats remained virtually unchanged from the 1930s to the 1970s, despite the widespread bomb damage the area sustained in World War II. While the industrial buildings gradually ceased production, the housing stock remained stable, even as it was generally condemned by the city council. Only in the late 1970s did widespread demolitions obliterate the long-​standing streetscapes of Victorian terraces interspersed with empty industrial buildings. In the wake of these demolitions, 200 new houses were constructed (the Cardroom estate), the rest of the brownfield site being redeveloped into the Central Retail Park in the early 1980s. Finally, it was the deterioration of the Cardroom estate and its abandonment by the majority of its residents in the 1990s that resulted in the most up-​to-​ date cycle of demolition/​redevelopment, that is, the razing of the estate from 2003 to 2006 and the partial redevelopment of what is now New Islington. As I  will suggest, the image of Ancoats and more specifically, New Islington, as comprised of successive and distinct layers of historical development (often wrongly termed a palimpsest) is a seductive yet flawed one, tantamount to a glossing over of the ways in which successive ruin and redevelopment overlap and, in Serres’s terms, ‘percolate’ rather than lie on top of one another, waiting to be read like layers of rock strata.97 In short, if the histories of Ancoats percolate rather than lie beneath the present-​day city, perhaps New Islington will never be able to rid itself of the ruins of the past.

The persistence of ruins In the area now designated as New Islington, namely the land bounded by the Rochdale and Ashton canals on one side and Great Ancoats Street and the southern edge of Miles Platting on the other, the property developer Urban Splash continues to be the most significant company in terms of defining what the regenerated area will eventually look like. As stated in its promotional literature, the name ‘New Islington’ was chosen by the community in 2000 and,98 although the associations with the then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s London home were obvious at the time, New Islington does in fact refer to an historic mill built in the area around 1798 next to what 83

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay would have been the open course of Shooter’s Brook.99 Unlike the majority of other eighteenth-​century mills in Manchester, New Islington Mill survived as a site of production throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, eventually being demolished in the 1970s to make way for a recreation area for the new Cardroom estate.100 In choosing the name New Islington, residents were referring to both a demolished building that would nevertheless have been remembered by them, and also a far distant time immediately before industrialization transformed the area; a decision seemingly grounded in an awareness of history that was rooted in their own lived memories and historical imaginaries (a far cry from the other ahistorical names  –​East Village and New East Manchester Dam  –​proposed by Urban Splash).101 However, in terms of what has been built so far, these desired-​for historical associations are difficult to detect, whether in the block of playful Dutch-​style houses built by FAT Architects in what is now New Islington Square (the first area of social housing to be completed in 2005), the neo-​Brutalist social housing completed by dMFK Architects in Percy Street in 2007, or, as of early 2016, the generic luxury apartment buildings and first private houses, with their sepulchral colour and box-​like forms mocking the original ‘Tutti Frutti’ design concept (Figure 2.12).102 Indeed, the new social housing, built to rehouse former residents of the Cardroom estate, blatantly ignored those residents’ explicitly stated desire for new homes that reflected the design of the ones that they had lost.103 In fact, as stated by one former resident, Joan, the gated complex that is New Islington Square has, for her at least, completely ruined the former sense of community that was an anchoring point in her memories of the Cardroom estate: in her emphatic words, ‘it’s all gone, it’s all gone, it just has’.104 The stigmatization of the Cardroom estate as already ruined before its eventual demolition was critical to the ways in which the New Islington development was promoted by Urban Splash. In its publicity, the company pictured the Cardroom as an unsalvageable ‘sink estate’ with all the necessary pejorative language that this requires. In its estimation, the estate was an ‘equally damaging’ response to the ‘60s high rise disaster’ in Manchester, with its design –​low-​rise, low-​density housing laid out in open-​plan cul-​ de-​sacs  –​seemingly causing all of the problems that led to the estate’s catastrophic decline. According to Urban Splash, the cul-​de-​sacs became ‘breeding grounds for criminal activity’, that is, ‘havens for drug dealing, 84

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Figure  2.12 Private houses under construction in New Islington in June 2015 (top), compared with a promotional hoarding depicting Urban Splash’s original vision for the area (bottom).

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay for dumping stolen cars, for breaking and entering’, with the construction of the Central Retail Park in the 1980s effectively severing the Cardroom community from the city centre and signing its ‘death warrant’.105 At the same time, in Len Grant’s photographs documenting the New Islington project, the Cardroom houses are pictured extant but already ruined, characterized by boarded up windows and doors, or, in other time-​lapse images, being slowly demolished. As architectural historian Ben Campkin has argued in relation to housing clearances in London, the argument for regeneration, especially if it involves demolition, requires a rhetoric of condemnation of the existing built environment in order to effectively justify its intention to destroy it.106 In Campkin’s estimation, there is a pressing need to ‘reconnect regeneration to the imaginaries of those communities it purportedly sets out to benefit’, and it is here that cracks start to become apparent in Urban Splash’s otherwise relentlessly upbeat publicity for New Islington.107 For, in commissioning the photographer Len Grant to document the end of the Cardroom estate in Cardroom Voices (2004), Urban Splash also allowed other more positive memories of the estate to be articulated, albeit within an overarching narrative that implied the Cardroom’s certain demolition. What these ‘voices’ suggest is a much more complex range of feelings and memories about the so-​called sink estate. For example, one resident, Jean, described moving into her four-​bedroom house on the new estate in 1978 with a sense of wonder and, when she was moved out of her house in 2004, maintained positive memories of her life there, retaining one of the house’s bricks as a memento mori.108 In fact, the majority of the residents who were interviewed by Grant described the Cardroom as a place that they were deeply attached to and which could never be replaced by demolition and rebuilding. In a telling video interview with Agnes, one of the final (and eldest) residents to leave in 2010, Grant makes no attempt to hide Agnes’s distress at being separated from her former house. Although she describes her new house in Percy Street (one of the neo-​Brutalist homes designed by dMFK) as ‘absolutely the same’ as her former one –​ the fixtures and fittings directly transplanted from the Cardroom estate –​ she nevertheless ‘felt desperate’ because of the sense of loss.109 Clearly, the attempts by Urban Splash to mitigate the pain of displacement for Agnes were ineffective. 86

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Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-industrial Manchester When one listens to testimonies like Agnes’s, it becomes clear that despite the portrayal of the Cardroom estate as a ruin beyond salvage, it was nevertheless home to many and this sense of home was rooted in personal memories that could never be replaced if the estate was destroyed. Moreover, what was also lost in the demolition of the estate was the memory of it as an initiative that, in the late ​1970s, was precisely equivalent to Urban Splash’s new vision. For, like New Islington, the Cardroom was also an attempt to ‘rescue’ Ancoats from its old dilapidated Victorian terraces and the catastrophic decline of manufacturing jobs in the area in the postwar period.110 Indeed, despite the new housing of the Cardroom estate being completely different from what it replaced, the area’s name and its new streets –​Warp Walk, Bobbin Walk, Spinning Jenny Walk –​referred directly to the memory of the cotton industry that would have been part of the residents’ lived experience.111 Thus, in promoting New Islington as a decisive break from the recent history of Ancoats, Urban Splash is in real danger of failing to learn the lessons from that history. What is curious about the New Islington site today is just how slow the development has been. In fact, since the demolition of the last houses on the Cardroom estate in 2010 and the completion of the two areas of social housing that former Cardroom residents were offered as replacement homes, construction has been very slow. Between 2010 and 2014, the area was landscaped, focusing on the ‘reinstatement’ of the former canal network in the form of a new water park lined with canal boats. Yet, despite the construction of the first phase of the new private housing (begun in early 2015), none of the shops, cafés, bars or other leisure facilities have been started, with construction work on the much-​needed school only just beginning in the summer of 2016. In fact, in an ironic twist that may not be lost on the former residents, for many years, much of the New Islington site was cleared waste-​ground, littered with industrial debris, such as the huge boulders once used as bedding stones for industrial machinery and reclaimed oak timbers that were formerly railway sleepers. Indeed, up until only recently, this was a landscape that startlingly resembled that of the early nineteenth century, just at the time when private speculators were rapidly developing the land for industrial buildings and workers’ housing. This temporary return of the conditions and ruins of the distant past to the contemporary post-​industrial city raises disturbing questions about 87

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay the essentially cyclical, rather than progressive and linear, nature of urban development and also of the tendency of each successive round of demolition and construction to refuse to acknowledge this pattern. With this uncanny return we are reminded of the truth of Serres’s statement that time doesn’t flow, but rather percolates; that the ruins of the past may manifest themselves at any moment (and perhaps at all moments), despite the repeated attempts to erase them.

The politics of ruins By early 2014, a small group of local activists had been keeping a vigil for over three years outside one of New Islington’s most iconic ruins: the Victorian Ancoats Hospital building (Figure 2.13), constructed in 1875 as a replacement for the earlier dispensary, opened in 1828.112 The Ancoats Dispensary Trust, the organization who kept the vigil, was formed in 2012 as ‘a reactionary movement in opposition to the proposed demolition’ of the Grade II listed hospital building by Urban Splash, which had purchased

Figure 2.13  The former Ancoats Dispensary building on Old Mill Street, Ancoats, where a vigil by local residents took place for over three years from 2011, before they secured the property in 2015.

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Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-industrial Manchester it, apparently for just £1 in the 1990s, but had been unable to find an alternative use for it, despite the company’s chair and co-​founder Tom Bloxham declaring in 2001 that ‘if we don’t deliver on this one, we’ll never work in this city again’.113 Having initially worked with the North West Development Agency in renovating the Dispensary into apartments, erecting scaffoldings and removing the existing roof, the abolition of the agency in 2010 by the new coalition government resulted in Urban Splash ‘mothballing’ the building and applying to the city council for a demolition order. With the destruction of the building seemingly imminent, a grassroots campaign was begun that put forward an alternative proposal to turn the building into a community space. As the Ancoats Dispensary Trust has argued, this campaign for a ‘common use’ for the former hospital reflects its history as a place of healing within the larger Ancoats area. As the campaign chair Linda Carver has argued, the motivation for returning this ruin to the community grew out of widespread dissatisfaction with both Manchester City Council and Urban Splash’s policy of turning New Islington into a mainly privately-​ owned site with only small concessions to social housing.114 Indeed, in my own visits to the Dispensary in March 2014, I encountered the same feeling amongst those volunteers who maintained the vigil for three hours in the afternoon every weekday of the year. With a host of makeshift placards and posters obscuring Urban Splash’s now ironic images of what the Dispensary might have looked like if converted into privately-​owned apartments, the vigil created and occupied its own space of resistance, effectively re-​appropriating the ruined building as a site of political protest. That the vigil continued unbroken for so long is a powerful testament to the tenacity and dedication of a small group of local citizens in what, for many years, seemed a thankless task. Refused Heritage Lottery funding twice, the campaign nevertheless continued and in March 2015, the Trust was awarded £770,000 from the Heritage Lottery fund, which was then matched by the developer Spacehive.115 A product of tireless work by a remarkably dedicated team of volunteers, the Dispensary’s future seems to have at last been secured for that community. As of May 2016, the Trust, together with Spacehive and Purcell architects, are developing their plans for the building. In contrast to the approach adopted by Urban Splash, this process is genuinely community led, with ideas for the future use of the building being actively solicited by the Trust, as demonstrated 89

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay in its 2015 exhibition Creating Our Future Histories, which invited visitors to share their thoughts on the future of the Dispensary building and to explore and contribute to its on-​going history.116 What is currently envisaged is a mixed-​use redevelopment including a community wellbeing centre, artists’ studios and spaces for small businesses. What all of the volunteers I spoke to had in common were personal histories of displacement by regeneration programmes in the East Manchester area. Chris Simpson, a young man in his 30s, was moved out of Ancoats by the local authority after his rent was raised by Adacdus Housing (the association which managed the housing in Ancoats on behalf of the city council); Jackie Marston had lived in Ancoats for 42 years before her block of flats was scheduled for demolition in 2008 and she was relocated to Openshaw; while Patrick Sudlow lived in the neighbouring area of Clayton, but felt strong affinities with displaced Ancoats’ residents, having himself been moved out of Hulme. All shared a common feeling of anger towards both Urban Splash and Manchester City Council regarding the regeneration of the New Islington site. Both Chris and Patrick viewed the new apartments along the Ashton Canal as being only for wealthy buyers, while the waste ground that lay in between the Dispensary and the Rochdale Canal was an ‘insult’ to Ancoats’ residents because it had now become fenced-​off privately owned land that had originally belonged to the community. Patrick made an explicit link between local politics and the campaign to save the Dispensary building when he said that, in this area of Manchester, only around 11 per cent of the population voted in the last local elections and that this was due to a widespread feeling that they have been systematically ignored by the regeneration strategies devised by Manchester City Council and enacted by Urban Splash.117 The campaign to save the Ancoats Dispensary has seized on a ruined building and re-​appropriated it as a political weapon against the dominant and powerful forces of urban regeneration in the area. It demonstrates how a local community can galvanize itself around a ruin in order to make its voice heard and to articulate alternative futures for its spaces. As Patrick explained to me, the Ancoats Dispensary is not just viewed as a convenient rallying point for long-​standing resentments to be expressed; rather it is a building that has a long history of being rooted in and serving the needs of the local community. From 1828 until 1996, the building functioned as 90

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Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-industrial Manchester the local community hospital, with additional buildings being added as required. When the hospital was threatened with closure in 1987 by the then Conservative government, local residents from the Cardroom estate staged a sit-​in protest that resulted in the building’s continued use as a community clinic until 1996. The subsequent decline and demolition of most of the hospital bar the listed Dispensary building has undoubtedly caused a great deal of anger towards the city council, anger that has now found a focal point for expression in the campaign to save the Dispensary. As Patrick stated, winning the money necessary for restoring the Dispensary to the community it once served has not only provided an enormous boost to a disenfranchised populace, but also enabled the creation of a heterogeneous space that will genuinely answer to the desires and needs of that community. In short, the ruined building has been transformed from an example of architectural failure into a focus for collective emancipatory desires.

Conclusion This chapter’s selective analysis of Manchester’s ruins has brought out the ways in which the city’s abandoned, neglected and decaying spaces can be understood as remnants of the city’s ‘disaster’  –​namely the catastrophic decline of its principal industry, cotton. In contemporary post-​industrial Manchester, hidden spaces and structures –​in this case a river and former canal underneath the city –​function as mnemonic devices for the recollection of ‘lost’ histories; redundant buildings (mills) are redolent of ruination as a heterogeneous process that involves many stages, from salvage to demolition; and regeneration sites like New Islington speak of both repressed pasts and also alternative futures. These categories of ruin collectively suggest a rich array of meanings. In a supposedly post-​industrial city like Manchester, and in many other cities with similar histories across the world, ruins can function as containers of meaning that allow reflection on the otherwise relentless drive towards modernization, with its dominant discourse (and enactment) of creative destruction. The presence of ruins constantly threatens to disturb the smoothed-​over post-​industrial city that Manchester is increasingly becoming –​like ‘slips of the tongue’, the troubled histories evidenced by ruins erupt to challenge the overarching narratives of progress and development.118 Ruins, especially in a city 91

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay like Manchester with its long history of decline and a persistent imaginary of disaster, lead us to contemplate another kind of development, one that looks both forward and backward at the same time, one that is open to the complexities of lived memory, and one that is prepared to move forward while embracing the ruins that are always everywhere.

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Explorations

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3 Fantasy and experience: ruin gazing in Varosha

Histories of urban ruins, whether the imagined destructions of London in literature and film considered in ­Chapter 1 or the material legacies of Manchester’s industrial past described in ­Chapter 2, shed light on the complex temporalities of ruins themselves, that is, how they bring together past, present and future in both the imagined and the ‘real’ city. Explorations of ruins, particularly those undertaken by urban explorers, tend to be more focused on embodied experience in the present moment as a subversive counter to the conspicuous forms of consumption carried out in shiny buildings of the contemporary city, which seem to conceal so much behind their transparent surfaces.1 Yet, no matter how grounded ruin exploration is in the present moment, it is always, to some extent, charged by the imagination. Thus, ruins are filled with ghostly traces of the past, which are intuitively experienced by the ruin explorer;2 or, the ruin explorer creates alternative histories through his/​her subjective imagination.3 Clearly, any encounter with a ruin is both material and imaginative; both of the present moment and infused with memory and history, whether real or fantastic. Yet, how might we untangle these relationships? How might we negotiate the (fine) lines between these fantasies and the reality of the ruins themselves? The following two chapters will address these questions through my own subjective experiences of two large-​scale urban ruins. This chapter focuses 95

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay on my exploration of the former resort town of Varosha in Cyprus, abandoned since 1974 after the Turkish invasion of the north of the island led to the partition of Cyprus along the United Nations-​defined ‘Green Line’.4 The following chapter centres on my visit to Pripyat near Chernobyl, evacuated shortly after the world’s worst nuclear accident in 1986. Pripyat has become one of the most widely-​represented urban ruins in the contemporary world, while Varosha, despite being on a similar scale to Pripyat, has received very little attention from scholars exploring representations of large-​scale ruination. This is principally because of the perceived difficulties of accessing the town which, along with much of the demilitarized zone between the north and south of Cyprus, is a so-​called ‘Forbidden Zone’ guarded by Turkish soldiers and patrolled by UN peacekeepers.5 In fact, as I discovered on my visit to Varosha, accessing the town is relatively straightforward –​the fence that surrounds it is riddled with holes; yet, any attempted exploration carries with it the prospect of arrest (or worse) by armed soldiers in a territory that is effectively ‘off the map’, as well as the dangers associated with exploring structures that are in an advanced state of decay.6 Varosha is a site prized by urban explorers, not only because of the perceived dangers of accessing the town, which heighten the sense of heroism involved in exploring it, but also because of its scale and ‘pristine’ character as a ruin.7 Yet, rather than emphasize the uniqueness of my experience or its subversive qualities, let alone any sense of heroism on my part in accessing the site, I want to draw out how my exploration was already grounded in and informed by the imagination, that is, by fantasies that we all can, and do, share. As already flagged up in the introduction to this book, part of the appeal of ruins for urban explorers lies in their ability to suggest imaginary cities, like those commonly represented in post-​ apocalyptic cinema, fiction or art.8 Yet urban explorers tend to suggest that their fantasies are more embodied than those of the average cinema-​ goer, the explorer’s engagement with material places of ruin giving those fantasies a privileged sense of authenticity.9 By contrast, I believe that cinema-​goers and readers of novels are as much ‘voyagers’ as urban explorers –​ adventurers who are just as embodied as those who visit ruins in situ.10 Consequently, this means that experience and fantasy must be explored together, as a continuum rather than in an hierarchal arrangement that privileges one over the other. 96

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Fantasy and experience: ruin gazing in Varosha In relation to my own exploration of Varosha, I want to flesh out the connections between my experience of its ruined spaces and three imaginative tropes that melded with that experience: firstly, the fantasy of urban annihilation (or urbicide), an enduring trope of apocalyptic cinema and actualized in modern aerial warfare; secondly, the fantasy of being the first/​last witness in a post-​apocalyptic ruined world; and, thirdly, the fantasy of disanthropy, or the imagination of the world as post-​human. Each theme grew out of reflection on the experience of being in a large-​ scale urban ruin and, even if this experience was unique and solitary, it was also embedded within an already-​formed symbolic landscape. In this sense, this chapter acts a corollary to ­Chapter 1 in that it explores how the literary and cinematic histories of the imagination of disaster discussed there influence how we actually experience ruins. In situating my experience of Varosha within broader cultural fantasies of urban ruin, I want to bring out affinities between the two in order to critically negotiate these fantasies. As with the following chapter on Pripyat, I seek to open up a space of dialogue between the experience of being in urban ruins, the contested histories of those ruins and the imagination of urban destruction in order to address the wider questions of how large-​scale ruins might be remembered and reconstituted in ways that promote inclusivity, hold together contradictions and maintain the hope of healing after the trauma of abandonment.

Urbicide Although anticipated over a century ago by the science fiction of H.  G. Wells and an even longer history of cities as targets in war, the notion of urban annihilation has only recently been explored by scholars seeking to understand the effects of the widespread destruction of cities initiated by the advent of aerial warfare.11 As political theorist Martin Coward has explained, the term ‘urbicide’ was popularized in the wake of the deliberate destruction of buildings in 1992 during the Bosnian war, and has since been developed to encompass all forms of large-​scale urban ruin that are the result of human agency, whether acts of war or terrorism, urban regeneration programmes, or practices of forced resettlement.12 Urbicide refers both to the destruction of the built environment and, according to 97

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay Coward, ‘to the destruction of the way of life specific to such material conditions’; in other words, it is a resolutely political act.13 Within this context, the abandonment of Varosha is a significant example of urbicide, albeit without the destructive force normally associated with the latter. Following the Greek-​Cypriot-​led struggle for independence from British colonial rule, which began in 1931 and intensified after independence in 1961, Cyprus’s Greek and Turkish communities were in an almost constant state of violent conflict that culminated in July 1974 with the invasion of the north of the island by the Turkish army after a Greek-​Cypriot military coup led to fears of an intensification of the already entrenched ethnic conflict.14 At the time of the invasion, Varosha was a flourishing suburb of the medieval walled city of Famagusta, having grown rapidly in the early 1970s to become Cyprus’s premier tourist resort. When fighting broke out in nearby Famagusta and anti-​aircraft guns were installed atop one of Varosha’s high-​rise beachfront hotels, the mainly Greek-​Cypriot population of the town fled, many leaving almost all of their belongings behind. After Varosha was abandoned, the Turkish Cypriots decided to use the town as a bargaining chip in what they believed would be imminent negotiations for a permanent reconciliation between the two ethnic groups.15 In the event, reconciliation never happened, and the island remained divided, with the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus still being a pariah state recognized only by Turkey, and Varosha existing for the last 40 years as a ‘Forbidden Zone’, sealed off by a makeshift fence of barbed wire, rusted corrugated iron and prickly pear cacti (Figure 3.1). My first view of Varosha was from the only public section of the town’s sandy beach at the northern end of the resort. I spent four nights at the recently renovated Palm Beach Hotel, which sits in an isolated corner of Varosha surrounded by the fence demarcating the Forbidden Zone. Today, Palm Beach is where tourists come to view the ruined town: directly behind the beach is part of the fence, beyond which are a series of high-​rise hotels, their windows now simply repetitive geometric holes in decaying concrete fronts (Figure  3.2), and the Salaminia Hotel still displays its gaping wounds from the initial Turkish bombing raid on the town, which destroyed part of the building. Further along the beach, the fence cuts abruptly into the sea, barring any progress beyond, behind which sits a permanently manned observation post and a blinding searchlight. Here, 98

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Figure 3.1  The fence around Varosha marking the Forbidden Zone, 2013.

Figure 3.2  Decaying frontage of one of Varosha’s high-​rise hotel buildings, as seen from Palm Beach, 2013.

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Figure 3.3  View of Varosha at night from the fence across Palm Beach, 2013.

tourists take photographs (as I did) despite ubiquitous signs expressly forbidding photography or filming –​the guards occasionally blow a whistle to admonish those who are spotted, not dispelling tales of arrest and confiscation of cameras. I arrived at the Palm Beach Hotel at night in late-​March 2013 and walked along the beach to the fence, beyond which was a great expanse of darkness, the shapes of Varosha’s former hotel buildings just visible, their shrouded forms only terminating on the far horizon, as the 20 km-​wide demilitarized zone merged into the lights of distant prosperous resorts in the Greek-​occupied Republic of Cyprus (Figure 3.3). With its sense of overwhelming extent, obscure forms, darkness and silence, this first view of Varosha summoned in me an involuntary shiver of fear, an unmistakable mark of that deeply-​entrenched aesthetic trope:  the sublime. This initial sublime view of the abandoned town was supplemented in the following days by an exploration within the Forbidden Zone, this time in warm, early-​spring sunlight. Here, panoramic views were obtained from the roof terraces of former apartment buildings, scopic vistas that suggested a different form of sublimity, that is, the apprehension of Varosha as a measurable landscape of ruin that can only be grasped in the view from above, 100

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Figure 3.4  View of Varosha from the fifth-​floor terrace of an apartment building in Irakleos Street, 2013.

removed from the claustrophobic ruin-​choked streets and anchored by the ability to apprehend vastness with the gaze alone (Figure 3.4). Finally, Varosha’s landscape of ruin is, for the first-​time visitor, anonymous and monotonous, preventing easy comprehension of the extent and character of the ruin because it is gazed at without the anchoring landmarks that characterize urban apocalypse in the filmic imagination.16 The concept of the sublime was first popularized in the mid-​eighteenth century by writers and theorists, such as the philosopher Edmund Burke, and has been an important aesthetic trope ever since. Defined by Burke as a strong emotional response, made up of a mixture of awe and terror, to vast or overwhelming natural or man-​made objects, the sublime became readily associated with experiences of ruins, particularly ruins that were the result of some form of violence, whether a natural or man-​made disaster.17 Although the sublime feelings associated with ruins were prized by Burke and successive Romantic writers and artists, they have also been criticized by others as leading to a morally dubious position. Reacting to the wave of Hollywood disaster films that were released in the 1950s and early 1960s, Susan Sontag presented her influential critique of the lure of 101

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay generalized disaster as ‘one of the purest forms of spectacle’ that aestheticized destruction and violence in a way that normalized sublime terrors, thereby inuring viewers to what was ‘psychologically unbearable’ (see also the introduction and ­Chapter 5).18 In this reading and in more recent equivalents that speak of cinematic and televisual ‘disaster porn’,19 the sublime is viewed as a form of fantasy that distances the observer from the landscape of ruin, thus offering a spectacle of destruction that can be enjoyed because the human tragedy of such destruction is maintained at a safe distance.20 Whilst it is clearly reprehensible to minimize tragedy for the sake of enjoyment, Burke’s early formulation of the sublime, far from condemning our attraction to spectacles of ruin, argued that without it we would turn away from such spectacles in disgust. For Burke, sublime enjoyment of tragedy was a necessary prelude to compassion; for the delight we experience in the spectacle of large-​scale ruins seen from a distance also generates uneasiness, which comes from the pain we feel from identification with the scale of the tragedy before our eyes.21 In this reading, the mixed feelings inspired by ruins are indispensable to social cohesion in that they arouse ‘the bond of sympathy’, redirecting self-​preservation through a sense of individual helplessness towards a common solidarity with society as a whole.22 Indeed, in 2003, in a substantial modification of her earlier condemnation of disaster cinema, Sontag defended those who found sublime beauty in photographs of ground zero after the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001.23 For Sontag, distancing the tragedy and finding beauty in images of the ruins of 9/​11 offered a vital corrective to both the desire to ‘fix’ the meanings of the terrorist attacks and also, more generally, the sheer quantity of images of destruction we are now expected to process. As she succinctly put it, in a culture saturated with images of ruin, ‘[t]‌here’s nothing wrong with standing back and thinking’.24 As a fantasy mode of apprehending large-​scale ruin, the sublime gaze suspends the fragmented quality of everyday perception to imagine a whole. Here, standing back and thinking about ruins –​giving the fragments some cohesion –​is not done in order to escape from or distance everyday perception, but rather to return to it with an enlarged imagination. In the case of Varosha and other large-​scale ruins, such a process is a vital prelude to also imagining and listening to the tide of witnesses of that ruin and their conflicting claims on it. 102

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Fantasy and experience: ruin gazing in Varosha Varosha’s witnesses, whether the town’s former Greek-​Cypriot residents or its post-​abandonment Turkish overseers, articulate a sense of the town not as a dead place, but rather as one that is suspended, waiting to be reanimated. For Zehra Nalbantoğlu, a Turkish resident of Famagusta, Varosha (or Maraş as it is known by the Turks) is ‘frozen, like a sleeping beauty’ but with a sense of darkness that points to ‘something covered up and buried in the unconscious’.25 As if fleshing out this feeling more precisely, an unnamed Turkish Cypriot who carried out his military service in Varosha at the end of the 1990s was haunted by the stories he heard of ‘missing’ Greek Cypriots who had apparently been buried under a football field in Varosha during the 1974 conflict. For him, Varosha was ‘a big shock and a big trauma’; when he entered houses in the abandoned town he found everywhere the visual reminders of the former residents –​ babies’ shoes, plates left on a table, a child’s bed in a freshly-​painted room –​ which left him with a sense of the town’s abandonment as ‘a scar in the face of our island’ and with a discomfort that remained ‘in [his] dreams [and] in [his] thoughts’.26 For Varosha’s former Greek-​Cypriot residents, the abandoned town similarly represents an open wound, albeit one that is tied directly to their own histories and memories. Forced to abandon their homes at very short notice, many former residents speak of Varosha as being like an ‘amputated limb’, its spaces ‘physical reminders of something cut off, absent [… marking] the presence of pain’.27 The online forums representing Varosha’s former residents, such as ‘The Varosha Blog’, tend to couch this understandable pain within a pejorative discourse on the deficiencies of the Turkish ‘invaders’. For them, the Turkish authorities are actively preventing ‘heartbroken former residents drawn towards their homes by memories and unfounded hopes’ from entering the abandoned town.28 After I published a blog post in March 2013, which included photographs, about my visit to Varosha, I received many comments from former Greek residents of the town.29 Some questioned whether an outsider had any right to visit Varosha and voice opinions about its current state of abandonment; others were grateful to see images of their former homes and to feel, in the light of not being able to visit Varosha in person, that they had vicariously been able to recover some of their memories of the town. Having made further enquiries of three of these respondents, I gained valuable insights into the 103

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay personal histories and on-​going suffering of a few of Varosha’s tens of thousands of Greek-​Cypriot former residents. The three with whom I corresponded –​Afghi, Olia and George –​were all teenagers when Varosha was attacked, and all three vividly recalled the day they were forced to flee the town with their families. Afghi left her apartment on Kennedy Avenue (Varosha’s main tourist street), taking refuge in the British base at Dhekeleia;30 Olia fled from her family’s apartment on Idhipodhos Street near the church of Agios Ioannis;31 and George fled from his family home in an apartment building on 16th of June Street (Figure  3.5).32 Each expressed the pain of having been violently cut off from their pasts and how they countered this pain through the retention of their memories of Varosha and a hope that one day they will be able to return. Afghi collects photographs of the town before its abandonment as aide memoires and participates in online forums on Facebook and other sites;33 Olia has held onto memories of the fruit trees at the back of her former house, still vividly present in her recollection of the smells of ‘the jasmine and the lemon buds and all the Famagusta smells of the sun, the sand and the sea’ and the ‘murmuring sounds and thousands of images of the town.’34 In an extraordinary coincidence, George’s memory was

Figure 3.5  View northwards along 16th of June Street, Varosha, Cyprus, 2013.

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Fantasy and experience: ruin gazing in Varosha ‘flooded’ with images when he identified his former home in one of my photographs posted on the website Flickr (Figure 3.5). From this image, George’s memory summoned up a ‘street bustling with activity and life’, the football games he played with his brother on the pavements on Saturday afternoons after the shops had closed; as well as the nearby cinema, public library, and sandy beaches.35 As much as these memories ground my photograph in its site-​specific context, they also imaginatively ‘fill’ the ghost city with what it formerly contained, whether remembered through the senses or through images that connect the personal and the collective. As Coward has argued, this equating of urban ruin with the destruction of an entire way of life is an important way of understanding the meanings of urbicide: ‘when a […] building is destroyed, so is the sense of the duration of the community that used it’.36 Holding together the divergent representations of Varosha by its Turkish-​Cypriot and Greek-​Cypriot witnesses is one way in which the sublime gaze might work towards Burke’s sense of common solidarity. Whilst the current United Nations resolution (No. 550) on Cyprus insists that Varosha can only be re-​inhabited by its former Greek-​Cypriot populace or their descendents, there is a sense amongst the town’s witnesses that something more inclusive is required if healing is to begin. For, despite being closed off, Varosha is in fact intimately attached to its mother-​city of Famagusta, an ancient walled city fortified by the Venetians in the sixteenth century and, before the 1974 conflict, home to a mixture of Greek and Turkish Cypriots. As expressed by the Turkish-​Cypriot soldier mentioned above, Varosha could become a ‘healing tool’ in the future resolution of the wider conflict in Cyprus; its redevelopment could promote a ‘bi-​community to benefit both communities’,37 one that recognizes a long shared history between Varosha and Famagusta.38 Indeed, such redevelopment is the centrepiece of a current project that aims to transform both towns into a unified ‘green’ city. The Famagusta Ecocity Project, launched in 2012, proposes to make the two adjacent towns into both a sustainable community –​a model ecocity for other towns in Europe –​and a centre for peace and reconciliation for Cyprus’s divided inhabitants.39 With wide exposure of the project in 2014, including a short film made by the project team,40 and international press coverage such as a BBC News report,41 the proposed ecocity brings expertise from many different areas –​architecture, filmmaking, education and 105

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay economics –​to galvanize support for the proposal (as a Kickstarter project) so that it can move from concept to reality.42 Yet, conspicuously absent from the ecocity project is any attempt to deal with Varosha’s long period as a ‘ghost’ town and the desire of many of its former residents to return to the houses they once lived in and which, despite being abandoned for over 40 years, are mostly still standing. Although the project has yet to become a fully-​realized design, it will probably involve the demolition of many of Varosha’s abandoned buildings, and presents a frustrating lack of specificity in relation to the town’s existing built environment. As such, the project risks overriding its important social and political aims with its desire to produce a generalized ‘blueprint for other towns to use in preparing their own communities for a more stable and lasting future’.43 Yet, the project does accept that Varosha can only be re-​enlivened by restoring the essential heterogeneity of its urban spaces, namely, by resisting the desire for homogenization by any one ethnic group, instead holding out the hope of a genuinely bipartisan urban life.44 In Varosha’s case this is vital because its ruin demonstrates, in extremis, the results of dividing communities solely on the basis of ethnicity. Clearly there are many examples of ethnically homogenous urban areas that are diverse in other ways, but Varosha’s ruin shows what happens when such homogeneity is brought about by force. Only by a process of reconciliation can that ruinous force be undone. However, given the intense protectiveness felt by its former majority Greek-​Cypriot community, it is difficult to see how reconciliation can be achieved without addressing the wider problem of Cyprus’s divided geographies. In this context, thinking through the ruins of Varosha as they exist now is an important tool in promoting just such a hope: as historian Andreas Schönle has argued, ‘to inhabit the ruin is to reconcile oneself with the present’s heterogeneity, to recognize its rich texture […] neither opposed to, nor defined by the past, yet respectful of it [and] draw[ing] inspiration from the ruin for mapping out the future’.45

The last witness Along with the sublime, the long-​established aesthetics of ruin gazing have been strongly influenced by another fantasy trope: that of being the last witness to a world in ruins, or a lone survivor after an apocalyptic event. 106

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Fantasy and experience: ruin gazing in Varosha As explored in ­Chapter 1, the ‘last man’ trope originated in the eighteenth century and would, in the nineteenth, become a popular in way in which imperial hubris was questioned, particularly in France and Britain. Yet, the solitary post-​apocalyptic ruin-​gazer continued to be a popular trope in fiction as the imperial burden shifted from Europe to the United States, most notably in the postwar period, with George Stewart’s novel Earth Abides (1949) being one of the most elegiac renderings of a post-​apocalyptic future in the new superpower.46 Later, from the 1980s onwards, the post-​ apocalyptic ‘hero’ figure became an enduring trope in cinema.47 Although dating from the early history of cinema and popularized by the 1964 film The Last Man on Earth (the first of three adaptions of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend), the trope only became pervasive after the influential Mad Max trilogy of films (commencing in 1979) and has continued unabated ever since –​and arguably with renewed intensity in post-​9/11 America.48 Today, such is the prevalence of this fantasy that it affects all kinds of representation of ruin: from W. G. Sebald’s description of his solitary walk within the abandoned military facility at Orford Ness in The Rings of Saturn (1995),49 to survivalist reality-​television programmes such as The Colony (2005) and fictional examples including Survivors (2008–​ 2010), The Walking Dead (2010–​) and The Last Man on Earth (2015–​), and point-​of-​view computer games like The Last of Us (2013) and the Fallout series (2001–​).50 Perhaps unsurprisingly, contemporary critics have seized upon this trope as a peculiarly pernicious fantasy. Evan Calder Williams has argued that most representations of post-​apocalyptic survivors are fantasies of unbridled individualism where lone ruin gazers ‘find nothing but the scent of their own trail.’51 Similarly, Slavoj Žižek has provided a characteristic psychoanalytic twist on this with his notion of the ‘last man’ as one of the purest fantasies of the ego, namely that of being a purely external observer of the world that does not return the subject’s gaze.52 Problematic as it undoubtedly is, the feeling of being an observer in a post-​apocalyptic world was a pervasive element in my experience of Varosha. To begin with, there was a distinct difference in walking along Varosha’s fence and entering the Forbidden Zone itself:  along the fence, one saw the ruined town in the context of life going on outside, often only yards from the crumbling buildings; within the Forbidden Zone, the sense of solitary isolation was palpable and all-​pervasive, intensified by the 107

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Figure 3.6  First-​floor hallway in a former house in Galinou Street, Varosha, 2013.

muffled sounds of traffic, school children and the azan (the Islamic call to prayer) just outside. Such a feeling of intense solitude led to a slowing down and a contemplative attention to details normally bypassed in everyday urban experience:  the palpable silence had the effect of magnifying any sounds, whether the cawing of crows, the flapping of pigeon wings, the creaking and banging of doors and windows in the wind, or the sounds created by my own body treading on overgrown vegetation or broken glass. This perceptual deceleration led me to sit for a while on the wooden floor of a first-​floor hallway in a former house in Irakleos Street (Figure 3.6). Leaning against the peeling paint of a wall, I purposefully contemplated the space as it was, empty of furnishings bar a broken-​down chair, two rusting 1970s refrigerators, a ragged piece of curtain and, in the former kitchen beyond, one dust-​covered plate on a table, to imagine how it had once been: perhaps a place of transit for a large family or carefree holiday-​makers. With the sudden sounding of the azan in distant Famagusta, these palpable absences were at once intensified and made strangely beautiful, as if the call to prayer was also now a call to remember. I would argue that, contrary to the notion of solitary ruin gazing being founded in a narcissistic fantasy, this kind of experience was grounded in something different: a wakefulness that 108

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Fantasy and experience: ruin gazing in Varosha came from a willingness to expose myself to what Hannah Arendt has called the ‘shock of experience’.53 As Žižek himself has remarked in the film The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, 2013), such wakefulness arises out of an acceptance of ruin as a prelude to understanding what history really means when the ‘eternal cycle of function’ is broken and the commodity-​ value of things is shattered.54 Such reflective passivity is primarily worked out in solitude. It is not that this solitude is superior to a communal experience; rather, that it is qualitatively different and valuable in its own right. Indeed, Žižek went further in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, arguing that the reflective passivity of the solitary ruin gazer also accounts for what he termed ‘the redemptive value of post-​catastrophic movies’, such as I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2008), a sequence from which was specifically included in Žižek’s film. As with most commentary on post-​apocalyptic cinema, that on I Am Legend tends to focus on the ideological aspects of the narrative, particularly its seemingly regressive nature when compared with earlier versions of the film, namely The Last Man on Earth (1964) and The Omega Man (Boris Segal, 1971).55 Like many recent films dealing with the aftermath of an apocalyptic event, I Am Legend provides a spectacular visualization of the urban environment in ruins –​in this case, New York City emptied of human life –​that is qualitatively different from its predecessors and representing much more than a simple reflection of the development of increasingly sophisticated CGI. In the opening moments of the film, the camera begins with both bird’s-​eye and ground-​level tracking shots that establish the rich visual textures of a long-​abandoned New York City and its newfound urban tranquillity, only to be rudely broken by a red sports car speeding down an empty street. Rather than view this sequence as just another example of ‘ruin porn’, I would argue that, far from abstracting the material presence of these proleptic ruins, the opening moments of I Am Legend actually emphasize the concrete materiality of the ruins in both their commitment to visual realism and in the way in which their slow tracking shots mimic familiar human passages through urban wastelands on foot.56 This sequence may be very short, but it nevertheless opens up the possibility of a contemplative gaze on the part of the viewer, one that ‘allows the decaying structures to reveal themselves as objects beyond modernity’s circuits of exchange’ and therefore clearing a space in which we can imagine alternative histories and 109

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay futures for them.57 Indeed, the future ruin (and ruins are always thus in post-​apocalyptic scenarios) depends precisely on an end that can be experienced: ‘not the apocalypse as such, but an end to be seen, to be retold and represented … a telling end’.58 However, being in the ruins of Varosha complicates the spectatorial experience of future ruin in post-​apocalyptic cinema because of the very material presence of those ruins and the fact that I actually moved through them. If the slow tracking shots at the beginning of I Am Legend mirror the perambulating human so that the viewer can identify with the camera’s gaze, walking in Varosha was a resolutely corporeal experience, involving much more than the gaze alone. My own camera might have captured the town’s overgrown streets as static landscapes of ruin (Figure 3.5), but my walk through that landscape was at least as important as my contemplative moments inside its empty buildings. Because of the fear of being seen and apprehended by armed Turkish soldiers, my movements through Varosha’s overgrown streets were painfully slow and marked by frequent pauses to guardedly look and listen. During the two hours that I was inside the Forbidden Zone, I walked barely 100 yards, covering only two or three of Varosha’s dozens of empty streets –​a tiny fraction of the total area now fenced off. Perambulating through ruins is a distinctive kind of walking. In contrast to conventional urban walking that is usually linear, moderately fast, and goal-​oriented, walking in ruins is contingent and improvized, its meandering course directed by intuition and curiosity.59 As such, walking in ruins is transgressive because it goes against how we are expected to interact with the urban environment, particularly the overly sanitized and seamless buildings that characterize the neoliberal city.60 Walking in a ruined landscape like Varosha also challenges conventional notions of time. For example, when the writer W. G. Sebald walked alone in the military ruins on Orford Ness, he experienced a sustained sense of temporal suspension: wandering amongst heaps of scrap metal and defunct machinery, he ‘imagined [himself] amidst the remains of our own civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe’ which led to him not knowing ‘[w]‌here and in what time [he] truly was’.61 Such an inter-​folding of past, present and future results from the fantasy of being the last/​first witness to the ruins of humanity; while walking in Varosha, time felt somehow suspended –​the two hours of my exploration feeling distinctly different 110

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Fantasy and experience: ruin gazing in Varosha from the two hours walking along the town’s fence, perhaps a result of a compression of past, present and future in the immediate moment. If such an experience, whether gained from walking in ruins or voyaging through a post-​apocalyptic film, can easily lead to narcissistic self-​absorption, it also holds out the possibility of producing new meanings through hybrid temporal narratives (as explored in Chapter 1 with reference to 28 Days Later).62 Indeed, imagining the ruins of the future from the standpoint of a slowed-​down solitary observer provides a means of conceiving alternative stories for those ruins, ones that might ultimately be redemptive rather than reductive.63 Such a future Varosha would be one in which the two principal communities work together in envisioning how the town might be rebuilt. Within this vision, the ruined buildings would not necessarily be renovated or torn down but rather be literally incorporated into the fabric of the new, perhaps in the manner of its medieval neighbour Famagusta, where the ruins of its Christian churches mingle with its later Islamic buildings. Like a wound that heals by first becoming a scab and then a scar, Varosha’s ruins could remain in this way as the material equivalent of the social reconciliation that would have to occur in order for the town to be re-​inhabited.

The world without us It is but a short step from the fantasy of being the last witness of a world in ruins to a world without witnesses, or a world without people. The disanthropic imagination, in contrast to the fantasy of the ‘last man’, is a relatively recent trope, originating in the early twentieth century in novels such as Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (1927) but ultimately grounded in the early-nineteenth-​century resurgence of millennial Christianity in the United States coupled with the discovery and popularization of geological and evolutionary ‘deep time’.64 With the rise in ecological awareness since the 1970s, the contemporaneous threat of nuclear annihilation and the more recent awareness of impending species extinction –​not least our own  –​through catastrophic climate change, global pandemics, or overpopulation, the disanthropic imagination has flourished. In the 1970s, this was witnessed in Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlon’s Christian millennialist bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) and in James Lovelock’s influential Gaia hypothesis, in which the earth carries on flourishing 111

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay without mankind.65 More recently, it has been seen in televisual and cinematic renderings of the world without humans, such as Animal Planet/​ Discovery Channel’s joint production The Future is Wild (2002), the History Channel’s Life after People (2008), National Geographic Channel’s Aftermath:  Population Zero (2008), and the Disney/​Pixar animated film Wall*E (2008), in which anthropomorphic robots try in vain to clean up a ruined earth that has been abandoned by its human inhabitants.66 In all of these disanthropic fantasies, a self-​contradictory notion is at work: that is, the fantasy of a post-​human earth that can be imagined when, in fact, this imagining always requires a (human) spectator to be witness to their supposed absence.67 According to Žižek, disanthropic fantasies represent the reduction of the human subject to a ‘pure disembodied gaze observing our own absence’ –​a conceit that utterly fails to take account of our individual and collective responsibility for our long-​term impact on the geosphere, whether we are around to witness it or not.68 Varosha makes one prominent appearance in a disanthropic bestseller, namely Alan Weisman’s 2007 non-​fiction book The World Without Us.69 As related by Weisman, the prolonged absence of humans in Varosha has ushered in a ‘vibrant presence of nature’, evidenced by asphalt streets now filled with wild cyclamen plants, feral geraniums emerging from missing roofs, overgrown mounds of bright-​red bougainvillea, or, at night, on the darkened beachfront, nesting loggerhead and green sea turtles. Forty years after human abandonment, my own perceptions of Varosha were no less dominated by the sense of a thriving non-​human world, whether seen in lines of pigeon droppings strewn across the floors of rooms in apartments, former streets now covered with tall grasses and yarrow plants (Figure  3.5), or the bright yellow flowers of a nasturtium plant that had found its way inside a desolate ruined former retail space. The sociologist Georg Simmel argued that such experiences of natural abundance in decaying buildings account for the profound sense of peace we often feel in ruins, which I felt very strongly in Varosha. According to Simmel, the perception of crumbling ruins can provide a sense of serene synthesis between nature and spirit and the human and non-​human, the ruin suggesting that a unique balance has been achieved between the conflicting tendencies of existence, namely the ‘upward’ striving of the human spirit, represented most strongly in architecture, and the ‘downward’ pull of the ‘corroding, 112

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Fantasy and experience: ruin gazing in Varosha

Figure  3.7 Remains of a motorcycle in a ground-​floor room in a building in Galinou Street, Varosha, 2013.

crumbling power of nature’.70 In Simmel’s view, the contemplation of ruins as a world without humans, far from being a reprehensible fantasy of the ego, contains within it utopian potential in that it imagines a reconciliation between normally hostile cosmic forces that, gathered in the present moment of contemplation, suggest a ‘psychic wholeness’ that might potentially be transformative.71 While I was walking through the ruins of Varosha, the objects that I encountered provided the most concrete embodiments of Simmel’s articulation of the intermingling of the human and the non-​human in the ruin. A half-​dismembered, dust-​covered motorcycle found in a ground-​floor room on Galinou Street (Figure 3.7) resembled not so much a rusting machine as the remains of a human skeleton, its poignancy heightened by the fact that the beginning of its post-​human life coincided exactly with the year of my own birth. Nearby, in the first-​floor hallway of an apartment in the same street, I discovered another extraordinary anthropomorphic object: a giraffe-​shaped form fashioned out of a mixture of dried straw and string that was both magically surreal and disturbingly inscrutable (Figure 3.8). In 113

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Figure 3.8  Remains of an unidentified object in the first-​floor hallway of a house in Galinou Street, Varosha, 2013.

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Fantasy and experience: ruin gazing in Varosha other ruined towns, Pripyat being the most obvious example, such ‘found’ objects tend to be deliberately staged by tourists or by former residents as a way of ‘fixing’ the meaning of the overwhelming landscape of ruin (see Chapter 4). The objects I encountered in Varosha were much more difficult to decipher, a consequence perhaps of the town’s perceived impenetrability. Was the decay of the motorbike a by-​product of the looting that is known to have gone on in the town since its abandonment? Or the result of the slow processes of decay, demonstrated in the accumulated debris –​a mixture of dried leaves, paper and plaster –​beneath its skeletal form? Was the giraffe-​like object once a child’s toy that had been left when Varosha was abandoned? Or placed here by another solitary visitor post-​abandonment? Or perhaps even a fantastical product of organic processes left unchecked for decades? Such questions were generated by an awareness of the biological and chemical lives of objects once they drop out of social circulation  –​lives that we are usually ignorant of because such processes are normally held in check.72 In ruins, objects generate a different kind of knowledge, one that comes from contemplation of processes of change that fuse the human and non-​human.73 More intuitive than logical, such knowledge reaches beyond the use-​value of objects to embrace meanings that exceed such value –​ones that come out of objects’ exposure to forces beyond the merely human. Indeed, mirroring Simmel’s celebration of the ruin as a site of reconciliation, decaying objects can be potential gateways to a transformative form of remembrance, one that is based on imaginative notions of mutability, rather than simply evidence and explanation.74 Here, histories normally pushed into the background, namely those of objects’ entanglements with the non-​human, can be brought to bear on conventional forms of remembrance to forge a much richer ecology of memory that embraces the human and the non-​human equally. In a former workshop space discovered on Varosha’s overgrown Akropoleos Street, I  sensed very clearly the mutable life of objects in a post-​human ruined space (Figure  3.9). Here, the remnants of the workshop’s once human life were miraculously preserved:  accounts, written in chalk, still visible on a blackboard; tattered pieces of paper and posters still pinned to boards; and one particular poster, depicting a 1970s Volvo car, giving the space a precise sense of temporality. Yet, at the same time, 115

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Figure 3.9  Former workshop in Akropoleos Street, Varosha, Cyprus, 2013.

non-​human processes were clearly in the ascendant, seen in the collapsed and rotting timbers of the roof which had, in their ruin, allowed seeds into the interior space that had eventually grown into a dense carpet of vegetation; the decay of plaster and paint in the walls which produced a complex and unique patina; and the unidentified, ruined machine that was now half-​buried in a mixture of plaster, mud and flora. Rather than interpreting this space as either a tragic indictment of the loss of the human in Varosha or a reminder that human life and the objects we value will inevitably be erased by nature, I would argue that this space and the objects within it provide an insight into processes of time and accumulations of memory that require a different kind of contemplative gaze  –​a form of remembering that embraces both the human and non-​human alike.75 This form of contemplation, which is tactile, imaginative and intuitive, is a fundamentally ethical process that is open to understanding and confronting the essential otherness of the past. The past always evades our ability to grasp it; like us, history is never static, its meanings are always changing.76 In this understanding, ruins are not objects that have become useless; rather, they are mutable things that are in the process of becoming something else, moulded by the transformative powers of decay and regeneration.77 Within 116

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Fantasy and experience: ruin gazing in Varosha this kind of contemplation, it is possible to find reconciliation amongst the ruins.

The future of ruins It is clear that Varosha will be very important in any future negotiations between the two ethnic groups in today’s divided Cyprus; in 2012, both sides mooted the possibility of reopening Varosha and its pristine beaches as a key item in their negotiations but thus far, this has come to nothing.78 Any future reconciliation between Turkish and Greek Cypriots will depend upon Varosha being somehow rebuilt, even though the estimated cost for this is €100 billion, which would make it by far the most expensive reconstruction project in Europe since World War II.79 If much of the recent rhetoric over Varosha has come from its former Greek-​Cypriot residents, who insist upon the immediate return of the town to its ‘legal owners’, then some have offered more conciliatory suggestions for the town’s future. These include the aforementioned Famagusta Ecocity Project, the Bicommunal Famagusta Initiative, set up in 2013, which envisages Varosha playing a catalytic role in reunification talks,80 and the 2011 ‘RECorder’ project, which is a digital participatory platform that invited former residents to imagine how they might rehabilitate the town if it were to be returned to them.81 Given these proposals, then, how might a solitary outsider’s experience of Varosha and the fantasies that mediated it relate to the pressing questions about the ruined town’s future life? This chapter has suggested that fantasies of urban destruction can help us come to terms with the reality of that destruction. In the case of Varosha, fantasies of urbicide, or the sublime mode of apprehending destruction, can create the conditions for apprehending the ‘wholeness’ of the town, that is, its essential heterogeneity that, if it is to be restored in the future, will mean listening to and holding together in creative tension all the competing voices that try to fix its meaning. At the same time, fantasies of solitary ruin gazing can promote a form of contemplative wakefulness that is able to grasp the multiple temporalities that are contained within ruins, thus offering the hope of a transformative reading of ruins themselves. Finally, fantasies of the world without people can promote a heightened awareness of the intertwined human and non-​human processes that 117

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay govern all material objects and environments, especially as the latter tend to be ignored or denigrated in the built environment. In terms of the future of Varosha, I would argue that its four decades of abandonment should not be viewed as an aberration –​something to be erased once reconstruction begins –​but rather an essential and potentially healing element in its story as a place. Yet the reconstruction proposals put forward so far tend to negate the town’s present conditions, which will, in the words of the visionary architect Lebbeus Woods, ‘impede the emergence of an urban fabric and way of life based on them’.82 It is not for me to suggest how the memory of failure –​Varosha’s ruin –​might be somehow preserved as a structured proposition.83 However, by offering a critical framework for engaging with ruins on the scale of an entire city, I suggest that fantasies of large-​scale ruination allow us access to an enriching form of imaginative thinking that can stitch together the fragmented world of ruins so that they become meaningful and, in my estimation, hopeful remains on which to build the future.

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4 Disaster and memory: the ruins of Chernobyl and Pripyat

Some dead cities, like Varosha, are almost literally ‘off the map’  –​illicit, secret and barely known about; others, like Pripyat near Chernobyl, have become iconic sites of ruin, places that, over time, have acquired extraordinary symbolic importance –​the 30th anniversary of the accident in 2016 generating much reflection on its continuing legacy of ruination. The facts about Chernobyl are well known: early in the morning of 26 April 1986, a series of explosions destroyed the building and reactor number four of the Chernobyl nuclear station. The enormous quantities of radioactive material that were released contaminated vast geographical areas from Greece to Sweden.1 Since the accident, and particularly after the break-​up of the Soviet Union in 1991, the ruins of Chernobyl and its satellite town Pripyat have come to symbolize, for the capitalist West, all the failures of state socialism: a total lack of transparency, a utopian ideology that concealed technological ineptitude, and a callous indifference to the human and environmental consequences of industrial and social exploitation. More recently, Chernobyl’s ruins have been commandeered by that same West in the service of post-​modern culture: namely, as a backdrop for fantasy horror in the film Chernobyl Diaries (Brad Parker, 2012), which generated a storm of protest by some of the charities that support Chernobyl’s victims.2 What does this shift tell us about the legacy of large-​scale ruins like those 119

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay generated by Chernobyl, both for the West and for those who were directly affected by such ruination? If ruins are in some sense memorials to their makers and moments of creation, whose memories are contained in the ruins of Chernobyl? This chapter will address these questions by considering the relationship between disaster, ruin and memory at Chernobyl, focusing on three significant mnemonic sites associated with the disaster: the destroyed reactor; the memorials erected on the Chernobyl site and others after the accident; and the ruined townscape of Pripyat, located 1 km from the reactor and which formerly housed Chernobyl’s workers. In a similar vein to the previous chapter, here I use my own experience of the Chernobyl site in October 2007 as a way of framing this relationship. My visit to Chernobyl was a hybrid form of tourism:  self-​organized with a friend and employing, through a Kiev travel agency, a driver/​guide who worked at the site.3 Consisting of both strict guidance to the destroyed reactor and almost free exploration in the ruined town of Pripyat, the visit incorporated elements of both dark tourism and urban exploration. Dark tourism refers to visits, motivated by curiosity, to places associated with death and destruction, particularly sites of genocide, war or terrorism.4 As the site of a nuclear accident, Chernobyl falls outside these established categories, but nevertheless occupies the ‘darker’ end of the spectrum developed by Richard Sharpley, particularly due to its contaminated status: the site is still perceived as dangerously radioactive and is one of the most rigorously-​monitored ruins in the world.5 In common with my visit to Varosha, Chernobyl represented an opportunity to discover a secret world in ruins, one that might challenge existing certainties and provide liberating alternatives. In the event, my experience of Chernobyl served more to challenge my position as an ‘onlooker’ of human tragedy  –​the ethically treacherous position of all dark tourists.6 As one former visitor has argued, Chernobyl should not be a tourist site because it is not yet one that is ‘historical’; rather, it is ‘a place of tragedy still’.7 My uncomfortable sense of being a voyeur of an on-​going catastrophe led to a long period of reflection and research after the visit that would eventually result in the first versions of this chapter and the wider research for this book.8 How to approach the enormous site of ruination that the Chernobyl disaster has left in its wake? And how to engage with its barely conceivable 120

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Disaster and memory: the ruins of Chernobyl and Pripyat range of individual and collective memories? If Chernobyl’s ruins are memorials, as all ruins are, what or whom do they prompt me, as a tourist, to remember, and how might that memory relate to something more collective? Such was the scale of the Chernobyl disaster and the worldwide reverberations of its ‘anthropological shock’ –​one that arguably precipitated the end of the Soviet Union and thus the Cold War –​that the legacy of its ruins remains a deeply contested issue.9 It is perhaps the very scale of Chernobyl’s ruins, and the voids they signify, that have led to so many conflicting ways of making sense of them. On the one hand, the last two decades have seen an enormous growth of tourism to the Chernobyl site and an accompanying plethora of representations that provide evidence of a particular form of cultural memory;10 on the other, the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people directly affected by the accident have offered, and continue to offer, their own representations that try to make sense of their suffering.11 Indeed, the controversy that accompanied the release of Chernobyl Diaries in 2012 was primarily centred on the question of who has the right to represent the legacy of Chernobyl, that is, to define how the disaster should be remembered. For the charities speaking on behalf of Chernobyl’s victims, the answer is clear: only the ‘sufferers’, or those who authentically mediate their voices, have this right; others, like the makers and audience of Chernobyl Diaries can only sensationalize the ‘real horror’ of the victims in reprehensible ‘disaster-​porn’.12 In this chapter I  challenge these negative assessments of imaginative appropriations of Chernobyl’s ruins by exploring the wider question of how these ruins have generated their own symbolic ‘fallout’: a multivalent field of imaginative responses that challenges attempts to enforce narrative cohesion around the social and political implications of the nuclear disaster. I seek not to uncover an ‘authentic’ representation of Chernobyl’s ruins, that is, to privilege one form of ‘witness’ over another, but rather to create a dialogue between the various witnesses who have contributed to the creation of this disparate symbolic field. At stake is the question of how we respond, individually and collectively, to events that are ‘catastrophic’, that is, ones that have the effect of shattering pre-​existing ways of apprehending the world. To assert, in Guillaume Grandazzi’s words, that we are all ‘citizens of Chernobyl’ is not to denigrate the particular suffering of Chernobyl’s direct victims –​because the disaster’s environmental and 121

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay symbolic impact extended far beyond the geographic borders of the contaminated areas, it acknowledges that perhaps we all have a stake in how it is to be remembered.13

Into the zone Today, the site of the Chernobyl disaster is a distinct zone, rather than a specific building or site. It comprises an inner circle of 10 km centred on the destroyed reactor and an outer circle of 30 km, both of which were demarcated shortly after the accident in April 1986 to define the area thought to be at greatest risk from radioactive contamination and from which the majority of residents were evacuated.14 Despite this precise delineation, the true extent of the contamination was far wider, with high concentrations of radioactive material found in pockets of land far and wide, from large areas of southern Belarus to isolated forests in Sweden.15 The sense of Chernobyl’s zone as a container, if an insufficient one, for contamination reflects the common usage of the word ‘zone’, which usually refers to a geographical region distinguishable by one factor, usually climate-​related. Yet it found its most literal use in describing one element of the rationalistic planning of postwar cities, particularly in the United States and the Soviet Union: that is, the zoning of urban areas, where districts of land were subject to particular restrictions concerning use and development.16 Enforced more consistently in Soviet cities than their western counterparts, the practice of urban land zoning defined a communist ideal of the complete separation of areas of work, housing and leisure. Despite this rational forebear and the explicitly functional intent of Chernobyl’s zone, it also communicated a very different meaning, namely, a symbolic one that drew on one particular precedent set in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979), which has come to be seen as prophetic of the Chernobyl disaster. Loosely based on Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1972 novel Roadside Picnic and set in an unspecified future world characterized by post-​ industrial desolation, Tarkovsky’s film featured a zone to which a group of three men travel in search of the mysterious room at its centre where one’s deepest wishes would be granted. Although the director never specified the meaning of the zone, its mysterious extent, ruinous and empty quality, and the fact that it may have been created by ‘a breakdown at 122

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Disaster and memory: the ruins of Chernobyl and Pripyat the fourth bunker’ (it was Chernobyl’s fourth reactor that exploded) have led some critics to interpret the film as prophetic of the Chernobyl accident seven years later.17 Tarkovsky himself described Stalker’s zone not as a place as such but somewhere where one underwent a spiritual test ‘that results in a man either withstanding or breaking. Whether a man survives or not depends on his sense of individual worth, his ability to distinguish what is important from what is transient’.18 Stalker’s zone is directly equated with Chernobyl’s in The Star of Chernobyl (1987), a novel published in the year after the accident. Here, two children, Anastasia and Shlik, travel into Chernobyl’s zone on bicycles to search for Anastasia’s missing sister. Mirroring the guide in Stalker, who throws white handkerchiefs in its zone to divine the way, Shlik ‘took out a white handkerchief and tied it to the back of his saddle’ for Anastasia to see.19 Borrowing Stalker’s symbolism was one way in which the unprecedented nature of the Chernobyl disaster might be rooted in the past. For those who had personal experience of its impact, Chernobyl’s zone, like that in Stalker, represented a place where cosmic forces were at work. For one of the ‘clean-​up crew’ –​those who were sent into the zone to manage the aftermath of the accident –​it was a ‘Forbidden Zone. I hadn’t been in the war, but I had a sense that this was familiar. From some memory. Of what? Something to do with death’.20 For another member of the clean-​up crew: ‘[t]‌he zone attracts. It calls to you, I tell you. Once you’ve been there, it calls you back’.21 For the Belarusian journalist Irina Kiseleva, it was a place where one had to learn about a new world in the face of the collapse of old securities: ‘[t]here are two states, separated by barbed wire: one is the zone, the other, everything else. People come to the zone as they do to a cemetery. It’s not just their house that is buried there, but an entire era. An era of faith. Of science. In a just social ideal’.22 Like the travellers in Stalker, going to Chernobyl’s zone meant opening oneself up to cosmic forces that threatened to overwhelm, as one visitor made clear: ‘[f]or there I  understood that I  was defenceless. I  am falling apart. The past cannot protect me’.23 Chernobyl’s zone is a distinct geographical area but is, at the same time, a void that is generated by a sense of incommensurable loss. The symbolic power of the zone derives from the unprecedented nature of the accident and the still unknown nature of its consequences. Similar nomenclature 123

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay also arose to describe the results of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. After the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, the site of destruction was immediately termed ‘ground zero’, a term originally used in the aftermath of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 by atomic bombs; it describes the zone on the earth’s surface exactly beneath the point of the bomb’s explosion in the air just above it.24 Like Chernobyl’s zone, ‘ground zero’ was framed as a literal ‘place’ but also a symbolic focus for incomprehensible loss that today is represented in the ‘void’ of the 9/​11 Memorial, where water flows endlessly into two square black holes.25

Sarcophagus/​shelter: monument as ruin If Stalker’s zone centred on a place of desire –​a room where your deepest wishes would be granted –​Chernobyl’s heart, namely, the destroyed reactor, is by contrast dark and forbidding. In 2007, before the construction of the new confinement structure commenced in 2012, visiting the reactor was a strangely disconcerting experience: I approached it through a car park where cleaners sit smoking as if in any other office environment (Figure 4.1). The story of the accident was narrated by Chernobyl’s ‘information officer’ in a purpose-​built structure, directly opposite the reactor, housing a small exhibition and a prominent electronic radiation meter on the wall. Although the reactor was barely 100 metres away, the window blinds shut it out from view and the story of the accident was related through a model that opened up to reveal the ruined reactor, rendered in painstaking detail: from its highly-​radioactive core, whose 2,000-​ton lid was blown off and into the side walls of the building (Figure 4.2); to the improvized methods of salvage, such as wooden palettes holding up damaged ceilings. If architectural models normally present a building as constructed or imagined, this model displayed the very reverse: a constructive rendering of past destruction that is now, and will always be, hidden from view. Yet, this model of ruin was (and still is) counterbalanced by the status of the damaged reactor building as a monument. In the first months after the accident, a structure was hastily constructed around the ruined reactor to contain the radioactive emissions (Figure 4.1).26 Known for many years as the Sarkofag [Sarcophagus], this edifice, which consisted of giant slabs 124

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Figure 4.1  View of the sarcophagus constructed around the remains of Chernobyl’s fourth reactor in 2007 before the new ‘Shelter’ was built from 2012 onwards, showing the author standing next to the 2006 monument to those who died in the clean-​ up operation. Reproduced by permission of Quintin Lake.

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Figure 4.2  Detail of the model used to describe the Chernobyl accident to visitors, showing the destroyed reactor.

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Disaster and memory: the ruins of Chernobyl and Pripyat of concrete mounted in haste by robots and helicopters, was always in danger of collapse and a new building programme has been underway since April 2012 to re-​house the sarcophagus in a 20,000-​ton steel arch, known as the Ukritye [Shelter] or the New Safe Confinement, and expected to be completed in 2017.27 Financed by an international conglomerate, the new structure is meant to be a permanent ‘final solution’ to the containment of the ruined reactor for at least the next 100 years.28 However, in order for the safe decay of the huge quantities of radioactive material still inside the reactor, particularly Plutonium-​240 with its half-​life of 6,580 years, such a protective structure –​in countless future reincarnations –​will need to be in place for a barely imaginable time scale of tens of thousands of years. The reactor, whether enclosed by the old sarcophagus or the new shelter, is, in effect, both a ruin and also an ironic monument: ‘the pyramid of our technical age, a symbol of our achievements to the thousands of generations to come’.29 Yet, the necessary longevity of the reactor’s containment structure lies far outside conventional perceptions of how monuments function and how they are always subject to the vicissitudes of cultural change. Urban monuments, as the architectural critic Anthony Vidler has observed, act as carriers of memory in rhetorical form, reminding citizens of their relation to heroic past deeds and events.30 By contrast, Chernobyl’s reactor suggests memories normally only associated with ruins, that is, traumatic ones, whether man-​made (through war, social breakdown, or technological failure) or as a result of natural disasters. Thus, the reactor’s ironic meaning resides in its unique monumentality: it is, in fact, a ruin that must be maintained as a monument for as long as is necessary to contain its destructive potentiality; a monument that, for centuries, even millennia, to come, will signify an historical failure rather than a victory. In effect, the reactor’s confinement structure, whether sarcophagus or shelter, monumentalizes both a void (the necessary invisibility of the reactor’s unimaginably toxic contents) and an obscene material excess (the almost eternal presence of those contents). In the face of such disturbing ruptures in the nature of the monumental itself, the changing names of Chernobyl’s reactor have acted as symbolic reference points to try and fix its meaning. The initial denoting of the containment structure as Sarkofag by the Soviet President Gorbachev and his government officials soon after the accident, provided the new structure 127

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay with a symbolic meaning that referenced both the generalized sense of the word ‘Sarcophagus’ as a funeral receptacle for a corpse (deriving from the Greek origins of the word meaning literally ‘flesh-​eating’) and more localized resonances with the Soviet Union’s most famous precedent, the sarcophagus which houses the embalmed body of Lenin in the Moscow Kremlin. As ‘Sarcophagus’, the ruined reactor became a metaphor for both what anthropologist Adriana Petryna has referred to as ‘a sense of physical, moral, and spiritual rejuvenation within the Soviet population’,31 and also ‘a foolproof container of the dead’ that gave positive meaning to its toxic contents that were presumed to be gradually ‘eaten’ by the sarcophagus itself.32 No doubt, the sense of eternal and noble entombment denoted by the Sarcophagus was also intended to counteract the shocking images of the ruined reactor –​torn open and strewn with toxic rubble –​that circulated widely in the immediate aftermath of the accident. This imagery was exemplified in the Soviet filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko’s aerial views of the destroyed reactor in his 1986 film Chernobyl: Chronicle of Difficult Weeks.33 With its current designation as ‘Shelter’, the new protective structure modifies the symbolic meaning of the reactor. First, as a ‘confinement’ structure, it openly acknowledges that Chernobyl’s wastes can never be fully contained; second, by eschewing the former Soviet references to the body of Lenin and flesh-​eating tombs in favour of a more generalized and ‘softer’ association with protection, it reflects the wishes of its geographically-​disparate group of funders. If Chernobyl’s Sarcophagus carried with it a sense of entombed toxicity, then the more recent shelter/​confinement designation implies a gentler, but perhaps less effective, protective enclosure of what is both inside and outside the reactor, in effect both universalizing the legacy of, and responsibility for, the destroyed reactor and also domesticating the obscene materiality of its radioactive contents. In short, the move from Sarcophagus to Shelter implies a different future memorialization of the accident, one that offers the assurance and memory of maternal protection, even if that comes at the cost of the former sense of heroic entombment. If the changing names of Chernobyl’s ruined reactor chart its shifting identity as a troubling monument, then so do wider representations of it in visual culture. In the last decade, tourism (led by private travel agencies 128

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Disaster and memory: the ruins of Chernobyl and Pripyat in Kiev) to Chernobyl’s zone has flourished; it has been estimated that over 20,000 tourists visited the site in 2009 alone, many illegally.34 Even though the nature of these tours varies according to the organizers, they are all, bar illicit visits to the zone, arranged along strict official guidelines. When I visited Chernobyl in October 2007, the part of the tour that included the reactor was governed by an official narrative and highly restricted access.35 As evidenced in a photograph taken by Quintin Lake (the friend who accompanied me to the zone) and in countless others taken by Chernobyl tourists, visitors are only permitted to photograph the reactor from one place, that is, a small open space a few hundred metres from the reactor which is dominated by a monument dedicated to those who died in the clean-​up operation (Figure 4.1). The monument was erected in 2006, commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the disaster. Given its prominent position in front of the reactor, and with plaques in both Ukrainian and English, this monument is clearly addressed to international visitors to Chernobyl, perhaps as a way of focusing their minds on, as the plaque states, the ‘heroes [and] professionals who protected the world from nuclear disaster’. The siting of this monument and its prominence in guided visits effectively mediates the symbolic meaning of the reactor, particularly for Chernobyl tourists: it directs the visitors’ gaze not to the reactor itself (or, rather, its containment structure) but to the memory of those who dealt with the aftermath of the accident. The monument also prepares visitors for the explanatory talk given by Chernobyl’s ‘information officer’ in a purpose-​ built structure nearby, where a small exhibition and model of the reactor direct visitors’ attention to remember the disaster in a particular way. With photographs of some of the so-​called ‘liquidators’ (around 600,000 volunteers and conscripts who cleaned up after the accident) lining the walls, together with a talk that emphasizes the failures of the Soviet government in the aftermath of the disaster, tourists are left in no doubt as to how they should remember the site once they have left. Such directive tourism forms part of a much wider visual culture of memorialization of Chernobyl, particularly in Ukraine and Belarus, with the latter suffering contamination of nearly 23 per cent of its territory, almost three times that of Ukraine.36 Most of the dozens of monuments erected in these countries after the disaster were built to honour the liquidators and many use similar symbolic motifs including: tolling bells 129

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Figure 4.3  1996 monument to the 28 firefighters killed in the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in 1986.

signifying the call to remember; lightning strikes, the almost supernatural force of the accident; raised hands (a religious symbol of supplication); and representations of the reactor as a safely entombed space. In addition, most visualize the liquidators in some way. One of the earliest memorials was that erected in 1996 in Chernobyl’s zone to honour the 28 firemen who were killed in the immediate aftermath of the accident, when they brought the burning reactor under some degree of control (Figure 4.3). Designed, built and funded by the surviving firemen, this memorial draws attention to the heroism of the firefighters themselves, their bodies permanently strained in the act of containing the reactor fire, the result of which is symbolized by a gigantic ribbon tied around the reactor topped by a cross, which represents their degree of sacrifice. This memorial set the course and current of future commemorations of the accident: for example, the 2006 Chernobyl memorial in Slavutych, in northern Ukraine, erected by local citizens who were evacuated from Pripyat to the city in 1986, includes 130

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Disaster and memory: the ruins of Chernobyl and Pripyat similar motifs seen in the earlier monument as well as photographs of the same 28 firemen; while a more recent monument in Kiev, erected in 2011 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the disaster, includes bronze busts of the same team of firefighters grouped around a symbolic statue of an atom with birds penetrating into its core flanked by the flags of all the former Soviet republics that ‘lost their lives as a result of Chernobyl,’ explicitly linking the accident to the break-​up of the Soviet Union.37 The monuments described above represent but a small sample of a proliferating number of similar memorials to Chernobyl’s liquidators. Today, they exist in almost every administrative centre in the contaminated districts of both Ukraine and Belarus and most were erected from the 1990s onwards, often on the occasion of significant anniversaries of the accident, and more were created in 2016, which marked the 30th anniversary of the accident. As Tatiana Kasperski has observed, many of these memorials are strongly reminiscent of the way in which the heroes of the Great Patriotic War (or World War II) of the Soviet era were portrayed in associated monuments. Just as the Communist party turned the memory of the war into ‘a cult of the Soviet victory over Fascism’, so Chernobyl’s liquidators are often portrayed as acting like heroic soldiers in a war against an invisible enemy –​radiation –​and voluntarily sacrificing their lives for the greater good.38 Kasperski has criticized these memorials as imposing an ‘official memory strategy’ and encouraging ‘oblivion’ in that they ‘say nothing about the absurdity of many of the sacrifices’, the failures of Soviet ideology, the larger human suffering brought about by the disaster, or the sacrifices of the many women who took part in the emergency operation.39 Yet, because many of these memorials were conceived by Chernobyl’s victims rather than the state, such criticisms must be tempered by acknowledging the significance of memorialization within this community of sufferers. Clearly, there was, and continues to be, a strong desire on the part of Chernobyl’s victims to remember their suffering in the light of meaningful sacrifice and perhaps even the Soviet ideology of masculine heroism. As documented in often heartbreaking detail by Svetlana Alexievich and Adriana Petryna, Chernobyl’s victims continue to deal with the extreme dislocations the disaster brought about: whether the terrifying and incomprehensible short-​and long-​term effects of radiation on the body,40 the geographical and social displacements of compulsory evacuation, the social dislocations 131

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union post-​1991, or the consequence of becoming ‘biological citizens’ in post-​Chernobyl Ukraine.41 In these contexts, for the disaster’s victims, Chernobyl memorials, which are very much conceived along conventional lines as carriers of memory in rhetorical form, have become a way in which some form of stability can be regained, whether in physical monuments that allow for collective memorialization of tangible common losses, no matter how small those may be in relation to the larger effects of the disaster, or in the connection of those memories to more abstract and rhetorical ideas of national fate, tragedy and loss. Memorials to Chernobyl’s ‘heroes’ also provide a bulwark against the troubling monumentality of the reactor itself, described above. If the reactor building often features as a prominent motif in many of these memorials, it does so in the context of its visualization as a ‘closed’ site, secured by the heroic actions of the liquidators that transformed it from gaping wound into Sarcophagus/​Shelter. This sense of the reactor as a sealed-​off world has been recently challenged by two films that open up the inside of the ill-​fated reactor once again. For, in both the Russian-​language film V Subbotu [Innocent Saturday] (Aleksandr Mindadze, 2011) and the American film Chernobyl Diaries (Brad Parker, 2012), Chernobyl’s ruined reactor is penetrated and opened up to view, albeit for very different purposes. Mindadze’s film, described by one reviewer as an ‘existential action movie’, takes places in the days immediately after the accident, imagining a group of people left behind in Pripyat who are struggling with their complex feelings and thoughts in the wake of the disaster and their inability to escape from Chernobyl’s zone.42 In the event, none of the film’s characters ever leave the zone, the final scene showing the main protagonist Valerii Kabysh, a young engineer and party official, clenching his fist in anger whilst passing close to the destroyed reactor on a boat. In this scene the reactor is shown in its (original) ruinous state, that is, steaming and groaning with malevolent force and destructive power, suggesting that, despite the heroism of its liquidators, its horrific legacy continues to this day. In Chernobyl Diaries, a group of international travellers undertake an ‘extreme’ tourist trip to Pripyat through a private Kiev travel agency (at first, very much like my own visit) only to become stranded in the abandoned town and then terrorized by a group of flesh-​eating humans who are 132

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Disaster and memory: the ruins of Chernobyl and Pripyat revealed to have been living in the zone since the accident and whom have presumably evolved as a result of the radioactive fallout.43 At the end of the film, the two surviving American tourists enter the reactor and are blinded and burned by the intense radiation before being cornered and killed by the Ukrainian authorities, who have been covering up the existence of the mutant survivors in the zone. In both films, the reactor functions as a critical site of horror, whether its effects are existential (in the case of Innocent Saturday) or corporeal (in Chernobyl Diaries). Despite their obvious differences, in both films the visibility, even penetrability, of the reactor acts as a counter to conventional monumental representations of it as an invisible, closed-​off world:  that is, an effectively sealed container, whether sarcophagus or shelter. Thus, by representing the reactor as an open site to be confronted, both films eschew the conventional representations of the reactor as an historical site identified with the memory of a particular group of victims, foregrounding instead a heightened sense of personal responsibility in the face of an overwhelming and still-​on-​going horror, even if, as in both films, that individual confrontation only results in annihilation.

Pripyat: ruins as monuments The multifarious meanings of ruin and monument that emerge from representations of Chernobyl’s reactor and memorials to the disaster’s victims are further complicated by the ruined town of Pripyat, situated 1 km north-​west of the reactor. Founded in 1970 to house construction workers and staff of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Pripyat was planned as an exemplary socialist town, in effect, an example of utopian urban planning that became a synonym for Stalinism in Cold War Europe (Figure 4.4). Pripyat, also known as Atomograd, was an atomic utopia that was based on the modernist blueprint of high-​rise standardized blocks of apartments broken up by wide boulevards and vegetation, as well as model public facilities, including the luxury Polyssia hotel, a palace of culture, theatre and cinema, twenty educational establishments, a state-​of-​the-​art swimming pool and sports centre, two stadiums and an amusement park, due to open just days after the accident (Figure 4.5). Pripyat’s 49,000 residents were evacuated 36 hours after the reactor exploded and at such short notice and 133

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Figure 4.4  View of Pripyat from the terrace of the Polyssia Hotel, 2007.

so quickly that most left virtually all their belongings behind.44 After three decades of abandonment, Pripyat has become iconic as one of the largest modern ruins in the world and a magnet for tourists and others attracted by the idea of exploring a dead city and a petrified remnant of Soviet utopian urban planning.45 If Chernobyl’s reactor is one kind of monument to the disaster, Pripyat is another –​its crumbling buildings and empty streets are set against the now eternal reactor shelter, seen from every rooftop of the town’s buildings. If the reactor is a ruin entombed, Pripyat is a ruin exposed: like Varosha, it is a place that reveals how entire cityscapes might decay if left abandoned for decades.46 The signs of memory in Pripyat are all-​pervasive and, unlike the reactor, are fully exposed to the tourist gaze. On my visit to Pripyat, the guide allowed free wandering of the town’s ruined spaces, all of which were mnemonic in their character, whether seen in the sudden reappearance of utopian objects from the past, such as decaying Soviet murals or socialist icons left in the palace of culture (Figure 4.6); discarded objects of everyday life, from rusted supermarket trolleys to empty medicine bottles in the former hospital; poignant reminders of lost childhoods like educational posters left on the walls of empty classrooms (Figure 4.7); or, most heartbreaking 134

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Disaster and memory: the ruins of Chernobyl and Pripyat

Figure 4.5  Ferris wheel in Pripyat’s amusement park, due to open just days after Chernobyl’s reactor exploded on 26 April 1986 (photograph taken in 2007).

of all, the former kindergarten with its soiled toys and the skeletal frames of metal cots crowded together. In addition, Pripyat’s recurrent visual motifs –​peeling wall paint, gaping holes where there were once windows, plants growing through floors, broken strip-​lights, cracked concrete –​are insistent reminders of the history of the town’s buildings, particularly after 135

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Figure 4.6 Soviet socialist paintings stored in a room in the former Palace of Culture in Pripyat, 2007.

Figure 4.7  Children’s education posters in a former classroom, Pripyat, 2007.

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Disaster and memory: the ruins of Chernobyl and Pripyat the accident, as nature began to reclaim the built environment. Yet, the obvious mnemonic quality of Pripyat’s spaces and objects was complicated by the town’s post-​disaster history. For example, the sense of violence in the way in which many objects were arranged was not the consequence of the accident or hurried evacuation of the town, but from years of systematic looting, with many of the former residents’ belongings removed from their petrified state and brought back into circulation again, despite the obvious risk of contamination.47 Representations of Pripyat, in line with other modern ruins, have been largely centred on the photographic image and have proliferated since the site was first opened to visitors in 2002. Robert Polidori was one of the first well-​known photographers to visit and his images have influenced all subsequent ones. In his book of collected photographs from Chernobyl, Zones of Exclusion (2003), Polidori casts himself as a pioneering adventurer, as demonstrated in his self-​portrait clothed in a radiation suit and helmet (the only image of Polidori in the book). His photographs, the majority of which are of Pripyat, frame Chernobyl’s ruin as a warning to those who might consider risking the safety of future generations.48 However, the images themselves, without any explanatory captions, seem coolly detached, even as they picture the more emotionally-​distressing sights in the town: kindergartens crammed full of rusting cots and broken toys, and classrooms strewn with broken chairs and books, one with a blackboard with the powerful parting statement written in chalk and translated as ‘There’s no return. Farewell. Pripyat, 28 April 1986’. Successive photographers have tended to place emphasis on the surprising elements of beauty seen in Pripyat: from David McMillan’s images focusing on the luxurious colour and ‘pearly light’ in the interiors of the town’s decaying buildings,49 to Quintin Lake’s ‘resolutely optimistic’ image of a sliver birch tree growing out of the floor in a terrace room of the Polyssia hotel (Figure 4.8).50 As Chernobyl becomes an increasingly popular site of dark tourism, so photographic images of its spaces proliferate, particularly on urban exploration websites.51 Despite the sheer abundance and variety of photographic representations of Chernobyl and Pripyat, very few offer any reflection on the role of photography in the representation of the site and the difficulties of ‘seeing’ it as a tourist. As the journalist Imogen Wall has observed, her 137

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Figure 4.8  Quintin Lake’s photograph of a silver birch tree growing through the floor of a room in the former Polyssia Hotel, Pripyat, 2007. Reproduced by permission of the photographer.

voyeuristic discomfort was first provoked when she was photographed next to Chernobyl’s Sarcophagus.52 As highlighted in the introduction to this book, voyeurism –​witnessing illicit scenes that are normally hidden from view –​is an important driving force of urban exploration and photographs are its most significant visual product, often involving considerable technical expertise and specialist equipment.53 This emphasis on representation conflicts with urban exploration’s valuation of first-​hand experience of ‘dark’ spaces like those in Pripyat: cumbersome equipment and a focus on the camera’s view deflect from the body’s own perceptions. In this context my own photographs of Pripyat offer a reflection on these limitations. Rather than documenting my experience, they instead serve to frame, visualize and bring attention to significant moments in that experience that were grounded in the specifics of the town’s spaces and my progression through them. They also suggest the relative powerlessness of photographs to represent an experience that was defined by an increasing awareness of incommensurable loss. Yet it was through the visual signposts provided by my photographs and the memories they provoked that I was led to engage with witnesses who intruded on any purely aesthetic reading of Pripyat’s spaces. 138

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Disaster and memory: the ruins of Chernobyl and Pripyat Another disturbing development is the presence of artists’ interventions in some of Pripyat’s buildings. In October 2005, a group of seven artists from Minsk, Moscow and Berlin spray-​painted directly onto industrial and residential buildings in Pripyat, leaving images including a schoolgirl turning off a light switch, a boy playing on a balcony, and flowers wilting over a gravestone. The artists involved claimed that their images were meant ‘to arrest oblivion … to keep the memory of the suffering of the people alive.’ Some, such as representatives of former residents at the website Pripyat.com, have condemned these interventions as insensitive acts of vandalism, and the appearance of a mural in 2012 of the American cartoon show The Simpsons in one of Pripyat’s spaces seemed to have confirmed their negative assessments.54 Finally, years of unsupervized visits by countless tourists, many of them photographers, have seen many of Pripyat’s discarded objects being rearranged to create juxtapositions for emblematic effect: for example a gas mask left on a rusted gynaecological chair in the grounds of the town’s former hospital –​a graphic image of horror that was almost certainly staged (Figure 4.9).55 Given these interventions, it is clear that distinguishing between authentic and staged memory in Pripyat is intensely problematic, despite the initial sense of the ‘untouched’ mnemonic power of the town’s ruins. At one point in my perambulation of Pripyat in early October 2007, I came upon and photographed two children’s toys left on one of the seats of the town’s now iconic carousel, their newness contrasting sharply with the advanced decay that surrounds them (Figure 4.10). As informed by my guide, these toys were probably brought to the site by former residents of Pripyat, who still return to the zone to visit the ruined town and the Stechanka cemetery nearby (in the first years following the accident relatives were allowed one escorted visit each year). In contrast to the variety of staged objects seen elsewhere in Pripyat, these toys forced an awareness of a particular kind of memory, one that was focused squarely on the human impact of the ruin of Pripyat, and which seemed to obliterate the characteristic aesthetic distance of the tourist gaze. The toys invited, or rather demanded, the visitor to ask the question: to whom does the memory of Pripyat rightly belong –​ the tourist or the suffering witnesses? In fact, these toys represent just one of many interventions in Pripyat that seek to influence how the ruined town is remembered. In particular, 139

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Figure 4.9  Gynaecological chair and gas mask in the grounds of the former hospital in Pripyat, 2007.

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Disaster and memory: the ruins of Chernobyl and Pripyat

Figure 4.10  Children’s toys left on the seat of a rusting carousel in the amusement park in Pripyat, 2007.

photographs and websites such as Pripyat.com gather testimonies from former residents and promote awareness of the human cost of the town’s abandonment;56 and documentary films like the German/​ Czech co-​ produced Pripyat (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 1999) form a visual complement to influential oral histories such as Alexievich’s book Voices from Chernobyl.57 Attempts to control the memory of Pripyat have even extended to some former residents calling for the ruins of the town to be designated a national monument, in effect a living museum that memorializes technological catastrophe;58 while others have suggested that the town and its surroundings be protected as a national park that reflects the abundance of rare wildlife that has flourished in Pripyat since its abandonment.59 As if speaking to me through the children’s toys left on Pripyat’s rusting carousel, a former resident, Nikolai Fomich Kalugin, stated that ‘[w]‌e had lost more than a city, we had lost an entire life’. After being evacuated from Pripyat and being forced to leave all his belongings behind, he returned to his apartment two years later to retrieve the front door, which was, for him a ‘talisman’, ‘[a] family relic. My father was laid out on that door … Our whole life is written on that door. How could I  leave it?’ He would 141

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay later lay his own daughter on the same door, a victim of radiation sickness caused by the accident.60 For another former resident, who was born and grew up in Pripyat, the loss was incomprehensible: ‘[h]ow can you believe what you can’t understand? No matter how hard you try, you can’t understand it. I remember so well: we left, and the sky was so blue’.61 This account stresses the powerlessness of existing ways of thinking to comprehend and represent the effects of the disaster. For Pripyat’s former residents, in response to their incomprehension, everyday objects and memories were invested with an almost cosmic significance around which the loss of an entire world could be articulated. In this context, the ruins of Pripyat are a testament not only to the violence of systematic looting which robbed these witnesses of precious sources of memory, but also to the collapse of shared values and the social cohesion they engendered. Before the accident, Pripyat’s residents were a collective community provided with model Soviet facilities; afterwards, they were re-​housed in European-​style suburbs, where ‘there was a new, unusual feeling, an awareness that each of us had his own individual life’ that generated an all-​encompassing sense of confusion and loss.62 The desire to fix the meaning of Pripyat’s ruins, particularly by those who were displaced from the town by the Chernobyl disaster, might well stem from a reaction against recent imaginative representations of Pripyat seen in the award-​ winning S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of computer games (Figure 4.11) and films like Chernobyl Diaries.63 The original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game, Shadow of Chernobyl, was released in 2007, with its two sequels Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat following in 2009 and 2011 respectively, and an associated television series from 2014 to 2015. Developed in Kiev by GSC Gameworld, the games’ Ukrainian designers were inspired by their own perceptions of the ruins of Pripyat and, more generally, the ruinous landscape of post-​Soviet Ukraine. As explained by one of the games’ designers, Anton Bolshakov, the decision to re-​imagine Pripyat’s ruins as populated with mutated monsters that are battled by the Stalkers in the games’ title was motivated by both the desire to ‘remind people of the Chernobyl accident’ and also to use its ruins to create a ‘horror-​filled atmospheric shooter’.64 In addition, the original game drew direct inspiration from the Soviet science fiction of Roadside Picnic (1972) and Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), in effect merging contemplative cerebral science fiction with the 142

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Disaster and memory: the ruins of Chernobyl and Pripyat

Figure 4.11  Still from S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat (2011).

cyberpunk tradition of post-​apocalyptic ruin as a playground for dreams of escape.65 In a further representational twist, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series have subsequently inspired many game-​players to visit Pripyat as tourists, where they can see for themselves some of the sites rendered so realistically in the games, such as the Polyssia hotel and the rusted ferris wheel.66 In the light of this, it is not surprising that the Ukrainian authorities have tried to impose their own narrative of the Chernobyl disaster by offering only a single, official tour of Pripyat, while others have condemned the rise of ‘Stalkerism’ as a form of ‘pseudo-​romanticism and post-​apocalyptic mystery’ that ‘overshadows the tragedy’ and its enormous human costs.67 Yet, as argued by geographer Nick Rush-​Cooper, perhaps we should not be so quick to judge S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s symbolic re-​appropriation of Pripyat as mere sensationalism that bears no relationship to the ‘real’ Chernobyl or the memories of its displaced citizens.68 For symbolism was, and continues to be, an important way in which Pripyat’s former residents have come to represent their suffering. Thus, Arkady Filin, one of Chernobyl’s liquidators, described the zone as a ‘wild world … a combination of the end of the world and the Stone Age’; while Katya P., a former resident of Pripyat, described the soldiers who came to evacuate her as looking ‘like extraterrestrials, walking 143

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay down the streets in white camouflage and masks’.69 Finally, if the sublime aesthetic of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games has been condemned as sensationalist, then it is also important to remember that Pripyat’s residents have described the Chernobyl disaster in similar terms: as former resident Nadezhda Petrovna Vygovskaya remembered seeing the reactor’s ‘bright raspberry glow’ from her apartment balcony in Pripyat and wondering at its sublime beauty.70 Perhaps at stake here is not the legitimacy or otherwise of an aesthetic reading of Pripyat’s ruins, but rather who has the right to articulate such a reading. It could even be argued that, far from disrespecting the authentic memories of Pripyat’s former residents, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games draw on those memories in their articulation of a similar symbolic terrain, one that respects those memories by resisting their homogenization into any single, official narrative –​precisely what critics of the games and its spinoff tours are, in effect, calling for. The controversy surrounding the release of the film Chernobyl Diaries also centred on the question of who has the right to remember and represent the ruins of Pripyat. The film is a logical extension to the imaginative re-​appropriation of Pripyat seen in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games. So, in the film, Pripyat was created from a mixture of photographs of the abandoned town, models of some of its structures, CGI that extended those models into a fabricated background, and point-​of-​view camerawork that mirrored S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s first-​person player setup (Figure 4.11).71 As the film’s group of youthful tourists enter Pripyat, their Ukrainian guide Yuri says: ‘Today we have Pripyat to ourselves’, a remark that sets up the central conceit of the film: namely, that a group of mutant survivors are still living in Pripyat and attacking and feeding off some of the visitors to the town. Before their first night-​time confrontation with these shadowy monsters, the tourists are shown the now familiar ‘sights’ of Pripyat: Soviet murals, abandoned children’s toys, the rusted ferris wheel, and Chernobyl’s reactor, the latter seen and photographed from an apartment balcony. In one sense, this initial narrative of Pripyat in the film reflects real tours of the site, and this sequence in the film was uncannily similar to my own visit in 2007. In the film, just as in my own experience, the memories of the former residents serve to provide tourists with some insight into the human effects of Pripyat’s abandonment, even as they continue to laugh and joke and take photographs. In the light of this, criticism of Chernobyl Diaries as ‘disaster 144

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Disaster and memory: the ruins of Chernobyl and Pripyat porn’ that sensationalizes the real horror of the aftermath of the accident can be read not just as an attack on the film alone, but on all forms of experience of the disaster that are not mediated by its ‘real’ story.72 However, it is possible to interpret the mutants portrayed in Chernobyl Diaries as symbolic representations of the real victims of the disaster, rather than coloured by what Thom Davies has termed a ‘latent Orientalism’ that is based on stereotypical American perceptions of Eastern-​Europeans as primitive and savage.73 As Alexievich and Petryna’s oral histories graphically demonstrate, many of Chernobyl’s victims have represented their own experience and suffering in a way that is disturbingly similar to that shown in the film. For example, the journalist Anatoly Shimansky described his experience of Pripyat as ‘some incredible thing […] creeping, crawling into you’,74 while those dealing with effects of exposure to radiation after leaving Pripyat speak repeatedly of barely comprehensible bodily disintegration and the medical and scientific void in which they feel they have been left.75 Despite criticism of how Chernobyl Diaries portrayed Pripyat’s victims, there were clearly some who felt differently: as the film’s producer Oren Peli stated, when he showed Chernobyl Diaries to a charity representing the children of Chernobyl, they reputedly did not think it was insensitive because they saw that the film ‘raise[d]‌awareness for Chernobyl’ to a ‘new generation that’s not familiar with it at all’.76 If some representatives of Chernobyl’s victims clearly found the film’s portrayal of them as mutants offensive, others perhaps recognized the film’s symbolic affinities with the victims in that it affirmed their own testimonies against the clearly pervasive desire to homogenize representations of their suffering.

Ruins as voids The disasters at Chernobyl and, more recently, Fukushima in March 2011, underscore the fact that, with nuclear power, failure has been, and continues to be, an unthinkable option for those who implement it, despite the abundant evidence that failures do indeed occur.77 It is this official inability to think through nuclear failure that has resulted in the proliferation of symbolic representations of the Chernobyl disaster and its ruins. For this sociological ‘blind-​spot’ is a void –​an absence, caused by trauma, that lies at the heart of all responses to the Chernobyl disaster, whether from its direct 145

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay victims, Chernobyl tourists, artists, game-​players or filmmakers. As demonstrated in this chapter, catastrophic memories like those of Chernobyl can be subject to dramatic mutations that confound any attempt to articulate overarching narratives of disasters and their continuing legacies.78 In this context, the notion of ruins as ‘voids’ is an instructive tool by which we might read Chernobyl’s ruins. If these ruins are monuments, they are monuments to a catastrophic event that profoundly destabilized the prevailing symbolic order.79 As testified time and again by Chernobyl’s ‘witnesses’, the disaster ruptured symbolic worlds, exposing voids that could not be filled. As literary critic Andreas Huyssen has argued, all sites of trauma (as ruins) point to ‘an absence that can never be overcome’, but an absence that nevertheless must be acknowledged if healing is to take place.80 In a site like Chernobyl, where ruin has overtaken the entire environment, such voids become all pervasive:  petrified remainders of an overwhelming trauma that challenge any desire to forget. The sheer multiplicity of representations of Chernobyl and Pripyat examined in this chapter are testimony to the disaster’s global reach and the potent desire to circle or fill its voids, whether seen in the thousands of texts that have documented the scientific and social effects of the accident; oral testimonies of Chernobyl’s ‘sufferers’; monuments and museums dedicated to the memory of the accident and its victims; countless photographs by tourists and urban explorers; art works that engage a variety of media; computer games and films that appropriate Chernobyl’s abandoned spaces; and websites that seek to engage with what they regard as authentic memories of the accident. Perhaps, rather than pitting one set of voices against others, what is needed is a critical approach that brings together these conflicting representations, opening up a space of dialogue between Chernobyl’s contested histories and addressing the wider question of how the ruins of disaster might be remembered. In the wake of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in 2011, there is an urgent need to re-​engage with the cultural memory of Chernobyl, one that draws its disparate representations together in solidarity rather than hostility.

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Futures

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5 Urban futures, art and the imagination of Detroit

In December 2014, when planning my visit to Detroit, I came across two press articles on the city that offered strikingly different assessments of the city’s prospects. On 17 December, Yahoo News announced that Detroit was ‘bouncing back from bankruptcy’ and charted the reclamation of the city by businesses, artists and government after its nadir in 2013, when the city filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history.1 The day before, the Mail Online had published seven aerial photographs of the city, including what it described as the ‘tiny urban island of downtown’ that was ‘lost in the wide spaces of a depopulated city’. Here, the city was presented as an almost post-​apocalyptic environment of vacant land, enormous urban ruins, such as the Packard Plant, and former residential areas erased and replaced by lush vegetation and open grassland (Figure 5.1).2 Such contradictory views of Detroit, far from merely being a product of its contemporary state – o ​ ver 60 per cent of its peak population of 1.8 million has left the city and nearly one third of its total land area of 138 square miles is now vacant –​are recurring motifs in the history of the city since the 1950s, when Detroit’s population first began to decline. As literary scholar David Sheridan wrote back in 1999, commentary on Detroit has characteristically veered between opposing poles: on the one hand, a utopian forward-​looking gaze that anticipates recovery and 149

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Figure 5.1  I-​94 Industrial Park, formerly the St Cyril neighbourhood in northeastern Detroit, 2015.

renewal and readily trades on Detroit’s early-​nineteenth-​century motto speramus meliora; resurgen cineribus, meaning ‘We hope for better things; it will arise from the ashes’, and on the other, a view of the city as ‘a ruined container of confused and empty lives.’ This latter view reflects a dystopian perception of the city that focuses on its nightmarish qualities, whether its emptiness, ruins, or racist constructions of ‘otherness’ as the United States’ largest black-​majority city (over 80 per cent of the population).3 Both of these ways of representing Detroit, although ostensibly opposed, nevertheless imagine the city in a manner that is future-​oriented. Thus, the utopian imagination of Detroit announces the city’s renewal and regeneration, thereby ‘proclaiming the future’s imminence’, while the dystopian vision waits for the future to play itself out as a form of urban entropy, erasing Detroit until it’s a blank canvas that can be remade in a different and often, implicitly, white image.4 Both of these future-​oriented Detroit imaginaries tend to obscure other forms of time being worked out in the city, namely the past and, more noticeably, the present; and both tend to generate ‘mythic’ notions of time, that is temporalities that are distanced from lived experience. This chapter will redress this imbalance by comparing the predominant tropes 150

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Urban futures, art and the imagination of Detroit of dystopia and utopia in the imagination of Detroit with creative interventions in the city’s ruined landscape, which can be collectively brought under the umbrella term ‘art’, but which include a wide variety of practices, including graffiti and street art, creative salvage of abandoned buildings, site-​specific sculpture, landscape art, renovation, installations, photography, and film.5 After exploring in more depth the wider cultural imagination of Detroit, I will focus on four principal themes that characterize some of the creative practices in the city today: cutting/​pasting, covering, melding and mouldering. I will explore how these creative practices are transforming the city and its hitherto dominant imaginaries and what these collectively might contribute to ideas about the future development of Detroit. Creative practices are important in Detroit today because they have become increasingly bound up with how the city is changing, mainly on account of the seeming absence of more conventional forms of urban development that are taken for granted in most other cities. In addition, because these practices so often engage with the city’s ruins, they collapse the distance between aesthetic representations of the city and the urban fabric itself. In short, much of the art being made in Detroit today is itself part of the city and, as such, will be embedded in its future evolution. Detroit’s creative scene has flourished in the last decade due to an influx of young, mainly white, artists, writers and musicians who have been attracted to the city because of low property prices and rents, a hands-​ off civic government that can barely maintain the city’s beleaguered infrastructure let alone police unapproved public art projects, and a developing community of like-​minded people. Many of Detroit’s artists have relocated from other cities, where they have been priced out of areas due to gentrification, New York City being the prime example; others are supported by philanthropy, such as through the Kresge Foundation, which is the key funding body in Detroit and provides awards for arts and culture-​based activities that focus on empowering the city’s disadvantaged population.6 There is also a growing commercial market for contemporary art in Detroit, as evidenced by the success of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Detroit, founded in 2006 and hosting numerous exhibitions each year showcasing local artists’ work,7 as well as more historic venues for buying and selling art, such as Detroit Artists Market, founded back in 1932 and still thriving today.8 151

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay My own exploration of Detroit’s creative scene focused on the visual arts and can be no more than a snapshot of my own limited time in the city, given the rapidly changing nature of its built environment and the creative interventions within it. As such, mine is a selective view, representing a short moment in the city’s on-​going evolution. Yet, such a snapshot view may not be as limited as it first seems. As Detroit ​journalist Jerry Heron has argued, attempts to ‘sum up’ Detroit, whether in the countless journalistic accounts of the city in the wake of the collapse of the housing market in late 2006 or collections of images like those in the Mail Online article, only lead to generalized representations of the city that tend to exceptionalize and therefore distance its condition.9 In contrast, my selective view of Detroit will present an open-​ended exploration of some of the creative practices that are contributing to the emergence of new urban imaginaries in the city. Some of these may come to nothing and many are problematic in other ways. Yet, taken together, they constitute an essentially heterogeneous approach to Detroit’s urban ruins that contrast sharply with the more conventional attempts to understand and represent them. What I focus on in this chapter is how art is both reimagining and intervening in the city’s ruins, not as conventionally conceived as either a prelude to gentrification or treating the city as a blank canvas, but rather as using ruins to artistically explore specific contexts, whether temporal, material, social or political.10 While I was staying in Detroit in early April 2015, I coincidentally happened to read an early short story by J. G. Ballard, ‘Chronopolis’, published in 1960.11 In Ballard’s tale, set in a future city, the urban populace have completely abandoned the notion of sequential time, resulting in a city that is ‘effectively an enormous ring, five miles in width, encircling a vast dead centre 40 or 50 miles in diameter’.12 Hiding his own interest in the now forbidden timepieces of his ancestors, the central character Conrad sets off on a journey into this abandoned city, meeting the renegade Marshall and restarting the city’s clocks once again only to realize that this lost time should never have been recovered. Ballard’s tale is fantastical, yet it is a prescient allegory of what has happened in Detroit over the last 60 years and the attempts to make sense of its current condition. Like Chronopolis, Detroit seems to have been abandoned by sequential clock time, principally the Fordist-​production lines of the automobiles factories that once defined the city; and, like Chronopolis, Detroit is also a city defined by 152

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Urban futures, art and the imagination of Detroit its abandonment, whether in the persistence of its ruined buildings or its large areas of vacant land. Yet, Ballard’s story also warns of the dangers of both trying to return the lost city to a version of its former self and imposing a new homogenous kind of time on its ruined spaces. The fate of Chronopolis gives us pause to think about what time might mean in a ruined city. In such an environment, time seems to slow down, challenging what is conventionally seen as ‘productive’ time in a city (the temporal rhythms of work and leisure) and asking how new forms of making might emerge out of this slower, more fragmented form of time. It also asks how that time might be worked into the fabric of the city’s future, which is always at any given moment radically unknown. As I explore in this chapter, in contrast to the predominant imaginaries of Detroit, creative practices in the city’s ruins, whether cutting, covering, melding or mouldering, open up new possibilities for those ruins, ones that are defined by processes rather than products and which, in those processes, both enact and suggest radical new urban futures.

The imagination of Detroit The built environment of Detroit today confounds conventional notions of what the urban should be: in the words of architect Julia Czerniak, it seems to be ‘formerly urban’.13 The city grew in the first half of the twentieth century to become a ‘galactic’ metropolis, occupying 138 square miles of land. Beyond the limits of the greater downtown area, which forms only 5 per cent of Detroit, the enormous area of land is filled with mainly low-​rise and low density residential neighbourhoods, punctuated by former areas of automobile production, now characterized by large-​scale abandoned and/​ or ruined industrial buildings, such as the iconic Packard Automotive Plant on the city’s east side (at 3.5 million square feet, it is one of the largest groups of abandoned buildings in the United States). Today, vast areas of the city beyond downtown appear to have reverted back to grassland, commonly referred to as Detroit’s version of midwestern prairie (Figure 5.1). A product of hundreds of thousands of residents simply abandoning their homes, many for new houses in the suburbs, this green landscape is much more disturbing than the rural environment from which it gets it name: for it is filled with the ruins of former homes, many of them built from timber. The 153

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay number of abandoned buildings in Detroit is always changing, but recent surveys like that being carried out by the consultancy Loveland:  Detroit (2012–​), have counted nearly 50,000 unoccupied homes, contributing by far the biggest percentage of the city’s 80,000 or so abandoned buildings, not to mention its 90,000 vacant lots.14 Some of these former homes have been burnt to the ground; others are in an advanced state of decay; the rest are everything in between. And in the midst of these ruins are many other houses that are still lived in and maintained by residents often passionately attached to their blighted neighbourhoods. Unlike many other cities, where abandoned houses occur in pockets, Detroit’s never seem to end. The abandonment, despite being very uneven across the city, reaches all the way out to the edges of the suburbs, eight miles from downtown. More shocking still is the abrupt transition from these residential ruins to the pristine, well-​maintained suburbs, often within the space of a few hundred yards and even, on Detroit’s far east side, a single brick wall that separates a majority black area with very high vacancy from the Grosse Pointe Park area, one of the richest and mainly white suburban areas in the whole of the United States. It is therefore unsurprising that so many have sought to explain Detroit’s perplexing and disturbing current ruinous condition. Historian Thomas Sugrue’s forensic examination The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996) focuses on the endemic racial discrimination, industrial disinvestment and suburban development that sowed the seeds of Detroit’s crisis from the 1940s onwards.15 Other accounts centre on the 1967 Detroit Race Riots/​ Rebellion that left 43 dead (mainly black residents killed by the police), thousands of buildings in ruins and prompted the white population to flee to the suburbs in ever larger numbers.16 Still others cite the prevalence of violent crime in the city in the 1980s, symbolized by the annual Halloween orgy of arson, Devil’s Night,17 while more recent accounts focus on the rapid depopulation of the city in the wake of the 2007–2008 financial crisis and the 250,000 residents who lost their homes or fled the city, resulting in Detroit’s population falling to its lowest ever level in 2010.18 Since 2008, Detroit has come under intense media scrutiny, particularly as its problems have now become more alarmingly evident in other cities in the United States. In 2009, Time magazine began a year-​long residency in Detroit, charting in a series of articles and photographs, the city’s ‘tragedy’ as well 154

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Urban futures, art and the imagination of Detroit as the steps it was taking towards rejuvenation,19 even as many other journalists visited the city to witness and photograph its abandonment, leading to a critical backlash against what native Detroiters perceived as lazy reportage that seized upon the sensationalist aspects of the city, most particularly its ruins, to both titillate and appall readers.20

Dystopian imaginaries The high level of media exposure that Detroit has experienced in recent years has largely drawn on long-​standing views of the city as a particularly extreme form of urban dystopia. As outlined by literary historian Laurence Goldstein, dark images of Detroit first emerged most powerfully in literature.21 Although Joyce Carol Oates’s 1969 novel them was one of the earliest works of fiction to reflect upon the violence and destruction of 1967, literature as far back as the 1930s, particularly Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932), pictured Detroit in hellish terms that recalled nineteenth-​century accounts of industrial Manchester (see ­Chapter 2).22 In the 1950s and 1960s, as Detroit’s automobile factories began to relocate to the suburbs and further afield, abandoned factories drew the attention of writers such as Philip Levine, whose first book of poems On the Edge (1963) included ‘An Abandoned Factory, Detroit’ –​a work that reflected on the loss of employment that such abandonment brutally enforced.23 Oates’s them, whilst only occasionally referring to abandoned buildings, was perhaps the first novel to present Detroit as what Goldstein termed ‘a ruined container of confused and empty lives’,24 where, from the 1950s onwards, the building of the freeways that linked city and suburbs destroyed poorer neighbourhoods and contributed to Detroit becoming, in Oates’s novel, ‘a kind of stretched-​out hole, a hole with a horizon’.25 Later, the crime novels of Elmore Leonard, particularly Primeval City (1980), emphasized Detroit’s reputation for violence (for many years during the 1970s and thereafter it claimed the dubious honour of the US’s murder capital), while more recent fictions, such as Joseph Williams’s Detroit Macabre (2011), have exploited the city’s abandonment as a setting for horror. Arguably more significant than literature in the portrayal of Detroit as dystopia is cinema. Detroit had featured sporadically in films as far back as the 1930s  –​in Paul Sloan’s Traveling Husbands (1931)  –​but the film 155

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay that first used Detroit as a dystopian setting was Paul Verhoeven’s ultra-​ violent Robocop (1987), remade into a much more tepid film in 2014. Set in Detroit in 2024, the original Robocop drew on contemporaneous anxieties about spiralling crime rates in the wake of the spread of crack cocaine in American cities in the 1980s, just as many other films from that decade reflected similar anxieties in other cities, particularly New York. Robocop created an imagined Detroit (it was mostly filmed in Pittsburgh and Houston) that was on the verge of financial and social collapse and where corporate powers were seeking to remake the city into a high-​end utopia by demolishing its poorer neighbourhoods. With Alex Proyas’s similarly stylized ruined city in The Crow (1994), this dystopian imagination of Detroit has had a lasting effect on the image of the city. Even as more recent documentaries, such as Requiem for Detroit? (Julien Temple, 2010) and Detropia (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2012), have brought out more clearly the realities of Detroit as a city lived in by both black and white residents, the dystopian imagination has continued to persist in other cinematic portrayals of the city.26 Detropia in particular focused attention on the dystopian nature of the city after the 2007–2008 financial crisis, including the municipal authority’s controversial ‘rightsizing’ policy which, had it been carried out, would have seen the relocation of residents in areas of high vacancy in Detroit to more populous parts of the city. From 2008 to 2015, the Michigan State authorities offered a 50 per cent tax incentive to film companies who shot in the state and, during this time, Detroit became a magnet for filmmakers of all kinds, its abandoned buildings featuring in Hollywood blockbusters such as the remake of Red Dawn (Dan Bradley, 2012), Transformers: Age of Extinction (Michael Bay, 2014)  and independent productions such as Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013), Lost River (Ryan Gosling, 2014)  and It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2015).27 Whilst the blockbusters have used Detroit’s ruins as stage sets for spectacular action sequences –​a strange case of life imitating art (or is it the reverse?) –​the independent films are no less guilty of ignoring the lived reality of Detroit, in particular by failing to represent the city’s overwhelmingly black population. Only It Follows, ostensibly a film about white suburban teenagers evading a sexually-​transmitted homicidal phantom, can be seen as calling attention to the widespread segregation between black communities in central Detroit and the wealthy 156

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Urban futures, art and the imagination of Detroit white-​dominated suburbs that encircle them. Critics have pointed to the film as an allegory of Detroit’s greater metropolitan area:  the ghoulish stalkers standing in for the ‘real repressed’ of the film, that is white fear of black Detroit that continues to be instilled in those who grow up in the predominately white suburban areas –​a fear which is explicitly referenced in the film.28 The ruins of Detroit, including the Packard Plant and abandoned homes, may be used in It Follows as stage sets for accentuating tension and horror, but in this film they are nevertheless explicitly connected to the city’s wider geographical and social contexts: indeed, the ‘It’ of the film’s title may very well be Detroit itself.

Utopian imaginaries Dystopian imaginaries of Detroit may have dominated fictional representations of the city, but within some of these are startling reversals of that trope. In Jim Jarmusch’s vampire fantasy Only Lovers Left Alive, a sepulchral Detroit forms the backdrop for the relationship between the two immortals (Adam and Eve) who anchor the film’s ambling narrative. At one point, whilst the vampire lovers are driving through the abandoned city at night, Eve says that in a future, hotter world, Detroit ‘will rise again … There’s water here. When the cities in the south are burning, this place will bloom’.29 Such an imaginary of a future blossoming of the city has formed the subtext of many photographic representations of Detroit in recent years, even those that are dominated by an obsession with the city’s abandoned buildings, the most high profile collections being Andrew Moore’s Detroit Disassembled and Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s The Ruins of Detroit, both of which were published in 2010.30 Indebted to the earlier photoessays of Camilo Vergara in the 1990s,31 these works generated a great deal of commentary, millions of similar images (mostly online), and the new term ‘ruin porn’. They are ostensibly collections of documentary photographs, yet many of the images are also invested with a strong romantic element that has been described as utopian.32 For example, in some of the extended captions that accompany the large-​format photographs in Ruins of Detroit, the tone is distinctly elegiac, emphasizing the city’s ruins as a ‘fantastic land, where one no longer knows whether reality slips into dream’.33 In this 157

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay melancholic time zone, almost completely devoid of people, Detroit’s ruins are pictured as ‘timeless islands’ that contain within them the germ of a utopian future that will emerge in an assumed post-​human world.34 As some commentators have argued, this view tends to naturalize Detroit’s abandonment,35 making it seem inevitable and not the result of human agency –​the agency that Thomas Sugrue paradoxically draws attention to in his introduction to The Ruins of Detroit.36 Just as Camilo Vergara had earlier proposed that Detroit’s abandoned skyscrapers be turned into an ‘American Acropolis’,37 so both Detroit Disassembled and The Ruins of Detroit conclude with images that reference Detroit’s motto: ‘We hope for better things; it will arise from the ashes’. Thus Moore’s collection finishes with his image of an ‘unlikely phoenix’ –​pheasants flying out from the vegetation that has reclaimed the city’s ruins,38 whereas Marchand and Meffre’s collection ends by comparing the ruins of Detroit with those of ancient Rome, Egypt and Greece.39 In these accounts, Detroit’s future utopia is an entropic one, the human city finally succumbing to emptiness only to be filled with nature and becoming a place of serene contemplation for the solitary ruin gazer, recalling Gustave Doré’s romantic image of a ruined London in the far distant future (see ­Chapter 1 and Figure 1.1). Understandably, native Detroiters tend to view these kinds of photographic collections with weary disdain, with John Patrick Leary arguing that, notwithstanding the obvious limitations of any still image, these works flag up a wider ‘failure to imagine what Detroit’s future –​our collective urban future –​holds for us all’.40 No wonder that more recent photographic work in the city, such as Corine Vermeulen’s walk-​in portrait studio (2015) and Julia Reyes Taubman’s Detroit: 138 Square Miles (2011) have emphasized, respectively, the city’s people and aspects of its urban fabric other than abandoned buildings.41 The utopian leanings implicit in some recent photographic representations of Detroit can also be tied into a long history of urban boosterism that has often bordered on the utopian, albeit in a very different way. Detroit’s Great Fire of 1805, which reduced the fledgling town to ashes, produced both the city’s hopeful motto and the earliest utopian vision of the city, namely, Judge Augustus B. Woodward’s honeycomb-​plan based on a grid with superimposed equilateral triangles –​a ‘radical embracing of the Euclidean grid’ that was as idealized as Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s 1791 plan 158

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Urban futures, art and the imagination of Detroit for Washington.42 Although only realized in a small area of Detroit’s downtown (around Grand Circus), Woodward’s plan foreshadowed the future history of the city in its close interlinking of utopian planning as a response to disaster. Detroit’s spectacular growth from 1920 to 1950 was accompanied by grandiose visions of the city’s possible futures:  from the inclusion of its ultra-​modern skyscrapers in Hugh Ferris’s The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929)43 to General Motors’ Futurama exhibit at the New  York World’s Fair in 1939, effectively a model of Detroit in a highway-​dominated future utopia.44 After the violence of 1967 and the exodus of white residents to the suburbs, black-​led civic leadership dominated by Mayor Coleman Young responded to depopulation and disinvestment with its own form of boosterism. This was evidenced in the construction of the Renaissance Center on Detroit’s riverfront (as the headquarters of General Motors) from 1971 to 1977;45 three enormous casinos and two new sports stadiums built in the late 1990s; and the creation of Federal Empowerment Zones in the city from 1994 onwards.46 In recent years, such boosterism has taken a different course, mainly focused on what is now termed the ‘greater downtown’ area encompassing just over seven square miles and including Midtown, Corktown, Eastern Market and Rivertown. The billionaire Dan Gilbert has led redevelopment downtown, buying up and renovating more than 60 properties and moving many of his employees into them (12,000 in total), as well as creating a new public space (Campus Martius) that has been described as a ‘bustling urban Eden’.47 At the same time, non-​profit led redevelopment is flourishing in the city, itself grounded in another form of utopian thinking that has a longer history than Gilbert’s corporate-​led investment. Thus, the founder of the Boggs Center on Detroit’s east side in 1995, Grace Lee Boggs, has argued that the city’s on-​going crisis has created an unprecedented opportunity to foster ‘a whole new way of looking at life in the future’, something that is mirrored in the hundreds of small urban farms and gardens that have sprung up in the city’s vacant lots (see below).48 As outlined by Rebecca Solnit, the devolution of Detroit’s civic power, which accelerated after the city’s bankruptcy in 2013, to grass roots organizations has led to a vision of the city as a kind of arcadia, a place that, because it has seen the end of exploitative capitalist production, can now turn into something else, 159

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay a city where a ‘a complex new human and natural ecology’ can come into being.49 As will become evident below, the many artists that have recently settled in Detroit have tended to embrace the city as a form of utopia –​a place of unprecedented opportunity, even a ‘blank canvas’ as I  overheard one artist say during my visit to Detroit, and also expressed by artists in the film Detropia (2012) as well as in recent accounts of art in the city.50 This notion of the city as a gigantic canvas for artistic experimentation is, of course, deeply problematic. Jerry Herron has argued that it is predicated on an attitude that ‘renders the historical spaces of the city unreadable –​as if [they have] no claim on our sense of responsibility or attention’.51 The fact that most of the artists who have recently settled in Detroit are white only adds to this problem of historical amnesia, for it immediately racializes it, despite those artists’ often strenuous attempts to mitigate this dynamic. The idea of Detroit as a blank canvas for artists has been fed by the photographic collections discussed above, resulting in practices that share with those photographs an interest and passion for Detroit’s crumbling infrastructure, empty houses and abandoned factories  –​an interest that is both selective and often reductive.52 Yet, as will become evident in my discussion below, the art that is being produced in Detroit is anything but monolithic, mainly on account of it being grounded in praxis rather than simply image-​making. For practices cannot help but be centred on processes rather than final products, engaging those processes in the realities of the lived rather than emptied out spaces of Detroit. In drawing out the range of these practices –​cutting/​pasting, covering, melding and mouldering –​I want to draw attention to a different kind of time working itself out in the ruins of Detroit, one that situates these practices in the lived-​in city. As will become clear, that lived-​in city is far more complex than that conjured up in the dystopian or utopian imaginaries of Detroit.

Cutting/pasting Cities are regularly subject to forms of cutting, whether cuts that destroy the built environment, as demolitions, or ones that remodel it, from the building of new roads to the retrofitting of old buildings. Cuttings of a destructive nature have been central to the formation of Detroit’s urban 160

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Urban futures, art and the imagination of Detroit landscape today. These have been the result of both longstanding structural issues, for example, highway construction in the 1950s, and also on-​going attempts to remove urban blight, mainly through an aggressive demolition policy in relation to vacant homes, under the aegis of Detroit’s mayors, whether Dennis Archer in the early 1990s or, more recently, Dave Bing (2009–​2013) and his successor Mike Duggan (2014–​).53 Indeed, demolitions have resulted in some residential areas of Detroit being almost completely erased, the I-​94 Industrial Park being one notable example (Figure 5.1). Formerly part of the St Cyril neighbourhood on Detroit’s northeast side bordering Hamtramck, the 189 acre I-​94 Industrial Park was formed in 1999 by Detroit’s city authorities when they demolished the last remaining houses in the neighbourhood (one that had already seen most of its homes abandoned and gradually removed). The vaunted economic rebirth of the area never happened: only one factory was built and, despite plans by its new owner to turn it into a storage facility for car parts, it remains empty. The only remnants of the neighbourhood are forlorn telegraph poles, piles of rubble and an assortment of fragmented objects: pieces of a vinyl disc, half an automobile registration plate and small areas of plants that have seeded from the gardens of the former houses.54 This site of almost total erasure has become prized by some Detroit-​ based artists, with the photographer Corine Vermeulen and artist Scott Hocking both renaming it the ‘Zone’. Just like Chernobyl (see ­Chapter 4), this abandoned area of Detroit has come to be associated by some with Tarkovsky’s mystical zone in Stalker. Vermeulen has described the I-​94 Industrial Park as a magical ‘autonomous zone’,55 where the sense of overwhelming erasure required the imagination of ‘something completely different’ from the existing reality; while Hocking’s photographs draw attention to the wildness and natural fecundity of this formerly urban area.56 Such imaginative responses to emptiness might seem unusual in their positivity, but they have recently become part of mainstream thinking about Detroit’s future development. Indeed, the notion of cutting formed the focus of the ‘rightsizing’ policy laid out in the 2012 Detroit Strategic Framework Plan, Detroit Future City, which was the result of years of community consultation by the non-​profit, quasi-​civic Detroit Works Project. With dozens of maps and other illustrative material, Detroit Future City sets out a vision for the city that, drawing on the example of the 2002 publication Stalking 161

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay Detroit (which seemed truly radical at that time),57 fully accepts Detroit’s declining population and vast areas of vacant land as an asset that, if properly managed, could transform the city’s urban landscape for the better over the next 40 years.58 Through a process of radical cuts –​the demolition of tens of thousands of vacant homes all across the city and the transformation of high-​vacancy areas into farms, parks, wetland or even ‘carbon forest’ –​ Detroit Future City presents its vision of the city in 2050, one that has erased much of the built environment as it is today, but through the lens of a positive vision of a world-​leading green city, with many of its new ‘natural’ spaces being only lightly managed (if at all).59 As revealed in the film Detropia, this policy has been fiercely contested by residents in areas of the city with high levels of vacancy, many of whom have recently seen their water supplies cut off as the municipal authorities seek to make drastic cutbacks in the wake of the 2013 bankruptcy proceedings. No matter how positively this future cutting of Detroit is presented, it is grounded in a fundamentally despairing vision of the city’s ruins, which would have them erased seemingly at any social cost.60 By contrast, cutting as a creative process has characterized how some artists have re-​appropriated a few of Detroit’s 50,000 or so abandoned homes by radically transforming their structures through cuts of many kinds. These include Jane Orr and Krysta Kearney’s (Cupcake Girls) installation of concrete cupcakes and other artificial confectionary in an abandoned pastry shop on Detroit’s east side;61 and artists’ collective Five Fellows’ project Full Scale, which saw them realize five different design concepts –​a new staircase, a sensory room, an adjustable door, weather-​sensitive walls and roof, and a skylight cut diagonally across one of the upstairs rooms –​ in an abandoned house in the neighbourhood bordering the north side of Hamtramck.62 In the same area are six additional properties purchased by Design 99 (architect Gina Reichert and artist Mitch Cope) and their organization Power House Productions, formed in 2009.63 With many of the these properties acquired for as little as $500 (the lowest auction price for a city-​owned abandoned house in Detroit), Reichert and Cope turned one property in 2008 into an ‘off-​grid’ building with its own wind-​turbine and solar panels, which acts as an example of self-​sufficiency to the local neighbourhood.64 The other houses were transformed by visiting artists (at the invitation of Power House) into art performance, installation and 162

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Figure  5.2 House in northeastern Detroit transformed by the artist Monica Canilao, 2015.

residency spaces and include:  Monica Canilao’s project that created an emporium for salvaged objects  –​a gallery of found materials that spills out of the house’s interior spaces (Figure 5.2);65 Ben Wolf ’s Dormer House, which incorporates decaying wood, peeling paint and pieces of burned-​ out structures into an abandoned house;66 and Swoon’s murals of the neighbourhood’s largely Bangladeshi population on the walls of the basement of another house, viewed through a large cut in the ground floor of the building.67 In other areas of Detroit, abandoned homes have also 163

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Figure 5.3  The Imagination Station, Corktown, 2015, created by the artist Catie Newell in 2011.

been acquired by artists, including the Imagination Station in Corktown (Figure  5.3), a burnt-​out former home directly opposite the iconic ruin that is Michigan Central Station. This property was salvaged by the artist Catie Newell and carefully reassembled to form her installation Salvaged Landscape (2011).68 The house has since become a non-​profit organization dedicated to the renewal of the local neighbourhood, hosting blight and debris cleaning parties, sculptural works, installations, performances and other events.69 Many of the artists involved in these projects  –​the majority coming from outside Detroit –​have stressed the social value of their work, particularly in the local communities in which they are located –​Swoon’s murals of local residents being a notable example. Yet, despite the works engaging directly with the processes of transforming abandoned houses into art and varying periods of residency in the city, there is a sense that some issues are being sidelined in favour of others. In one conversation with a Detroit resident and tour guide, I was told that often when abandoned properties are purchased, their former owners are still living in them because a great deal of the abandonment is a consequence of repossession, which often takes 164

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Urban futures, art and the imagination of Detroit years to work itself out.70 Thus, many buyers are forced to evict former homeowners before any renovations can be carried out. Whilst I cannot say that any of the properties acquired by artists in Detroit have involved such evictions, it is clear that in many of these projects, there is a lack of engagement with the lived-​histories of the houses that are requisitioned, painful and problematic as those histories may be. Responding to the accusation that creatives are exploiting Detroit in their lack of concern for its past and future, Monica Canilao countered this by arguing that she is ‘interested in making art that’s alive with history’ without actually specifying what (and whose) history that might be.71 The fact that the majority of these artists are white outsiders is not necessarily problematic in itself, but it clearly flags up issues that should be addressed more fully in their work. As the Cupcake Girls discovered, transforming abandoned properties through art is not necessarily appreciated by the black residents in whose neighbourhoods those properties are often situated; the building they salvaged being burnt down, like so many other abandoned houses in Detroit, the night after the first installation was completed. Admitting that they ‘didn’t fully understand the neighborhood [they] were in’ or its past history, their attempt at renovation through cutting was displaced by Detroit’s most endemic and destructive form of cutting in the city’s history: arson.72 Fire has also contributed to the evolution of one of Detroit’s best-​known artworks, the Heidelberg Project, created by Tyree Guyton from 1986 onwards.73 Spanning an entire block in one of the most deprived black-​ majority neighbourhoods on Detroit’s east side, the project was started by Guyton to both challenge the destruction of the area in which he grew up and still lives and also to call attention to and provoke debates about issues of race, diversity and the failure of the city authorities to tackle endemic crime and abandonment in this part of Detroit. Comprised of a mixture of decorated abandoned and occupied houses and, spilling out into vacant lots, a cornucopia of found objects and urban detritus, Guyton’s work engages all of the processes described in this chapter (and I return to it in the sections below). It is also intimately tied up with the many attempts to ‘cut’ the project, either by the demolitions carried out in 1989 and 1991 (under Mayor Coleman Young), and again in 1999 (under Dennis Archer), or a spate of more recent arson attacks on the work in 2013 and 2014 that resulted in the destruction of several of the decorated houses.74 165

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay Although now recognized as an internationally-​important art work and the second most visited tourist attraction in Detroit after the Detroit Institute of Arts,75 the Heidelberg Project is clearly problematic for some, particularly those who live nearby (some of whom may have been responsible for the recent arson attacks).76 As revealed in the way Guyton has responded to the attempts to destroy his work, the Heidelberg unashamedly and aggressively focuses attention on the devastation and violence that has characterized the recent history of Detroit and particularly the city’s east side. For example, on top of the charred remains of one of the houses destroyed by arson, Guyton’s has piled found objects, the majority of which are children’s toys, while in the brick basement of a second fire-​ravaged house, he has filled a wire cage with blue-​painted shoes (Figure 5.4). These unsettling objects, which recur throughout the Heidelberg Project, are both references to Guyton’s own impoverished childhood (his mother could not afford to buy shoes for him and his nine siblings),77 the plight of the city’s dispossessed, and also the violation of human lives through arson, including children that have died in such attacks. The fact that Guyton has defiantly melded these objects with the charred remains of other parts of his project demonstrates his insistence that the Heidelberg is a process rather than a static art installation, one that incorporates the negative ‘cuts’ into itself. Indeed, unlike many other artworks created in Detroit, the Heidelberg subsumes the question of race into one about power, demonstrated in the project’s resistance to the power of Detroit’s black-​led civil authorities and its continuation, despite the destructive and deliberate fires. Cuttings in Detroit that focus on abandoned houses tend to flag up questions of race and power; with processes that have cut through the city’s public spaces, these questions centre more on the aesthetics of architecture and structural reworking of infrastructure. One of the most extraordinary examples of the former is the Michigan Theater in the downtown area, which, in 1977, was converted from a cinema/​concert venue/​nightclub into a car park. When the proposal was first suggested, architectural studies showed that demolishing the theatre would compromise the structural soundness of the adjoining office building (whose tenants wanted the car park to be built). Thus, in an ingenious solution, parts of the ornate baroque-​style theatre (constructed in 1926) were kept, the three-​level steel and concrete framework for the car park literally cut into the theatre space, 166

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Figure  5.4  Installation in one of the houses destroyed by arson in 2014 at the Heidelberg Project, Detroit, 2015.

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Figure 5.5  Structural cut in the Michigan Theater in downtown Detroit, 2015.

leaving untouched parts of its ornamental interior, including the four-​ storey lobby ceiling and columns, the proscenium arch and part of the balcony seating area (Figure 5.5).78 Although the remaining part of the theatre is now in an advanced state of decay, this structural cut remains a unique example of the creative incorporation of an older building into a new one without displacing the former. Of course, both theatre and car park were defined by the power of the automobile: the theatre by the rise of the car-​ making industry that flooded Detroit with wealth; the car park, the opportunistic invasion of the car into a formerly human-​centred space.79 Yet, at certain times, the space is transformed once again into a place of communal expression, whether as the location of freestyle rapping in the 2002 film 8 Mile, or, annually in early April, on the day of the opening game of the baseball season (when I visited the site), when the car park becomes a place for impromptu parties and ball games.80 On a much larger scale than the Michigan Theater, the Dequindre Cut is a more recent example of the creative structural reworking of a ruined landscape in Detroit. Opened to the public in May 2009, this 1.35 mile greenway, including a 20 foot-​wide pedestrian and bicycle path, was built on the former Grand Trunk Railroad line, which had been abandoned and 168

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Figure 5.6  One of the many concrete abutments preserved in the Dequindre Cut, Detroit, 2015.

overgrown for many decades.81 With a mile-​long northward extension of the greenway opened in April 2016, the Dequindre Cut is remarkable for the ways in which it incorporates the ruins of the former railway into itself, principally the concrete abutments of the many bridges that used to cross the railway (Figure  5.6). With most of these covered in graffiti and now weathered into almost natural rock-​like formations, the ‘cut’ of the greenway does much more than simply clean up the former ruins of the railway line; rather, it represents an attempt to include some of those ruins within the new environment and embrace what would have previously been regarded as the defacing of those ruins with tags and other forms of graffiti. Indeed, the sponsors of the greenway, the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy (with generous funding from the Kresge Foundation) even engaged local graffiti artists to add new work to those ruins and to the new structures created,82 resulting in what poet Barrett Watten has described as a ‘practical case of refunctioning urban negativity’ that he compared with the work of the radical architect Lebbeus Woods.83 As Woods has argued in his own engagements with damaged buildings, ruins ‘suggest new forms of thought and comprehension’ that should be fully accepted and integrated into any 169

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay attempts to restore those ruins or build anew on top of them.84 In Woods’s speculative architecture, such as his projects for the rebuilding of Sarajevo after the Bosnian War (1992–​1995), new buildings evolve out of the ruins of the old, leading to an architecture of jagged fragments where nothing is ever discarded.85 Although aesthetically quite different from Woods’s work, the Dequindre Cut uses the same method of cutting that is also a form of salvage. Just like the Heidelberg Project, the Dequindre Cut represents a radically new way of engaging with the destructive forces that have made Detroit what it is, one that opens up very different possibilities from the conventional imagination of Detroit with regard to the city’s future. In this project, the slowed-​down time of Detroit’s ruins has not been replaced or erased; rather it has been cut into the new, with both old and new now melded in such a way as to create a radically new configuration of time for the future.

Covering The preservation of the graffiti in the Dequindre Cut project embodies a new approach to what is arguably the most distinctive aspect of Detroit’s built environment, namely the brightly-​coloured pictures and words that cover its abandoned buildings and walls, making the city one of the world centres for street art. Starting in the 1980s with black and silver tags that still remain on some of Detroit’s buildings, the city’s street art has evolved into a bewildering array of themes and variations. These include figurative and abstract works that are either commissioned or painted illegally (the latter usually tolerated by the civic government and residents); elaborate coloured tags that often use complex geometric patterns; politically-​ charged writing or stencils that address topical issues; and murals that relate to the cultures and histories of individual ethnic groups within the city.86 More than any other form of creative practice in Detroit today, street art defines the city as a ‘canvas’, its abandoned buildings offering virtually unlimited space for artists to experiment, coupled with a relatively tolerant civic authority (or one with such limited resources that it cannot but be otherwise). The recent celebration of Detroit’s street art is in line with a much wider reassessment of the value of graffiti in urban settings, encapsulated in the world’s first major public exhibition of street art at Tate Modern 170

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Urban futures, art and the imagination of Detroit in London in 2008.87 Just as Detroit’s creative scene has been credited with reviving the city, so its street art has been celebrated as ‘a visual display of hope’.88 Such an attitude has been bolstered by the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art in the midtown area. Opened in 2006 in a former automobile dealership building, the museum includes a giant tag on one of its walls. In 2013, the museum invited a group of artists to create a series of new murals depicting significant events in the history of Detroit.89 Drawing inspiration from the 80th anniversary (in 2013) of the creation of the city’s most famous murals –​Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals in the Detroit Institute of Arts –​the museum’s director, Elysia Borowy-​ Reeder, regarded the new works as re-​establishing and fortifying ‘the history of the mural in Detroit’ and ‘encourag[ing] the community to reflect on the present state of murals, and shape the future direction’.90 There is no doubt that murals in Detroit provide the most visible evidence of the creative processes that are currently transforming parts of the city. Some of the more recent murals are sponsored works:  for example, since 2012, the Detroit Beautification Project has paid for the creation of 78 murals around the city by artists from all over the world, including a series of works in the Eastern Market area adjoining downtown (Figure  5.7).91 With a general emphasis on playful subjects –​cartoon characters, stylized

Figure 5.7  Mural in Detroit’s Eastern Market district, April 2015.

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Figure 5.8  Mural in Hamtramck, an ethnically-​diverse city within Detroit, 2015.

figures, and consumer products all rendered in a multitude of colours –​ these murals stress generalized exuberance over specific references to Detroit’s history, unsurprising given that most of the artists involved come from outside the city. More reflective of localized concerns are some murals found in ethnically diverse areas of the city, including southwest Detroit, where works (some of which were created as early as the 1970s) draw explicitly on the Hispanic character of the area, as well as the example of Rivera’s murals. Works in Hamtramck –​a tiny city within Detroit –​ range from pieces inspired by the longstanding Polish culture of the city to its more recent wave of immigrants, including a significant Yemeni population (Figure 5.8). If these murals draw attention to Detroit’s multi-​ethnic communities and away from the conventional black/​white dichotomy of the city, then others function as different kinds of ‘locators’. Some murals, usually large-​scale ones, offer distinctive forms of ‘welcome’ to different areas of the city, while others serve to identify community-​based projects as well as beautifying former ruins.92 Many of the city’s murals are associated with projects that seek to engender change in Detroit, that is, to set a direction for its future development. These may be generalized attempts to beautify abandoned buildings, as in 172

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Urban futures, art and the imagination of Detroit the murals that were commissioned by the Detroit Beautification Project, or part of community-​based projects, such as urban farming initiatives. For example, Halima Cassell’s murals in the downtown urban farm/​park Layfayette Gardens grew out of her role as director of the Detroit Mural Factory, an initiative that teaches youth painting through live community mural projects and which has resulted in fifteen works created by more than 600 young people.93 The murals in Layfayette Gardens form part of a wider assemblage of community-​based art projects on the site, including the Peace Mosaic, created in July 2013 by a diverse range of volunteers and representing ‘the coming together of communities and individuals to create beauty in Detroit’, and sculptures/​bird boxes created by artist Andy Malone and ten children at the Grace Lee Boggs School on the city’s predominately African-​American east side.94 Another example is the Alley Project in Detroit’s Hispanic-​dominated southwest, where photographer Erik Howard set up a project that encouraged young local artists to paint 25 garages in what was once a refuse-​strewn alley at the back of two rows of houses.95 Many of the resulting artworks were inspired by Hispanic themes, such as the annual Day of the Dead festival, with several using this event to draw attention to personal memories of deceased relatives. Also addressing the theme of memory, artist Kevin Joy has begun a ‘found photo project’ in Detroit’s north end, aiming to link found photographs in abandoned homes with their former residents so that Joy can paint their portraits on the houses they once lived in.96 These community-​conscious projects are all linked by a respect for Detroit’s lived history in all its ethnically-​diverse contexts; in their coverings they aim to bring those histories into the visual culture of the future city. Yet these works and the attitudes they promote are not reflective of all approaches to street art in Detroit. The African-​American artist Sintex has generated a great deal of controversy over his attitude towards white artists from outside the city who have created works in black-​dominated neighbourhoods, such as those through which the Grand River Creative Corridor runs. Designated as an area in which graffiti artists can legally create work, this mile-​long stretch of one of Detroit’s principal arterial roads has led to many murals being painted on abandoned buildings.97 As documented by the journalist Steve Neavling, Sintex took offence towards the works created in this area by white outsiders, overpainting 173

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Figure  5.9 Mural by Revok overpainted by Sintex in Detroit’s Grand River Creative Corridor, 2015.

a large mural that honoured Vincent Chin, a Chinese-​American beaten to death by two white men in Highland Park in 1982, as well as another mural by Los Angeles artist Revok, who was working as part of the Detroit Beautification Project (Figure 5.9).98 Sintex replaced these ‘white’ murals with images of prominent black figures: in the former case, Vincent Chin now reappearing alongside Malice Green (a Detroit resident who died in police custody in 1992) and Aiyana Jones (a seven-​year old girl shot and killed by Detroit police in 2010) under the banner ‘Our Land till Death’. In his overpainting of the Revok mural, Rosa Parks appears in the guise of Sintex himself. Accompanied by an angry rhetoric, Sintex’s actions have stoked the underlying racial tensions that are so easily glossed over in many other community-​based works. His murals may be overly aggressive, but they nevertheless flag up a legitimate grievance, namely, that much of the commissioned and therefore paid work goes to white outsiders rather than Detroit’s resident black artists. And those non-​resident artists have responded in kind: by daubing their tags over Sintex’s work, such as his ‘Art of War’ mural, also in the Grand River Creative Corridor. No less concerned with the politics of race in Detroit is the Heidelberg Project and also Olayami Dabls’s African Bead Museum and open-​air 174

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Urban futures, art and the imagination of Detroit installations in the city’s north end. Coverings in the Heidelberg Project are dominated by brightly-​coloured polka dots painted on the pavements, roads and houses within the neighbourhood in which the project is situated. One of the first elements to be created by Guyton in the late-​1980s, these dots, according to the artist, represent the circle of life –​sun, moon and universe  –​as well as symbolizing human diversity.99 As markers of reconciliation, both racial and cosmic, and joyfully exuberant, the polka dots contrast sharply with the project’s more disturbing elements, and they have the effect of softening the traumatic memories evoked by the charred remains of some of the houses (as seen in Figure 5.4). The dots have also spread beyond the confines of the project itself, appearing elsewhere in the city, such as in the ruins of the Packard Plant.100 They also feature in a moment of transcendent joy for two of the protagonists in the post-​ apocalyptic graphic novel Sword of my Mouth (2011), a fantasy work with some clever satirical takes on race relations in the city that sees Detroit occupied by urban farmers in a post-​rapture world.101 Equally cosmically-​inspired are the coverings that adorn the buildings of Olayami Dabls’s African Bead Museum, founded in 1985 by the artist and his wife.102 Like the Heidelberg, this project has re-​appropriated Detroit’s urban detritus for artistic ends, ones that are also very much focused on the city’s African-​American history, albeit conceived in a much more celebratory way than some of Guyton’s work. Both the painted and collage works that cover several of the buildings on the museum’s site reference African culture in general, with the recent African Language Wall including the scripts of all known languages on that continent (Figure 5.10). On my visit to the site in early April 2015, Dabls emphasized the cosmic symbolism of the Language Wall, the hundreds of rusted nails embedded in its surface symbolic of the amount of iron contained in each individual human body, namely around one nail’s worth.103 Even though his work is grounded in his racial identity as an African-​American artist, Dabls’s own statements about his work do not just embrace a particular segment of the community; rather the work reaches out to make its visitors feel more comfortable in their surroundings and is enervated by an educational zeal.104 In many ways, Dabls’s work sees blackness as a privilege and responsibility rather than a state of victimhood in the face of white prejudice. 175

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Figure  5.10  The African Language Wall, part of Olayami Dabls’s African Bead Museum, Detroit, 2015.

Melding Melding –​the fusion of one substance with another –​is a theme in many of Detroit’s recent murals, perhaps the most noticeable and certainly the largest being Kobie Solomon’s work Chimera, which covers 8,750 feet of one of the walls of the gigantic Russell Industrial Center, a former automobile factory in northeast Detroit that now houses over 100 artists’ studios.105 Dominated by a lion that is fused with machine and automobile parts and other objects, the work reflects similar melds seen in other murals across the city, particularly in the Eastern Market area, where images of food merge with machine and body/​animal parts, cartoon-​like figures and geometric patterns (Figure  5.7). Indeed, the notion of Detroit as a place that fuses unexpected elements has become central to how the city is now being represented and how it will likely evolve in the future. As Rebecca Solnit has argued, Detroit ‘will be the first of many cities forced to become altogether something else’, although precisely what that ‘something else’ is, is unsurprisingly very difficult to articulate.106 Some, like the journalist John Gallagher, have drawn attention to the melding of the urban and rural in Detroit’s hundreds of small urban farms that will, if we subscribe 176

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Urban futures, art and the imagination of Detroit to the vision laid out in Detroit Future City, eventually turn Detroit into a truly green city, its vacant land transformed into a new kind of nature that is neither urban nor rural.107 Yet the nature that has taken over large parts of Detroit is subject to a variety of contesting interpretations. Some regard it as a sign and way of explaining the city’s decline; others, as the portent of a different kind of rebirth, one that subsumes or even excludes the human as suggested by so many photographic images of Detroit’s ruins. Nature is also seen by some as breaking down the distinction between public and private land and providing a potentially useful and shared resource.108 Such conceptions, conflicting as they may be, nevertheless tend to posit nature in Detroit as something separate, even antagonistic, to the urban. Such a binary way of thinking is inherently limited; rather, nature in Detroit should be seen as a meld, a view that rejects notions of nature reclaiming the city, focusing instead on how it is forging new connections: between the natural and the urban and between the diverse communities that are working with this meld.109 Perhaps the most distinctive example of such melding in Detroit is its urban farms. Usually making use of vacant lots created by the demolition of houses, the city’s hundreds of small-​scale urban farms cover barely one of Detroit’s 40 square miles of vacant land. Yet bold claims have been made about the potential of urban farming to transform the city’s future, with advocates arguing that it could free Detroit from corporate greed by creating an entirely self-​sufficient food economy.110 Whilst some have connected this recent surge in local food production with a long history of urban farming in Detroit –​from the so-​called Pingree Potato Patches created during the economic depression of the 1890s to Henry Ford’s vision in the 1920s and 1930s of a post-​urban world in which workers would also farm part-​time  –​others have incorporated urban farming directly into their art practices in the city.111 For example, the artist Kate Daughdrill, in collaboration with Patrick Costello, has turned the produce she has grown at Burnside Farm (the site Daughdrill owns in the same neighbourhood as the Power House) into the installation From Here to There that featured in the inaugural Art-​X exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in April 2015.112 By sorting foodstuffs into their respective colours, the artist aestheticized these products, before undercutting this new status by creating dishes from the food and serving it to the gallery’s visitors. The 177

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay exhibit culminated in what Daughdrill has described as ‘a value-​making ceremony’, which brought together 150 Detroit residents to discuss and celebrate ‘what we truly value and how it is embodied in our daily lives’.113 In a different vein, other art works associated with urban farms, such as Halima Cassell’s murals in the downtown urban farm/​park Layfayette Gardens and Katie Yamasaki’s piece for the Boggs Educational Center on Detroit’s east side, draw attention to the social contexts of food production that often bring black and white residents together. So, many urban farms give their produce away to local black residents who live in parts of Detroit that are deemed ‘food deserts’ –​areas where a paucity of supermarkets coupled with the lack of decent public transportation condemn residents to buying whatever food is obtainable from limited outlets.114 Other urban farms invest in the city by selling their produce at Detroit’s Eastern Market, where thousands of people come every week to shop on Saturday mornings. The majority of Detroit’s urban farms draw in dozens, even hundreds, of volunteers, many of whom are young white suburbanites who want to reconnect with the city that their parents and grandparents abandoned. In drawing out these multiple connections, urban farms in Detroit are contributing much towards a new form of urban meld, one that is posited on progressive, even utopian, social ideals and which have fiercely resisted commercialization.115 Yet, they are not without their critics, with some arguing that urban farms are part of the strategic ‘greening’ vision of organizations such as Detroit Future City to dispossess residents in high vacancy areas of the city in order to facilitate commercial property investment. In this context, ‘green’ infrastructure is not viewed as a way of empowering local populations but rather of displacing their interests in favour of those of big business.116 How the future of urban farming in Detroit pans out will depend on how effectively it is able to remain firmly rooted in the communities it currently serves. In addition to small-​scale urban farms, some of Detroit’s vacant lots are also being transformed into parks that meld recreation and art. In many areas of the city, formerly overgrown sites have now been fashioned into open spaces that use salvaged materials to engage different forms of play. These include stacked automobile tyres (perhaps the most ubiquitous form of detritus in Detroit), former waste materials fashioned into junk sculptures in Lincoln Park, which was created next to a recycling centre (Figure  5.11) and bicycles that have been turned into a sculpture 178

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Figure 5.11  Sculpture created from recycled waste in Detroit’s Lincoln Park, 2015.

in a vacant lot in north Corktown. These works, and many others scattered throughout the city, use salvage as a creative tool, one that invests detritus with positive meanings that go beyond the conventions of recycling, where waste is turned back into products that are useful and usually profitable. Such junk art has a long history, reaching back to the work of the Surrealists in the 1920s; yet, in Detroit, it has a focus in the work of the Cass Corridor movement in the 1970s, when a group of artists, including Robert Sestok,117 began making art out of urban detritus and found objects in order to mirror and critique the city’s increasing abandonment by white residents and disinvestment by the automobile industry.118 Salvage in Detroit also extends to entire buildings, whether in its conventional form as refurbishment of formerly abandoned buildings for commercial and residential purposes (mostly centred on the downtown and midtown areas), or, more unusually, the melding of buildings with art practice, such as the abandoned homes transformed by Power House Productions and Five Fellows (see above). Perhaps the most notable and certainly the largest example of a building being melded with art is the Russell Industrial Center, a former automobile factory designed by Albert Kahn that now houses over 100 artists’ studios. In this vast building, the meld between 179

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay ruination and creativity is strikingly rendered, with the studios filling the spaces of former car production, the patina of industry still visible in the soot-​streaked windows and industrial-​sized elevators, as well as in large sections of the complex that are still vacant. Just as many of these melds of ruins and art draw attention to the potentially transformative nature of Detroit’s abandoned sites, objects and buildings, so others, particularly the Heidelberg Project and the African Bead Museum, use melding to flag up specific social, historical and cosmic concerns. Salvage is critical to Guyton’s work and in the Heidelberg Project salvaged materials are often melded with buildings, whether in works that have been destroyed such as the Baby Doll House (which fused dismembered, naked dolls with an abandoned house to draw attention to issues such as the broken innocence of children, child abuse, abortion and prostitution) or new works springing from the charred remains of old ones (Figure  5.4).119 These material melds in the Heidelberg Project are also complemented by social ones: Guyton has always viewed the Project as being centred on community outreach and empowerment of residents through art making.120 In addition to the project’s involvement in local schools, since 2005, the Heidelberg has also hosted an annual summer camp for young people to teach them how to make clay tiles and recycle material by creating installations with found objects.121 Both the materiality of the Heidelberg Project and its social outreach programmes use melding as a critical tool, both to invest in disempowered residents (and their futures) and also to offer an alternative to those who feel that the physical remnants of the city cannot exist alongside the new. In a similar vein, Dabls’s African Bead Museum uses melding to offer a transformative vision of waste and detritus. Mixed with painted figurative and abstract figures, these melded materials create a dazzling kaleidoscopic effect to celebrate African-​American history and culture and to reflect the cosmic vision of the artist (Figure 5.10). In this project, melded materials –​nails, fragments of mirrored glass, rusted metal, crushed cans, and painted wood –​suggest meanings beyond their mere materiality, ones that may not be rooted in local social concerns but which are nevertheless invested with a conciliatory vision that achieves it power through an emphasis on transcendence. In the context of such an enormous variety of art in Detroit engaging with the practice of melding, the work of Scott Hocking stands out 180

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Figure 5.12 Scott Hocking, Ziggurat and Fisher Body 21 (2007–​2009), photographed by Hocking in 2009. Reproduced by permission of the artist.

as offering a distinctive practice of engaging with the ruins of the city.122 Besides his work as a photographer, Hocking is perhaps best known for his site-​specific installations in some of Detroit’s iconic ruined buildings, including Garden of the Gods (2009–​2011), in which he installed twelve television sets on the tops of concrete columns in the ruins of the Packard Plant;123 Ziggurat and Fisher Body 21 (2007–​2009; Figure 5.12), an installation in the Fisher Body Plant which used 6,201 of the building’s wooden floor tiles to create a striking pyramid;124 and The Egg and Michigan Central Train Station (2007–​2013), in which Hocking crafted an egg-​shaped sculpture out of shards of marble from the vandalized walls of this iconic building.125 Hocking has spent months, even years, working inside Detroit’s abandoned buildings to painstakingly create these striking sculptural installations. Although critics, such as Dora Apel, regard Hocking’s method as a ‘dehistoricizing approach’ that ‘removes the city from its historical specificity’, there is a sense in which he is simply drawing attention to different kinds of historical time in the city than those that have preoccupied most commentators on Detroit, namely its recent history.126 181

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay As Hocking explained to me on my final afternoon in the city, the melding that these sculptures enacts is not principally concerned with image or object making, despite the abundance of photographs of his works; rather they highlight Detroit’s ruination as a process that resists conventional attempts to represent it, particularly in photography.127 As a lifelong resident of Detroit –​his formative years spent on the western fringes of the city in the 1980s and 1990s –​Hocking has witnessed first-​hand the gradual abandonment of the city; its industrial buildings usually going through a process of ruination that begins with the abrupt end of industrial work, the taking over of the building by ever-​smaller companies (usually connected with storage) and ending with the building being entirely stripped of its valuable materials by scrappers. Thus, as Hocking emphasized, the melds he has created with his installations reflect upon the gradations of ruination (what he terms ‘an organic cycle’) and the potential for this process to be intervened in but not reversed. In addition, out of his process-​ orientated work comes a concern with history and time, particularly the longer picture that reaches back into the history of the Detroit area before it was first ceded to Europeans at the end of the eighteenth century, that is, when it was a Native American territory.128 In contrast with Guyton’s Heidelberg Project, Hocking wants his installations and images of them to ‘convey something more universal’, that is, the long cycles of creation and destruction that have defined the history of cities in the modern period and long before.129

Mouldering Many of Hocking’s installations enter into the same processes of construction and destruction that have defined his work as an artist. So, the site-​specific works installed in the Packard Plant, the Fisher Body building and Michigan Central Station have all themselves become ruins:  the television sets of Garden of the Gods were destroyed as the Packard Plant continues to collapse; Ziggurat vanished when the Fisher Body’s floor tiles were removed by contractors; and The Egg has probably experienced a similar fate as security has significantly increased in recent years at the former Michigan Central Station. Hocking does not mourn the destruction of his works; rather he regards their disappearance as enhancing their mystery, 182

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Urban futures, art and the imagination of Detroit the installations in effect becoming invested with the kind of mythic time that Hocking sees in the ancient forms that inspired the works.130 Mythic time is, of course, strongly related to a romanticization of ruination that has been associated with photographic work that places Detroit’s ruins out of time, or at least out of historical lived time.131 Yet, in Hocking’s case, there is a sense that his own myth-​making has developed out of an historically-​ grounded experience of Detroit and its ruins. His work is not an attempt to ‘sum up’ or explain the condition of the city; rather, it adds another layer of meaning to Detroit’s ruins, one that goes beyond the personal without denigrating it in the work of others. In ending up as ruins themselves, Hocking’s site-​specific works become part of the very processes they are commenting on. Indeed, like Hocking, many other artists in Detroit have seen their works destroyed. Some works of street art are destroyed when the buildings they adorn are renovated, as in Kevin Joy’s downtown graffiti works on the windows of the United Artists Building, which were erased in 2006.132 Works of art also disappear when buildings are demolished, for example Object Orange’s painting of abandoned homes in Highland Park and other areas.133 Finally, street art is sometimes removed if deemed illicit (Eno Laget’s street posters being one example),134 or if its meaning is contested by other artists, some of Sintex’s works being the most obvious examples (Figure 5.9). The destruction of many art works in Detroit points to the on-​going processes of ruination that, for many, continue to define the city’s current condition. As a city that offers unrivalled opportunities for the exploration of ruins, it is unsurprising that many of Detroit’s abandoned buildings display visual evidence of infiltration by urban explorers, the most obvious being graffiti tags. With many abandoned buildings unsecured and easy to access, some of these ruins display imaginative engagements by explorers that add new layers of meaning to their mouldering spaces, objects and surfaces, even as these interventions hardly ever aspire to the status of art. Indeed, many are grounded in a rather crude exploitation of irony in abandoned buildings, such as the ever-​changing tags of graffiti artists that adorn the altar of the ruined St Agnes church on Rosa Parks Boulevard in northwest Detroit.135 No less crude, but more imaginative, are the multiple references to the opening scenes of Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later (see ­Chapter 1) and the television series The Walking Dead in the interior spaces of an abandoned hospital in southwest Detroit (Figure 5.13).136 Even 183

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Figure 5.13  Graffiti in Detroit’s abandoned Southwest Hospital, 2015.

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Urban futures, art and the imagination of Detroit as the records of former patients lie strewn across its floors, the walls are adorned with words that warn of zombies, the danger of infectious diseases such as Ebola, and a ward admissions board that is now filled with the nom-​de-​plumes of urban explorers and graffiti artists. Such interventions tie in with more outlandish proposals for the reuse of Detroit’s vacant land and buildings, such as Mark Siwak’s idea to transform one of the city’s abandoned neighbourhoods into a live-​action zombie theme park Z World Detroit that keys into the phenomenal success of the zombie genre in both contemporary television and cinema.137 These developments indicate not only a profound disconnect between the explorers of Detroit’s ruins, who are mainly white outsiders, and the lived histories of predominantly black former inhabitants contained within those ruins, but also how those ruins have become invested with a very different kind of imaginative charge, one that flags up the importance of popular cultural representations in influencing how ruins are experienced. They also accept and indeed depend upon the continuing mouldering of those ruins, wherein rests their imaginative charge. A more nuanced, and historically and geographically grounded, embrace of Detroit’s ruination can be seen in the Heidelberg Project. As already discussed above, the project has always built upon the ruins of itself, whether in response to the attempts to demolish it in the 1990s or the more recent spate of arson attacks. It is also quite literally made from ruins, whether the countless discarded objects that are either piled high or attached to buildings and other structures, or pieces of charred wood from the remains of the burned-​out houses. In their material presence, the ruins on show in the Heidelberg Project reclaim a multitude of discarded histories, by both drawing attention to those histories and transforming them into new constellations of meaning. In this context, the numerous clocks that appear throughout the project, whether as salvaged timepieces or ones that are painted onto boards, offer their own take on the meaning of historical memory in this mouldering work of art and in relation to the city as a whole (Figure  5.14). In many photographic representations of Detroit (The Ruins of Detroit and Detroit Disassembled being the most high profile) stopped clocks form a recurring motif, particularly in images of the classrooms of the former Cass Technical High School, which was demolished in 2011. In addition, stopped clocks also remain on some 185

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Figure 5.14  Some of the many representations of clocks in the Heidelberg Project, Detroit, 2015.

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Urban futures, art and the imagination of Detroit abandoned structures throughout the city, such as the CPA Building on Michigan Avenue in Corktown. As if calling attention to a petrified time that has never moved forward, these clocks form a startling juxtaposition to those seen around the Heidelberg Project, which offer a different take on the meanings of such stopped time. In contrasts to Guyton’s other found objects, which seem to fester in their ruin, these clocks are both ironic reminders that time never stops and also symbols of the myriad personal histories that have indeed been cut short and petrified, whether as a result of the abandonment of cherished homes or a consequence of crime and other forms of violence. In the Heidelberg, the discarded objects and blackened ruins are not the only things that moulder; so do such intangibles as memories, histories and time itself. Yet, at the same time, the mouldering material and immaterial things survive, their histories displaying openly ‘all of the life that was once contained in them’.138 With these overt references to time in the Heidelberg Project, we return, finally, to J.  G. Ballard’s allegorical short-​story ‘Chronopolis’. Today, it is clear to many that Detroit will never get back the productive time abandoned in Chronopolis: the city will not return to the 1950s and once again fill up with people and production-​line jobs. Yet that does not necessarily mean that Detroit and its tens of thousands of abandoned buildings are now frozen in a static time, or one that is purely entropic, as suggested in so many representations of the city’s ruins. Neither does it mean that the city has to once again wait for its resurgence –​for the lost time to come back in corporate reinvestment and repopulation. By focusing on creative engagements with Detroit’s abandoned buildings and vacant land, this chapter has explored some of the alternative possible uses for the city’s ruins, ones that posit a very different kind of future for them. First, the process of cutting has seen some of Detroit’s abandoned buildings being incorporated into something new, pointing to multivalent futures containing different and often startlingly juxtaposed materialities and histories. Second, the process of covering has forged a creative approach to the material surfaces of Detroit’s abandoned buildings, one that is not without its problems and conflicts, but which nevertheless has transformed many of the city’s ruins into narrative canvases that continue to evolve over time. Third, the process of melding that has seen some of Detroit’s vacant land and abandoned buildings fused with different creative practices has opened up new futures 187

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay that will see the breaking down of the binaries of urban/​rural and natural/​ artificial. Finally, the mouldering that is so evident in much of Detroit’s urban fabric has been incorporated into creative processes that embrace an entropic future of decay and disappearance. Of course, all of these possible futures for Detroit’s ruins are uncertain ones –​the process of gentrification that has affected so many other cities in the West may eventually result in Detroit being taken over by neoliberal capitalism, as is already happening in the downtown area. Yet, at the moment, the ‘regeneration’ of Detroit beyond the small enclave at its centre seems unlikely and, as such, the city’s future remains radically uncertain. With that, the opportunity remains to work creatively with that uncertainty to forge a new city of tomorrow.

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6 Suspended futures: urban ruins in reverse

For three years after I moved to Manchester in early 2011, a twelve-​storey steel-​framed structure on Great Ancoats Street dominated the skyline just north of the city centre. Abandoned mid-​construction in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis in the summer of 2008, this skeletal metal frame, designed to contain dozens of new apartments, had, over the years, gradually acquired a patina of rust, one that contributed to its ruinous quality. Yet in early 2013, construction resumed and the steel skeleton was abruptly clad in multicoloured panels. Although the building had moved one step towards completion, it still contained the memory of its half-​decade of abandonment. Understandably, that part of its past remains unacknowledged by the developers in any of its promotional publications, despite their interest in what they term the ‘history inextricably intertwined’ with the site.1 My experience of this half-​constructed building in Manchester raised uncomfortable questions about what constitutes ruin in architecture. What happens to a building when a good part of its history is characterized by abandonment? In what way is this different from any construction project, which always involves a history of incompletion, albeit one that is usually much shorter than half a decade? And what of buildings that never will be completed? Do these become the ruins of the future? If so, how can they 189

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay be understood and framed, given that ruination is conventionally understood as a process that begins in the past, rather than the future? In the light of the extraordinary proliferation of unfinished buildings across the world in the wake of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and increasingly shorter projected lifespans of new buildings, there is a pressing need to try and make sense of these new ruins. They pose uncomfortable questions not only about the futures of isolated buildings, but also entire urban environments across the world. This chapter will address these questions by focusing on three sites that can be said to comprise ‘new’ ruins: first, the so-​called ‘ghost city’ of Valdeluz near Madrid, begun in 2004 but only partially completed to date; secondly, the Park Hill estate in Sheffield, built from 1958 to 1961, and, since 2004, under renovation by Urban Splash, the property developer already introduced in ­Chapter 2; and, thirdly, unfinished structures in Giarre, Sicily, that have been recognized as an important site of the ‘incomplete’ in architecture.2 Drawing on my own experience of these structures and sites, the chapter will forge connections between new ruins and the imagination in order to build up a sense of what constitutes a global ‘style’ of architectural ruin that has emerged both in the aftermath of 2008, and, more generally, in the postwar period, particularly in modernist contexts. Although the work of J. G. Ballard has already informed parts of this book, namely in relation to post-​apocalyptic imaginings of London (­Chapter 1) and Detroit (­Chapter 5), his fiction returns obsessively to the motif of ‘new’ ruins, whether abandoned motorways, swimming pools, tower blocks or hotels;3 and, in this chapter, I focus on his short story ‘The terminal beach’ published in 1964. As will become evident, Ballard’s fiction provides a fruitful way of exploring the imaginative potential of incomplete architectures, particularly those that employ that quintessential modernist material, concrete. Unlike ‘natural’ building materials such as stone and brick, concrete does not ‘ruin’ in the conventional sense of the word (displaying external signs of weathering and wear); rather it decays from the inside, leading to strange reversals of the normal process of ageing. Thus, a concrete building can look old before it’s even finished, or pristine half a century after the concrete was first formed.4 The unconventional temporality of concrete, particularly when exposed to ‘natural’ agents of decay, in part explains its imaginative appeal to writers 190

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Suspended futures: urban ruins in reverse such as Ballard; it also lends concrete ruins a curiously static temporality that is both alienating and exhilarating. Thus, the new ruins explored in this chapter inspire imaginative engagement with the future, more so than the past, and prompt those who encounter them to think about how to live with these ruins, namely, how to re-​inhabit them. Buildings that have failed or stalled highlight the fact that the future is the product of human choices, which are often fallible. They also reveal the limitations of discourses that tend to narrow our notions of what the future can be –​ discourses that exist in order to bind us to the illusion that the future can be predicted and made certain. New ruins pull that rug from under our feet and, discomforting as that may be, they also invite us to consider many more future trajectories than we had hitherto thought possible. A theme that runs throughout imaginative engagements with unfinished architecture or new ruins is that of entropy, or the notion that matter, if left alone, will likely become more and more disordered and ‘ruined’ over time, an exemplar material in this respect being sand. In relation to architecture, entropy indicates that buildings are always on the verge of ruin, with only the unceasing work of maintenance preventing it.5 Thus, entropy tends to posit ruins as both future oriented (always on the verge of happening) and also processes rather than objects –​ruin as a verb rather than a noun. The work of the American artist Robert Smithson and his own obsession with entropy has been key in influencing a generation of architects, artists and critics interested in future-​orientated conceptions of ruins.6 Smithson’s 1967 article ‘The Monuments of Passaic’ saw him travel through the post-​industrial landscape of New Jersey conjuring mythic timescapes out of the remains of half-​constructed motorways, industrial detritus and car parks. In this article Smithson coined the term ‘ruins in reverse’ to describe incomplete or abandoned structures, which are referred to in this chapter as new ruins.7 Along with Ballard and a host of subsequent artists, Smithson has forged fertile imaginative readings of new ruins, ones that have much to contribute to the discourses of architecture and urban planning.8 For, as Denis Maher has asked, in a global urban landscape now littered with unfinished architectures, how might ‘the memory of failure’, whether embodied in the abandonment of single buildings or entire cities, ‘be preserved as a structured proposition’, one that acknowledges and memorializes a period of abandonment, however 191

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay problematic or painful that might be?9 Indeed, as I also argued in ­Chapter 3 in relation to Varosha, engaging the imagination and ruins requires such an acceptance of failure, an architecture of the future that takes into itself the memory of its own ruin.

Abandoned futures Neoliberal capitalism has an intimate relationship with the construction of the built environment. As explained in detail by the geographer David Harvey, the largely abstract basis of financial speculation that has characterized neoliberalism from the late-​twentieth century onwards has been accompanied by what he calls a ‘secondary circuit accumulation’ of real estate investment that is meant to act as a ‘buffer’ in the event of an economic depression.10 From the early 1990s until the financial crisis of 2007–2008​ the most sustained period of economic growth in the postwar period –​ an enormous number of speculative building schemes were begun to both exploit and try to secure the booming virtual economy.11 Such building was centred on the production of new residential sites on cheap land on the peripheries of towns and cities, particularly in the United States, Ireland and Spain. Although it was the collapse of America’s subprime mortgage market in late 2006 that triggered the wider global financial crisis, its effects on speculative construction were felt most strongly in countries that had over-​invested in this industry, particularly Ireland and Spain, with the construction industry in Spain making up 11 per cent of the country’s GDP as compared with the EU average of 5.7 per cent.12 At the same time, an even greater construction boom has been underway in China, which has continued since 2008, despite a recent slowdown, resulting in what many Western newspapers have termed ‘ghost’ cities. These are vast new building projects such as Kangbashi in Inner Mongolia –​a new city built for 300,000 projected residents –​that have been driven by an unprecedented national investment in real estate (up to 20 per cent of the country’s GDP). China’s speculative urbanism has produced an astonishing number of buildings awaiting residents –​estimates range from 10 to 52  million unsold or vacant housing units across the country in 2015.13 Yet, despite their superficial similarity to the new ruins of the West, China’s vacant buildings are nevertheless the result of economic growth, not crisis 192

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Suspended futures: urban ruins in reverse or recession, even as many now predict a fate similar to that of the West for the country’s enormous property ‘bubble’.14 Although there are now countless ‘new’ ruins throughout cities in the West as a result of the 2008 financial crisis –​thousands of abandoned foreclosed houses in American cities such as Detroit (see ­Chapter 5), empty offices and residential units, and undeveloped sites in UK cities such as Manchester (see ­Chapter 2), and so-​ called ‘ghost’ housing estates in Ireland –​the greatest concentration of such ruins is in Spain.15 In 2014, an estimated 3.4 million homes there were deemed vacant or unsold.16 In addition, enormous tracts of land on the edges of Madrid and Spain’s Mediterranean resorts have been only partially developed in preparation for hundreds of thousands more residential and commercial units that have not yet materialized.17 In their on-​going photographic project, the artists’ collective Nación Rotonda (literally ‘Roundabout Nation’) have documented the extraordinary range of these sites in a series of aerial views; by doing so, they call attention not only to the failings that led to their creation but also their sheer material presence in Spain’s landscape today.18 A notable example, and one that has had voluminous press coverage in Britain, is the new city of Valdeluz (Cuidad Valdeluz), situated 60 km northeast of Madrid.19 The city was created from scratch in 2004 as a commuter settlement for the capital, its geographical location on the remote high plain of Castille-​La Mancha north of Madrid determined in large part by the building of a large new railway station (Guadalajara-​Yebes) on the high-​speed intercity line from Madrid to Barcelona.20 As a precondition for advertising prospective properties for sale, the entire road network of the town, covering an area of 490 hectares, was created in 2006 by the giant global construction company Royal Urbis, together with an infrastructure of water and gas pipes, electricity and fibre optic cables and sewers beneath the surfaces of these roads. By the time of the financial crisis in 2008, only 2,200 of the planned 9,000 homes had been finished; the ensuing bankruptcy of Royal Urbis resulted in the abrupt halting of any further construction work with many of Valdeluz’s intended facilities, including a new church, state-​of-​the-​art sports complex and flagship school and college, suddenly becoming petrified in their half-​built condition (Figure 6.1). With barely 200 people living in the new town when the economic crisis hit, the Western media found a telling, material embodiment of the burst 193

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Figure 6.1  Unfinished plaza in Valdeluz, Spain, 2014.

property bubble, labelling it a ‘ghost city’ and publishing photographs of Valdeluz’s unfinished spaces and buildings, usually without including any of the town’s inhabitants in these images.21 Despite a gradual increase in the population of the new town (rising to around 2,500 in 2016), increasingly affordable housing that has attracted new residents –​mainly young families –​and a campaign by existing residents to transform perceptions of the town, much of Valdeluz remains abandoned. Indeed, the town’s former Mayor Joaquín Ormazábal was instrumental in changing the sign that greets visitors to the town from ‘Cuidad Valdeluz’ (‘City of Valdeluz’) to ‘Cuida Valdeluz’ (‘to care for Valdeluz’), thus relinquishing Valdeluz’s ambition to be a city in favour of a more community-​based focus.22 As documented by Sarah Taslimi, the vast areas of roads laid out around the fledgling community, which are now unlikely to see any further development, have effectively been cast out of Valdeluz’s new identity, whether evidenced in the concrete barriers that bar vehicular access to these streets, or in their simple discounting from residents’ conception of the town.23 This desire to make a stark division between occupied and abandoned Valdeluz becomes less tenable on the ground. My own exploration of the town in September 2014 encompassed both inhabited and empty areas, 194

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Suspended futures: urban ruins in reverse beginning and ending at the outsized railway station that sees only infrequent stops by the high-​speed railway linking Madrid and Barcelona; so infrequent that, during the best part of each week day, it would be quicker to travel all the way to Barcelona and back again than wait for the next train from Guadalajara-​Yebes back to Madrid. The terrain covered during my 20-​minute walk along the road from the station to the edge of Valdeluz was characterized by a mixture of semi-​arid scrub, with so few cars on the road that one can mostly walk undisturbed on its concrete surface. Flanking the road were sun-​bleached and wind-​scoured images on billboards advertising properties and business opportunities that will probably never come to fruition. The inhabited area of Valdeluz resembles a citadel, situated as it is at the town’s highest point, with gridded networks of roads around it forming a kind of protective labyrinth of concrete. A cycleway that follows the edge of a luxury golf-​course on the south side of the town is lined with ornamental street lights that never shine and an array of manhole covers that are raised above the incomplete surface of the thoroughfare. Nearer to the centre of the town, empty benches line the roads, some of which have been enveloped by the bushes that were planted to provide shade for the absent promenaders. These unmaintained areas gradually merge with the inhabited part of the town, where parks and empty children’s playgrounds are carefully tended by workers dressed in green overalls. Even in the inhabited part of the town unfinished buildings abound. I witnessed the exposed breeze blocks of a sports hall opposite an unfinished church building punctured inexplicably by a gigantic hole (Figure 6.1); a skeletal concrete frame of a large apartment complex standing next to a near-​identical one that is partially occupied; and a dead tree overlooking a vast school and college that was suspended mid-​construction –​parts of the complex finished, others barely begun. Perhaps most extraordinary of all is the prospective business park located on the northwest fringes of the town (Figure 6.2): a network of roads that emerges from the drought-​resistant plants and trees surrounding it. Here, together with rows of streetlights, the concrete block-​like forms of the empty service structures are the only intact elements, their metal doors creaking in the incessant wind. At regular intervals along the pavements, fronds of multicoloured cables and tubes emerge from the ground but connect to nothing, instead resembling a strange 195

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Figure 6.2  Part of the unfinished business park in Valdeluz, Spain, 2014.

kind of futuristic vegetation. In this barely constructed landscape, I felt not only disorientated by the gridded streets and repetitive and banal concrete structures that only alienated in their inscrutability, but also drawn into a world that seemed to be inducing a profoundly unsettling psychic state. In short, this entropic concrete landscape seemed to be both external and internal, in the words of J. G. Ballard, both an outer and inner space. Indeed, it is Ballard, perhaps more than any other figure in the postwar period, who has mined these kinds of entropic landscapes as fertile places for the imagination in his fiction, whether as entire cityscapes being overtaken by hostile nature (see ­Chapter 1) or sand (a quintessential product of entropy), or as recurrent motifs of abandonment –​drained swimming pools, empty hotels, decaying concrete roadways, run-​down tower blocks –​ that drew upon his own childhood experiences of Shanghai during World War II.24 Perhaps Ballard’s most intense engagement with an entropic concrete environment (and one that has an affinity with my own experience of Valdeluz) is in his 1964 short story ‘The terminal beach’.25 The story is set on an abandoned nuclear test site, probably based on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, where Traven, the central character, deliberately isolates himself in order to try and make sense of the trauma caused by the recent death of 196

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Suspended futures: urban ruins in reverse his wife and son in a car accident. With events in the story mirroring those in Ballard’s own life (his wife died suddenly of pneumonia in 1964), the continuous concrete structures that cover the island –​bunkers, blockhouses, roads, observation towers –​are articulated by Ballard as spaces where Traven develops an ‘existential’ existence, devoid of linear time.26 Here, the built environment takes on the character of a labyrinth, the hidden space ‘below ground zero’ seeming to offer Traven the key to unlocking the mystery of his own mental and emotional disturbance.27 The strange temporality of this all-​encompassing concrete environment is also grounded in its ‘functional, megalithic architecture’ that seemed both ancient –​‘as any of Assyria and Babylon’ –​and futuristic at the same time. Indeed, as a ‘fossil of time future’, the bunkers and blockhouses of the island seem to invert the conventional process of temporal progression with its reliance on the past to make sense of the present. Instead, they become a place where ‘the key to the present lay in the future’.28 Precisely what this key consists of is never revealed by Ballard; rather, the built environment is constructed as a mirror of Traven’s mental state, the two ultimately indistinguishable as separate landscapes. Just as in The Drowned World, explored in ­Chapter 1, ‘The terminal beach’ ends with the apparent suicide of the solitary male protagonist –​Traven finding in his own death both ‘an image of [himself] free of the hazards of time and space’ and also the spectres of his wife and son.29 Even though the premise of Ballard’s story seems outlandish  –​who would ever choose to inhabit a former nuclear test site? –​the experience of reading ‘The terminal beach’ can be brought to bear on what it might mean to inhabit the strange, half-​formed spaces of ruined environments like Valdeluz. Far more than the inhabited areas of the town, these liminal unfinished zones were at once disturbing and exhilarating (un)built environments. They disturbed because of their temporal inscrutability: as ruins in reverse, they did not suggest a past state of completion that makes conventional ruins sites of serene contemplation; rather, they pointed forwards to a future that could not be adequately imagined because it had not yet happened and, more disturbingly, may never happen. Yet, these ruins in reverse were also exhilarating in their very inscrutability: as open sites they have the potential to be remodelled in radically new ways. New proposals could be put forward for alternate uses. Perhaps the unfinished business park might instead become an experimental playground, its concrete 197

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay service structures remodelled as art installations, its subsurface network of drains as spaces to explore, its roads as a giant canvas for street art or a skateboard park. The slowed down, even static, temporality that seems to govern much of the construction in Valdeluz forces precisely the kind of existential awareness described in Ballard’s story. Even though they are banal and universal structures, Valdeluz’s half-​completed roads and walkways nevertheless seem to require entirely new forms of comprehension, ones that can only be provided by the imagination of those, like Traven, who choose to inhabit these unfinished architectures. It is precisely Ballard’s insistence that liminal built environments offer perhaps the most fruitful sites for the modern imagination that suggests that otherwise forsaken sites like Valdeluz can open themselves up to alternative meanings, ones that might have a potentially transformative effect on those that live with and in them. As Ballard-​critic Simon Sellars has argued, we should not be afraid to overlay the ‘real’ built environment with the fictions of our inner lives, because only if we do so is the built made ‘complete’ because it is then fully inhabited, creating a ‘stereoscopic representation […] that places the user at the centre with the power to inform, direct, stage and manage the terms of his or her movements through time and space’.30 It may be completely understandable that the current residents of Valdeluz wish to shut out the town’s liminal zones and incomplete structures from their conception of the place they inhabit, but, in Ballard’s estimation, they then fail to emancipate and claim back those spaces as sites of positive meaning.

Suspended futures The ruins of Valdeluz represent just one instance of the countless unfinished architectures around the world that are a significant material legacy of the financial crisis of 2008. Yet there are other kinds of new ruins that have also resulted from that economic meltdown, ones that can be described as both unfinished and finished. In the decade leading up to the financial crisis, the flood of speculative building already discussed above was also accompanied by attempts to ‘regenerate’ some of the modernist social housing built from the 1950s to the 1970s, particularly in Western Europe and the former Soviet Union, where mass h ​ ousing in the form of 198

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Suspended futures: urban ruins in reverse pre​fabricated concrete-​framed tower blocks has left a legacy of socialist and communist buildings, many of which have fallen into varying states of ruin.31 As Kate Beswick has argued, in twenty-​first-​century Britain, the social housing estate serves as ‘an archetypal contemporary ruin’, featuring prominently in art works displayed in the Ruin Lust exhibition held at Tate Britain in 2014, from Rachel Whiteread’s ‘Demolished’ series (1996) to paintings and drawings by Laura Oldfield Ford, including Ferrier Estate (2010).32 Even as many of these concrete tower blocks have been demolished, usually in spectacular, explosive-​created ‘blow-​downs’, some have been reclassified as ‘unfinished’ projects.33 In these cases, which include the Aylesbury estate (1966–19​77) in south London, the political ideologies –​ usually left-​leaning –​that drove the original conception of these towers blocks are now widely regarded as defunct and requiring updating to match the new political landscape dominated by neoliberal capitalism.34 Even as this process is being challenged in the work of artists and academics such as Oldfield Ford and Ben Campkin, the dominant model for ‘finishing’ failed modernist social housing is to attract new residents that can afford to buy the former rented flats, which usually involves pushing out those that depend on housing provided by the state.35 Although much of this debate is focused on the regeneration and gentrification of former council estates in London, where the recent extraordinary inflation of house prices has made such projects desirable, the largest example in Britain is the Park Hill estate in Sheffield, its 985 flats and ‘streets in the sky’ built from 1958 to 1961 by the architects Ivor Smith and Jack Lynn under the auspices of Lewis Womersley, the chief architect of Sheffield’s Housing Committee (Figure 6.3).36 Alongside London’s Barbican estate, Park Hill was the largest-​scale application of the approach called ‘New Brutalism’, named after its characteristic use of unpainted concrete known as béton brut. New Brutalism was characterized by both an emphasis on massive scale –​in Park Hill’s case, a series of 13 interconnected blocks that range from 4 to 13 storeys in height, and which follow the contours of their hilly site –​and also a concern for social cohesion in mass housing. The latter was achieved at Park Hill not only in the design, namely deck access ‘streets in the sky’ which connected with the ground, but also the way in which the tenants of the site were rehoused in the same ‘streets’ in which they had formerly lived, a process aided by the work of 199

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Figure 6.3  Abandoned (left) and renovated (right) sections of the Park Hill estate in Sheffield, 2015.

the estate’s live-​in sociologist Mrs J. F. Demers.37 Indeed, the design of the original estate was explicitly utopian in its social ambition, that is, to clear away all of the defects of a notorious slum and replace these with high-​ quality housing that also replicated the best features of working-​class life, namely a tightly-​packed street life and strong sense of community.38 Only in the 1980s did residents’ levels of satisfaction with the Park Hill flats begin to significantly decrease –​a combination of the mass unemployment that resulted from the rationalization of Sheffield’s steel industry under Margaret Thatcher, a right-​to-​buy policy that turned council estates into homes of last resort, and the obliteration of the community-​focused work that moulded the original estate, as Sheffield Council filled vacant flats with an itinerant populace that undermined its former social cohesion.39 As a result, by the 1990s, the estate had become, like so many others, redolent of failure:  described by its long-​running bête noir, the Sheffield Star, as a ‘single vision of horror’, characterized by ‘ugliness […] social decay, drug abuse [and] family breakdown’.40 The almost certain demolition of Park Hill was avoided in the late 1990s after English Heritage controversially placed a Grade II* listing on the entire estate in 1998,41 after 200

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Suspended futures: urban ruins in reverse which a long and tortuous process of regeneration began, led by the developer Urban Splash, to whom the estate was transferred for free in 2004.42 By mid-​2015, Urban Splash had renovated the tallest block of the estate –​ the concrete frame restored and new apartments fronted by brightly-​ coloured panels designed by the French architect Christophe Egret –​with two more blocks in progress, the renovated apartments ‘launched’ in June 2015.43 Meanwhile, the rest of the estate has remained abandoned save for a declining number of residents still living in the old flats at the low-​rise end of the complex, and the flourishing Grace Owen Nursery School, housed within one of the otherwise abandoned blocks since 1963, and only relocated to one of Urban Splash’s renovated blocks in late 2016.44 This combination of unfinished construction in the form of renovation and the ruin of what was previously finished, namely, the rest of the mostly abandoned estate, gives Park Hill today a peculiar but unmistakeable temporal complexity. On the one hand, in the grass that now grows thigh-​high in the vast open space surrounded on all sides by the abandoned blocks, time seems to have stopped, or at least become aligned to the more conventional ruin time of abandoned buildings, that is, a slowed-​down present redolent with lost histories, in this case the lives of the thousands of former residents who are summoned up by the hundreds of repeating windows now covered over with identical metal grilles. Expressed rather too literally in a diminutive piece of graffiti on one of the brick infills between the concrete frame –​‘All those people, all those lives. Where are they now?’ (borrowed from the Smiths 1986 song ‘Cemetry Gates’) –​this sense of the immanence of lost histories is nevertheless offset by those that still inhabit these ruins, whether the staff and young children of the longstanding Grace Owen Nursery or the one remaining flat that is still (at least in the summer of 2015) occupied in the otherwise abandoned blocks. Here, lived space disturbs the ruin’s function as signifier of an architecture consigned to the past. In addition, these lived spaces challenge the new vision of the estate being partially realized by Urban Splash. For, although the developer is providing 200 new flats that will be available for social rent, the majority (around 600) will be sold on the open market in what architectural critic Owen Hatherley has openly called a form of ‘class cleansing’.45 Indeed, with prices for the new two-​bedroom flats starting in mid-​2015 at £147,000 –​ well above the average price for similar properties in Sheffield available as 201

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay social housing –​it is hard to see the renovations as anything more than a repudiation of the social aspirations held by the estate’s original designers. For some, this represents a healthy development, one that will encourage a new social mixing in the renovated estate even as it squeezes out the poor onto ever-​longer waiting lists for council housing.46 For others, it represents nothing less than the ruin of the ideals upon which the welfare state is based, signalling the abandonment of the socially progressive vision that lay behind the design of the original estate.47 If the original estate was meant to embody the future; now, it and the utopian ideals it once embodied have together become ruins.48 Yet perhaps turning Park Hill into a symbol of the ruins of the welfare state risks romanticizing what these projects originally stood for. We may not go so far as to blame their decay from within on their design (as Alice Coleman did in her notorious 1985 book Utopia on Trial) but surely there is a relationship between their social and architectural failure. The original architects of Park Hill certainly believed that design had a strong role to play in transforming working-​class living conditions for the better, but they had a narrow view of what constitutes a fulfilling built environment, namely one that engages users’ imaginations as much as their more obvious needs. Clearly, the lack of differentiation in the estate’s living spaces  –​its overwhelmingly monolithic character –​could not but diminish the individuality of its residents’ inner lives. Perhaps the relationship between design and social failure might only be untangled by taking seriously architecture’s effect on the inner space of its users. If these were indeed recovered, we might learn much about the so-​called ‘social’ problem of the tower block, one that would point us beyond the class-​bound parameters in which it is usually discussed. Clearly, the majority of high-​density housing, whether Brutalist leftovers or contemporary high-​rises, has not fallen into ruin; yet, those that have pose uncomfortable questions about the social pressures of vertical living, which implicate both architects and residents alike, whatever their class. Indeed, perhaps the Brutalist architecture of Park Hill was doomed from the start, containing within itself the inevitable prospect of its own destruction. In his 1975 book Bunker Archaeology, Paul Virilio suggested that New Brutalism, with its sense of ambition and even arrogance, can be linked to the vast concrete fortifications built by the Nazis during World War II, 202

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Suspended futures: urban ruins in reverse however uncomfortable that association may be. For Virilio, there was an ‘immediate comparison between […] the ordinary [urban] apartment building and the abandoned bunker[s]‌’ of the Atlantic Wall, for both contained within themselves the promise of security and shelter in the face of the aggression and violence of a hostile technological modernity, whether in the context of modern urban life or warfare.49 This uncomfortable melding of security and aggression forms an important part of the cultural history of concrete, the material used for both wartime bunkers and many modernist tower blocks. The twentieth-​century use of concrete originated, at least in part, in structures designed to resist the ballistic power of modern warfare and even in the most utopian projects of architectural modernism, these earlier associations were never far from the surface.50 In this sense, the all-​pervasive exposed concrete that is now being so carefully restored in the renovated areas of Park Hill speaks eloquently as a metaphor of the tensions inherent within the building itself and its modernist basis. The new apartments may be encased within a concrete frame that has been cleansed of its former patina of stains, cracks and chips, but this does not mean that it is safe from future ruin. For, unlike other building materials, concrete does not display signs of its decay on its surface; rather, the decay happens from within, unseen until it erupts in the spalling of the aggregate. Just as the decay of concrete is always latent within the material, so perhaps is the future ruin of all architectures that either seek to control or repress their inhabitants. In his 2012 article on Park Hill, the architectural critic Jeremy Till examined how modernist social housing projects embodied a future-​oriented vision of progress but paradoxically always experienced the return of the waste, chaos and contingency that their planners had so vigorously sought to eliminate.51 Till’s suggestion is that the project of architectural modernism rested on an ‘unattainable illusion’ of social control.52 Such control was an inherent part of the original design of Park Hill. As I walked through the abandoned areas of the estate in June 2015 with the grandparents of a child who attended the Grace Owen Nursery, the retired couple spoke of their long experience of Park Hill as a place where the positioning of the blocks meant, when traversing the estate, one felt watched at all times by the residents. Probably intended by the designers to act as a deterrent to ‘degenerative’ behaviour that they probably associated with working-​class 203

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay living, this almost certainly had the reverse effect –​a form of control that was eventually rejected by the residents. In such architectures of control, there can perhaps only be one certain outcome, namely ruin from within. Yet despite such a pessimistic forecast for the future of modernist tower blocks, there is nevertheless a glimmer of hope, for, in their ruins, something new may emerge. Certainly, the abandoned sections of Park Hill offer spaces for reflection that would be absent if the estate were demolished or renovated quickly. These ruins offer the potential to move beyond the models of social control that underpinned the estate’s design, and by extension much modernist mass housing. For in ruins, as this book has demonstrated, the built environment can be inhabited in unexpected ways that draw out new meanings from the ruins themselves. Even as Urban Splash claims to be transforming Park Hill into something new with its gentrification project, it seems a paltry substitute for a more radical transformation, namely the estate becoming a place where social divisions might be lessened, where the wounds of the past might be healed, and where a more socially-​just future might be built. For that transformation to occur, the ruins must be reconciled with what is to come; incorporated into the estate’s re-​inhabitation, they might yet contribute to redeeming its past failures by accepting and learning from them.

Incomplete futures Although the 2008 financial crisis may have produced a proliferation of unfinished buildings –​whether half-​built new constructions or half-​renovated older ones –​incompletion in architecture is not simply a product of economic downturns. The construction of a building is always dependent on the successful coming together of the right materials, labour and design; construction also depends upon time and the availability of resources. Indeed, such are the uncertainties during a building’s construction, that it is always vulnerable to possible abandonment before it is even finished. In addition, architecture in capitalist contexts is fundamentally bound to destruction because of capitalism’s incessant need to expand and create new markets, thus forcing obsolescence of both labour and buildings.53 For example, as highlighted in ­Chapter 2, the development of industrial production in Victorian Manchester was accompanied by a series of 204

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Suspended futures: urban ruins in reverse speculative building booms that resulted in such poorly-​built houses for the working classes that they quickly became obsolescent, while, in the second half of the twentieth century, the city’s thousands of mills became redundant as the cotton industry relocated to other parts of the world. Today, the average lifespan of buildings is lower than even their poorly-​ built Victorian counterparts: most steel-​framed structures will only last around 30 years, compared to the 40 years that a reinforced concrete building might be expected to last, or the significantly longer lifespans of those built in brick or stone.54 Thus, even a relatively short period of stasis during a building’s construction can have a significant impact on its future, whether shortening its lifespan still further or, in extreme cases, making it uninhabitable. After the Asian financial crisis of 1997, many buildings were left unfinished, like the 40-​storey Sathorn Unique building in Bangkok, which has been abandoned for so long that its completion now seems unlikely.55 The radically uncertain futures of buildings like these point to the wider question of how we approach redundancy in architecture in an age of globalized capitalism that leaves in its wake an unprecedented amount of obsolescence in the built environment.56 In the West, obsolescent buildings, particularly if they are large, are often pejoratively termed ‘white-​elephants’, yet, in the more unstable economies of the Global South and eastern Mediterranean, incomplete architectures are common –​places where ‘building traditions have always included those that proceed incrementally, and often informally’.57 In the town of Giarre on the southeast coast of Sicily, architectural incompletion has become manifest in a disproportionately large number of half-​finished grand public buildings. Documented by the artists’ collective Alterazioni Video, Giarre is home to no less than 25 incomplete public buildings built between the mid-​1950s and the 2000s.58 Many of these are notable for their scale: a vast athletics and polo stadium, designed to seat 20,000 people (Figure 6.4); a near-​Olympic-​size swimming pool (Figure 6.5); and a five-​storey cultural centre, termed a ‘Multifunctional Hall’ (Figure 6.6). Dominated by pre-​fabricated concrete frames and breeze-​ block infills, these structures are slowly being overtaken by meadow grass and cacti as well as being coated in fine layers of solidified black ash from nearby Mount Etna, Europe’s most active volcano. Although the rationale behind some of these projects is difficult to credit –​a polo 205

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Figure 6.4  Incomplete athletics and polo stadium in Giarre, Sicily, 2015.

Figure 6.5  Unfinished Regional Swimming Pool in Trepunto, Sicily, 2015.

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Figure 6.6  Unfinished ‘Multifunctional Hall’ in Trepunto, Sicily, 2015.

stadium in a country where few have much interest in the sport, and a hospital completed after 40 years only to be closed down again as part of the rationalization of Sicily’s health service –​the concentration of them in Giarre speaks of the absurdities that result when political ideology is wedded to construction. For during Italy’s postwar boom years from around 1975 to 1995, private companies succeeded in dominating municipal governments where the measure of a politician’s success was the ability to bring building projects to his or her home town. The money, employment and prestige that followed became ends in themselves, the buildings deliberately left unfinished so that the contractors could keep the funds flowing into the local economy.59 As revealed by Alterazioni Video, there may be a high concentration of such projects in Giarre, but the phenomenon extends across Sicily and, to a lesser extent, the whole of Italy: of the 400 or so unfinished projects surveyed by the artists’ collective, 160 are in Sicily alone.60 In 2008, some of the incomplete public buildings in Giarre were reclassified by Alterazioni Video as the Archaeological Park of Sicilian Incompletion, an attempt, in consultation with the town’s municipal authorities, to provide these unfinished architectures with a new cultural identity as heritage.61 207

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Figure  6.7 Incomplete children’s play area in Chico Mendez park, Giarre, Sicily, 2015.

This process culminated in a community-​based festival in Giarre in the summer of 2010: tours were offered of the town’s new ruins, and playful re-​appropriations of their spaces took place, such as a polo game and chariot race at the athletics stadium and a mock-​swim in the town’s empty pool.62 The festival concluded with the ceremonial cutting down of a concrete pillar and its removal to Venice as an exhibit in the 2010 Architecture Biennale.63 In early summer 2015, I used the tourist map published by Alterazioni Video in 2010 to guide myself around Giarre’s new ruins. My visit took in the vast concrete walls, buttresses and cantilevered stairwells of the athletics and polo stadium, started in 1985 (Figure 6.4); the more diminutive but no less extravagant children’s play area in the Chico Mendez Park, begun in 1975 (Figure 6.7); the Regional Swimming Pool (from 1985), with its cavernous concrete interior being slowly invaded by hardy creepers (Figure 6.5); and the Multifunctional Hall next door (1987–​), with its skeletal five-​storey concrete frame and open-​air amphitheatre being overtaken by grass and volcanic ash (Figure 6.6). Even as these projects remained unfinished, others shown on Alterazioni Video’s map, such as 208

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Suspended futures: urban ruins in reverse a multi-​storey car park (1987–​) and a theatre begun in 1956, had been moved further towards completion and away from being ruins in reverse. Indeed, throughout my tour of Giarre’s unfinished structures, I  felt acutely aware of just how difficult it is to categorize them as ruins. On the one hand, both the swimming pool and Multifunctional Hall have many of the qualities of conventional ruins: a silence and emptiness that leads to contemplation, signs of reclamation by nature, and pleasing patinas of decay, principally stained concrete. On the other, parts of the athletics and polo stadium are used by the local population: a new running and cycling track circles the gargantuan concrete stands, while the crumbling concrete structure in the Chico Mendez Park is sited right next to a new playground and café. Indeed, many of Giarre’s new ruins seem to merge with the rest of the town; once paid attention to, abandonment suddenly reveals itself to be everywhere –​in the half-​built houses that litter the town and surrounding areas; in the unfinished extensions to apartments and houses; and in the neglected spaces of the town such as a roundabout next to the Chico Mendez Park.64 This realization that abandoned structures are everywhere and melded with lived space raises questions not only about what constitutes ruin in the built environment but also the future of structures and spaces that seem to serve no function. These questions have informed the work that Alterazioni Video has done in transforming perceptions and uses of Giarre’s unfinished buildings that culminated in the 2010 festival. In their provocative ‘Sicilian incompletion manifesto’, published in 2008, the artists outlined, in ten bullet points, the rationale behind their engagement with what they termed Giarre’s ‘ruins of modernity’.65 Rather than drawing attention to the incomplete as redolent of failure, the manifesto instead embraces Giarre’s new ruins as ‘open to the imagination of the people’ because of their very redundancy in terms of a ‘declared function’.66 Referring to Italy’s ‘thousand-​year philosophical tradition’ of generating ‘places for spiritual habitation and contemplation’, the manifesto argues for an incorporation of new ruins into such a tradition, one that reads them as ‘places of existential awareness, embodiments of the human soul’.67 This may read like an attempt to romanticize Giarre’s new ruins, namely, to incorporate them into the long history of aestheticizing ruins as sites of pleasure. However, the manifesto is also grounded in an allegorical reading 209

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay of Giarre’s ruins as ‘landmarks’ to the ‘laissez-​faire creative enthusiasm’ that characterized Italy’s economic boom years.68 This allegorical emphasis lends Alterazioni Video’s manifesto a critical weight.69 In a similar manner to Camilo Vergara’s proposal to turn Detroit’s abandoned skyscrapers into an ‘American Acropolis’ (see ­Chapter 5), the Archaeological Park of Sicilian Incompletion creates monuments out of new ruins in order to draw attention to the longer cycles of creative destruction on which both capitalism and urbanization are based. In claiming back Giarre’s unfinished buildings as sites for the imagination, Alterazioni Video is, in effect, offering a way of inhabiting these ruins –​of turning them into living rather than dead spaces. Such engagement has also resulted in proposals to ‘complete’ these buildings, whether to turn the athletics and polo stadium into a botanic garden or to refurbish the half-​completed swimming pool as an ecological paradise, in the form of a luxuriant covered pond.70 Within their allegorical reading of Giarre’s ruins, Alterazioni Video also ground these ruins in their local contexts. First, the nature that has returned to the unfinished structures is not generic, but comprises the figs, meadow grass, and cacti of southern Sicily; while the stains and cracks in the concrete surfaces of the structures are temporal traces that speak very precisely of local climactic and geological conditions. Secondly, the 2010 festival saw the town’s ruins appropriated by the local community, albeit in ways that were more anarchic than conventional forms of engagement with heritage sites. During the festival, Giarre’s residents were invited to see their ruins as fertile places for the imagination, countering ideas of them as static structures that represent simply a legacy of failure. Whilst having clear implications for how unfinished buildings are perceived in all geographical contexts, Alterazioni Video’s insistence on local forms of engagement also points to the significance of the wider urban fabric of Giarre and Sicily. If Giarre represents an ‘epicentre’ of the incomplete, the phenomenon also reaches far beyond the town, ‘radiating out … to the rest of the peninsula, creating an Unfinished Italy’.71 During my stay in Sicily I was struck by the sheer proliferation of unfinished buildings in and around Giarre. These included not only entire buildings under construction, where work seemed to be proceeding intermittently if at all, but also countless incomplete additions to existing properties –​extensions that had only been partially completed. Such 210

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Suspended futures: urban ruins in reverse a proliferation of unfinished buildings leads to a distinctive ‘style’ in the built environment, comprised of exposed breeze blocks, projecting concrete reinforcement bars on the rooflines of otherwise seemingly finished buildings, black rectangular holes waiting for windows, and concrete pillars topped with sprouting tendrils of steel.72 As symbols of a future that may never arrive, these incomplete architectures bring temporal complexity to the urban environment, pointing out that unfinished projects and environments are less the exception than the rule. In a remarkably direct way, unfinished buildings suggest a radically uncertain relationship between past, present and future. In acceptance and open display of such uncertainty, these structures represent, albeit in extreme form, the condition found in most cities, that is, the constant churning of creation and destruction.

The future of ruins Ruins in reverse constitute perhaps the most pervasive, but often unnoticed, form of ruination in the built environment today. Although some of these buildings may be completed at some point in the future, there is a sense that the financial meltdown of 2008 has ushered in a new era of perpetual urban crisis, compounded by already existing multiple threats of climate change, terrorism and wars to counter it, rapid urbanization in the developing world, and increasing social division across the world. Given these threats, it seems increasingly likely that architecture will become ever more provisional, designed to accommodate significant adaptation, or simply subject to abandonment. What the examples focused on in this chapter demonstrate is that new ruins, despite their tendency to represent failure (and a failure that is perhaps too close for comfort), nevertheless do not preclude imaginative engagement. Rather, the materiality of such ruins, dominated by porous concrete, offers rich potential for re-​imagining the relationship between the inner lives of people and the built environment they inhabit. In many ways unfinished buildings are more open to such engagement than finished ones –​as demonstrated by Alterazioni Video; in their very incompleteness they invite multiple conceptions of how to ‘complete’ them, that is, how to inhabit them. More generally, embracing ruins in reverse has the potential 211

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The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay to promote a different kind of urbanism from the architect- and planner-​led processes that have dominated the development of modern cities. Rather, incomplete buildings suggest an incremental, collaborative process, where future urban growth depends on salvaging what has been deemed obsolescent and incorporating it into new buildings.73 This may seem a rather pessimistic way of understanding the built environment –​the creation of fragmentary places that inspire only a loose sense of loyalty; yet, it is perhaps one best suited to dealing with the future of our cities. This emphasis on engaging with ruins in order to inhabit them has been central to this book. What I have focused on is how our thinking in relation to ruins can be enriched by engaging with them and how this thinking itself is a form of living in ruins. So, as demonstrated in ­Chapter 1, the inhabitation of ruins might be enacted through the imagination alone. In reading novels or watching films about future urban ruin, we undertake journeys forwards in time to imagine what such an environment would be like to live in. Vicarious living this may be, but it nevertheless can have a powerful effect on how cities will actually evolve over time –​cities, after all, being the meld of matter and mind. At the same time, the ruins we often take for granted, like those in my home city of Manchester, also offer rich potential for new kinds of inhabitation, whether ones that draw together past and present, opening up forgotten seams of history, or others that make a claim on ruined buildings in order to wrest them from the ideology of regeneration, where ruins are both created and destroyed as part of the on-​going accumulation of capital. Large-​scale urban ruins such as the abandoned towns of Varosha and Pripyat have much to teach us about the connections between imagination and reality. Far from imprisoning us in our own subjectivity, the intermingling of the imaginary and the real might actually help us accept the fundamental openness of ruins, that is, their multiple, contested meanings that cannot be resolved into a single narrative. As I found in Detroit, perhaps the most contested place of urban ruin in the world today, those narratives can spin out into an extraordinary array of creative engagements with ruins. Finally, as new urban ruins now litter the planet and we are all left picking through the pieces of abandoned futures, we can nevertheless perhaps be prompted by their material remains to engage more fully in re-​imagining and re-​creating those futures for ourselves. Whether urban 212

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Suspended futures: urban ruins in reverse ruins are old or new, spectacular or mundane, treasured or despised, hidden or all-​too-​exposed, they offer the potential for us to engage with them in multiple ways that meld the subjective and collective and the aesthetic and the political. What might the ruins explored in this book actually look like in the future? Will they all eventually succumb to the seemingly unstoppable power of global capitalism and be recycled back into a system of profit? Or will they be appropriated for other purposes, becoming part of more sustainable, less anthropocentric ways of living in cities? If central London is submerged by rising sea waters, as many predict will happen within the next hundred years, will we find new ways of living in the city’s ruins, or will we abandon them and retreat to higher ground, carrying on as before? If Manchester continues on its path of neoliberal regeneration, will the city’s ruins –​fragments of its industrial past –​be allowed to remain? If not, can we, like the community in Ancoats, seize them before they’re gone and repurpose them for ourselves? If the two main ethnic communities in Cyprus are ever reconciled (and they must be if Turkey is ever to join the European Union), will Varosha be razed and rebuilt or will its ruins be incorporated into a new unified urban landscape in unforeseen ways? Will Pripyat become a living museum –​a place to witness the melding of the human and non-​human –​or will its buildings be overtaken by the non-​human forces that run wild there? Will the creative practices that are transforming some of Detroit’s tens of thousands of abandoned buildings lead to gentrification of those ruins or something more radical, namely buildings becoming art rather than real estate? And will the countless half-​ finished buildings around the world today ever be inhabited, even if they are never completed, or will they simply be left as reminders of lost futures? This book may not have answered these questions, but I hope it has, nevertheless, opened up a field for those with different expertise than its author to translate its emphasis on thinking into action.

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Notes Introduction: urban ruins, imagination and exploration 1. Brian Dillon, ‘Introduction /​A  short history of decay’, in Brian Dillon (ed.), Ruins (London, 2011), pp. 10–​14. 2. See Caitlin DeSilvey and Tim Edensor, ‘Reckoning with ruins’, Progress in Human Geography 37/​4 (2012), p. 3. Since their survey of the recent academic literature on ruination was published in 2012, many more works have appeared, including book-​length studies: Ann Laura Stoler, Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham, NC and London, 2013); Bjørnar Olsen and Þóra Pétursdóttir (eds), Ruin Memories: Materialities and the Archaeology of the Recent Past (London, 2014); Hannah K. Göbel, The Re-​Use of Urban Ruins: Atmospheric Inquiries of the City (London, 2015); and special issues of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38/​ 3 (2014); Performance Research 20/​ 3 (2015); and Transformations 28 (2016). 3. Examples of apocalyptic destruction in post-​9/​11 cinema are legion and in 2014 alone included, large-​scale urban ruination generated by aliens (Edge of Tomorrow), dystopian warfare (The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1), rebooted monsters (Godzilla), and a global pandemic (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes). Recent examples of post-​apocalyptic video games include the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series (2007–​), The Last of Us (2013), and the Fallout series (1997). On the Ruin Lust exhibition, see Brian Dillon, Ruin Lust: Artists’ Fascination with Ruins, from Turner to the Present Day (London, 2014). 4. Stephen Graham, ‘Postmortem city: towards and urban geopolitics’, CITY 8/​2 (2004), p. 188. 5. Ibid., p. 187. 6. Exemplified in Dora Apel’s Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline (New Brunswick, NJ and London, 2015), which is surprising given that the author is an art historian. It also underlies many overtly political readings of ruins, including Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London, 2012). A more nuanced reading of the relationship between politics, aesthetics and ruins is provided by Daryl Martin, ‘Introduction: towards a political understanding of new ruins’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38/​3 (2014), pp. 1037–​46.

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Notes to pages 2–4 7. As far as I am aware there has been no attempt to survey images of urban ruination in contemporary visual culture, and such a survey would be difficult to undertake considering how quickly digital images become obsolete. Yet even a cursory search reveals the extent of the proliferation: as of 10 September 2016, there were over 4 million photographs of ruins on the file-​sharing site Flickr. com; over 9 million news articles (nearly 8,000 on ‘abandoned cities’ alone); and nearly 300,000 Google search results for ‘abandoned cities’. This in addition to the dozens of photographic collections of abandoned sites published by companies such as Carpet Bombing Culture, RomanyWG, and Steidl. 8. This argument is central to Apel’s Beautiful Terrible Ruins. 9. Nick Yablon, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819–​1919 (Chicago, 2009), pp. 3, 5. 10. Stephen Cairns and Jane M. Jacobs, Buildings Must Die:  A  Perverse View of Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 2014), pp. 1–​2. 11. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London, 2011), p. 174. 12. As explored in depth in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine:  The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London, 2008). Klein identifies the shock doctrine strategy as based on neoliberal capitalism’s exploiting of crises to push through controversial exploitative policies while citizens are too emotionally and physically distracted by disasters or upheavals to mount an effective resistance. 13. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA, 1999), p. 97. On the development of aerial warfare and its impact on cities, see Kenneth Hewitt, ‘Place annihilation: area bombing and the fate of urban places’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73/​2 (1983), pp. 257–​84. 14. On the Chinese tradition of contemplating ruined cities, see Wu Hung, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (London, 2012), pp. 18–​19. 15. See Alexander Regier, ‘Foundational ruins: the Lisbon earthquake and the sublime’, in Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (eds), Ruins of Modernity (Durham, NC and London, 2010), pp. 357–​74. 16. On the British context, see David Skilton, ‘Contemplating the ruins of London: Macaulay’s New Zealander and others’, Literary London Journal 2/​1 (2004), available at http://​www.literarylondon.org/​london-​journal/​march2004/​skilton.html; on the American context, see Yablon, Untimely Ruins, pp. 147–​52. 17. George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (New Haven, CT and London, 1971), p. 19. 18. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA, 1986), pp. 384, 386. 19. Georg Simmel, ‘The ruin’ (1911), in Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), Georg Simmel, 1858–​ 1918: A Collection of Essays (Columbus, OH, 1959), pp. 259–​66.

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Notes to pages 4–7 20. On Benjamin and ruins, see Susan Buck-​Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA, 1991), pp. 159–​201; and Emma Fraser, ‘Interrupting progress: ruins, rubble and catastrophe in Walter Benjamin’s history’, unpublished MA thesis, University of Technology, Sydney, 2012. 21. See Rebecca Solnit, ‘The ruins memory’ (2006), in Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscape for Politics (Berkeley, CA, 2007), pp. 351–​70. 22. See, for example, Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA, 2003), p. 19. 23. Mike Davis, ‘The flames of New York’ (2002), in Mike Davis, Dead Cities and Other Tales (New York, 2002), pp. 2–​8; and Terry Smith, The Architecture of Aftermath (Chicago, 2006), pp. 129–​35. 24. See Mike Davis, ‘Dead cities: a natural history’ (2001), in Davis, Dead Cities, pp. 361–​95. 25. See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2001), p. 50. 26. Susan Sontag, ‘The imagination of disaster’ (1965), in Against Interpretation (London, 1994), pp. 216, 225. 27. See, for example, Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins, p. 2. The term ‘ruin porn’ was first coined by Detroit blogger James Griffioen in the late 2000s in response to intense media coverage of the city’s abandoned buildings and their exploitation by filmmakers and urban explorers (see Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins, p. 114). 28. Erik Seyngedouw, ‘Apocalypse forever? Post-​political popularism and the spectre of climate change’, Theory Culture Society 27 (2010), pp. 213–​30; and ‘Apocalypse now! Fear and Doomsday pleasure’, Capitalism Nature Socialism 24/​1 (2013), pp. 9–​18. 29. See Mick Broderick, ‘Surviving Armageddon: beyond the imagination of disaster’, Science Fiction Studies 20/​3 (1993), pp. 362–​82. 30. See Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (Winchester, 2011) for an elucidation of the meanings of what he terms ‘salvagepunk’. 31. Bruce Braun and Stephanie Wakefield, ‘Inhabiting the post-​ apocalyptic city’, Society and Space 32/​1 (2014). Available at http://​societyandspace. com/​2 014/​0 2/​1 1/​bruce-​braun-​and-​stephanie-​w akefield-​i nhabiting-​t he-​ postapocalytic-​city/​. 32. See, for example, Anirban Kapil Baishya, ‘Trauma, post-​apocalyptic science fiction and the post-​human’, Wide Screen 3/​1 (2011), pp. 1–​25. 33. Andy Merrified, Magical Marxism:  Subversive Politics and the Imagination (London, 2011), p.  18. On the relationship between politics and the imagination see also Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics:  Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary (New York, 2014); and Tara Forrest, Politics of Imagination (Bielefeld, 2007). 34. Fredric Jameson, ‘Future city’, New Left Review 21 (2003), p. 73.

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Notes to pages 7–11 35. On the relationship between urban life, politics and the imagination, see Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge, 2002); and Steve Pile, Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life (London, 2005). 36. See the film The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, 2013), 1:01: 28–​1:02:52. 37. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents. Trans. David McLintock (London, 2002; original, 1930), p. 9. 38. Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins. There are many existing studies of the aesthetics of ruins, the most wide-​ranging being Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (London, 1953); Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins (Amsterdam, 2004); Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (Oxford and New York, 2005); Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason (Oxford, 2006); and Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (London, 2002). 39. Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins, pp. 75–​112. 40. Steven High, ‘Beyond aesthetics: visibility and invisibility in the aftermath of deindustrialisation,’ International Labor and Working-​ Class History 84 (2013), pp. 146–​9; and Steven High and David W. Lewis, Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialisation (Ithaca, NY, 2007), pp. 41–​63. See also Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott (eds), Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialisation (Ithaca, NY, 2003); and Alice Mah, Industrial Ruination, Community and Place (Toronto and London, 2012), pp. 3–​19. 41. See, for example, Graeme Kirkpatrick’s political reading of Adorno’s approach to aesthetics in Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game (Manchester, 2011); and Trigg’s The Aesthetics of Decay. 42. Yablon, Untimely Ruins, p. 194. 43. Ibid., p. 193. 44. Ibid., p. 270. 45. See Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London and New Brunswick, NJ, 2000; original, 1989). 46. Edensor, Industrial Ruins, p. 164. 47. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 462. 48. See Cairns and Jacobs, Buildings Must Die; and Robert Harbison, Ruins and Fragments: Tales of Loss and Rediscovery (London, 2015). 49. See Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Times and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA, 2004); William Viney, Waste:  A  Philosophy of Things (London, 2014); and Yablon, Untimely Ruins. 50. See Dillon, ‘Introduction’, pp. 10–​19. 51. See Hayden Lorimer and Simon Murray, ‘The ruin in question’, Performance Research 20/​3 (2015), pp. 58–​66.

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Notes to pages 11–14 52. Silke Arnold-​de Simine, ‘The ruin as memorial  –​the memorial as ruin’, Performance Research 20/​3 (2015), pp. 94–​102. 53. Both Apel and High have mounted such criticism against Edensor’s photographs included in Industrial Ruins. Objecting to the lack of captions or other explanatory text, Apel has argued that Edensor’s photographs show a lack of interest in the social, political or historical contexts of the sites they depict (Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins, pp. 67–​8). 54. A point that is central to many of the articles in Carl Lavery and Richard Gough’s edited collection on ruins and ruination, Performance Research 20/​3 (2015). 55. Chapman’s book Access All Areas: A User’s Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration was released in 2005, just after his untimely death. 56. Bradley L. Garrett, Explore Everything:  Place-​ Hacking the City (London, 2013), p. 15. 57. Ibid., p. 245. The publication of Garrett’s book in 2013 was followed by a court case brought by the British transport police against him and other explorers under charges of conspiring to commit criminal damage. The case ended in May 2014 with a conditional discharge for Garrett. See Robert Booth, ‘Oxford University academic who scaled the Shard is spared jail sentence’, The Guardian, 22 May 2014. 58. Ibid., p. 36. 59. Ibid., pp. 29, 60. 60. See, for example, the untitled photograph on p.  55 in Garrett’s Explore Everything. 61. Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins, p. 71. 62. High, ‘Beyond aesthetics’, p. 147. 63. See Carrie Mott and Susan M. Roberts, ‘Not everyone has (the) balls: urban exploration and the persistence of masculinist geography’, Antipode 46/​1 (2014), pp. 229–​45. 64. See Theo Kindynis, ‘Urban exploration as deviant leisure’, Deviant Leisure, 21  September 2015. Available at https://​deviantleisure.wordpress.com/​2015/​ 09/​21/​urban-​exploration-​as-​deviant-​leisure/​. 65. See Garrett and Harriet Hawkins’s response to Mott and Roberts’s article ‘And now for something completely different:  thinking through explorer subject-​ bodies: a response to Mott and Roberts’, Antipode, 18 November 2013 (available at https://​radicalantipode.files.wordpress.com/​2013/​11/​garrett-​and-​hawkins-​ response.pdf). A  further response by Mott and Roberts was published as ‘Difference really does matter: a reply to Garrett and Hawkins’ (available at http://​ radicalantipode.files.wordpress.com/​2013/​11/​mott-​and-​roberts-​reply.pdf). 66. A point, indeed, acknowledged by Garrett in Explore Everything, p.  241. A  refreshing exception is Emma Fraser’s ‘Urban exploration as adventure tourism: journeying beyond the everyday’, in Hazel Andrews and Les Roberts

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Notes to pages 14–18 (eds), Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-​Between (London, 2012), pp. 136–​61. 67. Garrett, Explore Everything, pp. 62–​4. 68. See Edensor, Industrial Ruins. 69. I had initially posted on a forum on 28DaysLater in early 2013 in relation to gaining access to the Irk culvert in Manchester, only to be ‘exposed’ as a researcher who had not revealed his true intentions. 70. On the ruins of ancient Rome and the grand tour, see Rosemary Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour in Italy, c.1690–​1820 (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 99–​163. 71. See Edensor and DeSilvey, ‘Reckoning with ruins’, p. 78. 72. My companion was the architectural photographer Quintin Lake, whose own images of Pripyat featured in his exhibition Pripyat: 21 Years After Chernobyl (Architectural Association, London, 9 May–​ 6 June 2008)  and his book Drawing Parallels: Architecture Observed (London, 2009), pp. 143, 149, 153, 158, 160. 73. Paul Dobraszczyk, ‘Petrified ruin: Chernobyl, Pripyat and the death of the city’, CITY 14/​4 (2010), pp. 370–​89. 74. On Ağdam, see Alistair Bonnett, Off the Map:  Lost Spaces, Invisible Cities, Forgotten Islands, Feral Places and What They Tell Us About the World (London, 2015), pp. 108–​13. 75. On Hashima Island (also known as Gunkanjima) see Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, Gunkanjima (Göttingen, 2013); and Carl Lavery and Lee Hassall, ‘A Future of Hashima’, Performance Research 20/​3 (2015), pp. 112–​26. Lavery and Hassall’s work arose from their participation in the AHRC-​funded project The Future of Ruins: Reclaiming Abandonment and Toxicity on Hashima Island (see http://​www.futureofruins.org.uk). 76. On imaginary destructions of New York, see Max Page, The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (New Haven, CT and London, 2010); on Los Angeles, see Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York, 1998). 77. On post-​industrial decline and regeneration in rust belt cities, see Julia Czerniak (ed.), Formerly Urban:  Projecting Rust Belt Futures (Princeton, NJ, 2012); on Ivanovo, see Mah, Industrial Ruination, Community and Place, pp. 98–​26. 78. On the Chinese contexts, see, for example, Wade Shepard, Ghost Cities of China: The Story of Cities Without People in the World’s Most Populated Country (London, 2015), and Wu, A Story of Ruins; on the Latin American contexts (with a focus on Argentina), see Gastón R. Gordillo, Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (Durham, NC, 2014). Eyal Weizman’s work on Israel/​Palestine includes Hollow Land. 79. Recent sources include Delwar Hussain, Boundaries Undermined: the Ruins of Progress on the Bangladesh /​Indian Border (London, 2013); and Stoler, Imperial Debris.

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Notes to pages 18–25 80. Emma Fraser, a PhD student at the University of Manchester, is engaged in research with the working title ‘Self and ruin: imagining the end of the city’ that deals with the imagery of post-​apocalyptic cities in video games (see http://​ www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/​ s ubjects/​ s ociology/​ p ostgraduate-​ research/​phd-​students/​emma-​fraser/​).

Chapter 1: Post-​apocalyptic Londons: imagining the death of a city 1. On the origins and development of the idea of the New Zealander, see Skilton, ‘Contemplating the ruins of London’. On Doré’s engraving, see Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon:  People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-​Century London (London, 2000), pp. 212–​15; Woodward, In Ruins, pp.  1–​5; and Yablon, Untimely Ruins, pp. 151–​5. 2. See Johan Höglund, ‘Apocalyptic London: the construction and destruction of the heart of the empire’, Literary London 5/​2 (2007), p. 11. 3. Ibid., pp. 16–​22. See also Nead, Victorian Babylon, pp. 3–​4. 4. See Leo Mellor, Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture (Cambridge, 2011), p. 168. 5. On Benjamin’s allegorical reading of ruins (and in contrast to romantic views), see his The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London, 2009; original, 1928). See also Mark Featherstone, ‘Ruin value’, Journal for Cultural Research 9/​3 (2005), pp. 301–​20; and Naomi Stead, ‘The value of ruins: allegories of destruction in Benjamin and Speer’, Form/​Work 6 (2003), pp. 51–​64. 6. A useful survey of images of ruined London in literature is Patrick Parrinder, ‘ “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”: visions of ruined London from Edmund Spenser to J. G. Ballard’, in Susana Onega and John A. Stotesbury (eds), London in Literature: Visionary Mappings of the Metropolis (Heidelberg, 2002), pp. 19–​34. 7. On the imagination of the flooding of London, see Matthew Gandy, The Fabric of Space:  Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 2014), pp. 185–​215. 8. On the apocalyptic imagination in the discourse of climate change, see, for example, Stefan Skrimshire (ed.), Future Ethics:  Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination (London, 2010); and Swyngedouw, ‘Apocalypse Forever?’. On literary works addressing climate change, see Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-​Putra’s survey ‘Climate change in literature and literary criticism’, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews:  Climate Change 2/​2 (2011), pp. 185–​ 200; and Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Charlottesville, VA, 2015).

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Notes to pages 26–29 9. Stephen Graham, ‘Cities as strategic sites: place annihilation and urban geopolitics’, in Graham, Cities, War, and Terrorism, p. 44. 10. See David L. Pike, Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Culture, 1800–​2002 (Ithaca, NY and London, 2007), p. 47. 11. See Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara (eds), Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J. G. Ballard, 1967–​2008 (London, 2012), p. 51 (interview with Peter Linnett, 1973). 12. On cinematic and televisual images of deserted London, see Peter Hutchings, ‘Uncanny landscapes in British film and television’, Visual Culture in Britain 5/​ 2 (2005), pp. 27–​40. 13. Edward Gibbon, The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon (London, 1896), p. 302. 14. On the British context, see Skilton, ‘Contemplating the ruins of London’; on the American, see Yablon, Untimely Ruins, pp. 147–​52. 15. On the emergence of the last man theme in the early nineteenth century, see A. J. Sambrook, ‘A Romantic theme: the last man’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 2/​1 (1966), pp. 25–​33. 16. The numerous sources on Shelley’s text include William Lomax, ‘Epic reversal in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man: Romantic irony and the roots of science fiction,’ in Michele K. Langford (ed.), Contours of the Fantastic:  Selected Essays from the Eighth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (New  York, 1990), pp. 7–​17; and Samantha Webb, ‘Reading the end of the world: The Last Man, history, and the agency of Romantic authorship’, in Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (eds), Mary Shelley in Her Times (Baltimore, 2000), pp. 119–​33. 17. Mary Shelley, The Last Man (Ware, 2004; original 1826), p. 329. 18. Ibid., p. 343. 19. Ibid., p. 415. 20. Ibid., p. 436. 21. Sellars and O’Hara, Extreme Metaphors, pp. 26–​7 (interview with Lynn Barber, 1970). 22. See Warren Wagar, Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things (Bloomington, IA, 1982). 23. Ibid., p.  126. Of the 60 or so postwar post-​apocalyptic texts referenced by Wagar, only 12 are wholly pessimistic. 24. Brian W. Aldiss, Billion Year Spree:  The History of Science Fiction (London, 1973), p. 293. 25. On Wyndham’s disaster novels in the context of British science fiction, see N. Hubble, ‘Five English Disaster Novels, 1951–​1972’, International Review of Science Fiction 34 (2005), pp. 89–​103; and Nicholas Ruddick, Ultimate Island: On the Nature of British Science Fiction (London, 1993), pp. 137–​72.

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Notes to pages 30–38 26. Ibid., p. 149. 27. Ibid., p. 151. 28. John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (London, 2008; original, 1951), pp. 85–​6. 29. Ibid., p. 86. 30. Mellor, Reading the Ruins, p. 197. 31. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, p. 230. 32. Ibid., p. 231. 33. See Brent Dunham, Danny Boyle: Interviews (Nashville, TN, 2010), pp. 78–​82 (interview with Sandy Hunter, 2002). 34. See Charlotte Brunsdon, London in Cinema:  the Cinematic City Since 1945 (London, 2007), pp. 47–​9. 35. For example, The World, the Flesh and the Devil was based on two significant literary sources: M. P. Sheil’s The Purple Cloud (1901) and Ferdinand Reyher’s story ‘The End of the World’ (1951); while The Omega Man was the second cinematic adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I am Legend. 36. See Brunsdon, London in Cinema, pp. 49–​51. 37. Peter Hutchings, ‘Horror London’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 6 (2009), pp. 196–​7. 38. Baishya, ‘Trauma, post-​apocalyptic science fiction’, pp. 5–​11. 39. Walter Benjamin, ‘A small history of photography’ (1931), in One-​Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London, 1997), p. 243. 40. See Derek Gregory, ‘ “Doors into nowhere” ’: dead cities and the natural history of destruction’, Cultural Memories 4 (2011), pp. 249–​83. 41. On the Trümmerfilm see Robert R. Shandley, Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich (Philadelphia, 2001). 42. Overviews of these invasion novels have been provided by Cecil Degrotte Eby, The Road to Armageddon:  The Martial Spirit in English Popular Literature, 1870–​1914 (Durham, NC, 1987); Höglund, ‘Apocalyptic London’; and Wagar, Terminal Visions, pp. 24, 110. 43. Höglund, ‘Apocalyptic London’, pp. 10–​15. 44. On the history of the imagination of New  York’s destruction see Page, The City’s End. 45. H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (London, 1975; original, 1898), pp. 174–​82. 46. Ibid., p. 112. 47. Ibid., pp. 175–​8. 48. Ibid., p. 178. 49. Ibid., p. 192. 50. On The War in the Air, see Jay Winter’s introduction to Penguin’s 2005 edition of the book. See also Mellor, Reading the Ruins, pp. 138–​40; and Davis, Dead Cities, pp. 2–​3.

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Notes to pages 38–45 51. Mellor, Reading the Ruins, pp. 11–​46. 52. On the significance of the aerial view in modern warfare, see Peter Adey, Mark Whitehead and Alison J. Williams (eds), From Above:  War, Violence and Verticality (London, 2013). On its significance in visual culture, see Mark Dorrian and Frederic Pousin (eds), Seeing from Above:  the Aerial View in Visual Culture (London, 2013). 53. See Ann Saunders and Robin Woolven, London Country Council Bomb Damage Maps 1939–​1945 (London, 2005). The original maps are held in the London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/​AR/​TP/​13. 54. Mellor, Reading the Ruins, p. 174. 55. Rose Macaulay, The World My Wilderness (London, 1958; original 1951), p. 56. 56. Ibid., p. 135. 57. Ibid., p. 41. 58. Ibid., p. 95. 59. Ibid., p. 186. 60. See Lawrence Phillips, ‘Sex, violence and concrete:  the postwar dystopian vision of London in Nineteen Eighty-​Four’, Critical Survey 20/​1 (2008), pp. 69–​ 79. In his own personal memory of Orwell, George Woodcock reflected on how the London of Nineteen Eighty-​Four seemed so much like the reality of the ruin and decay witnessed in the wartime city (p. 70). 61. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-​Four (London, 1983; original, 1949), pp. 67, 74. 62. Ibid. p. 142. 63. On postwar British rural apocalypses in literature, see Hubble, ‘Five English disaster novels’; in television and cinema, see Hutchings, ‘Uncanny Landscapes’, pp. 30–​31. 64. See Phillip Drummond, ‘The London apocalypse:  allegories of futurity in 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later,’ in Phillip Drummond (ed.), The London Reading I:  Essays from Londonicity 2011, the First Annual London Studies Conference (London, 2013), pp. 168–​9. 65. Wells, The War of the Worlds, p. 113. 66. See Mellor, Reading the Ruins, pp. 198–​202. 67. Ibid., p. 169. 68. Davis, Dead Cities, pp. 363–​71. Jefferies’s description of nature overtaking London and the rest of England occupies the first section of After London; or, Wild England (London, 1905; original, 1884), pp. 1–​12. 69. See Laura Spinney, ‘Return to paradise’, New Scientist, 20 July 1996, pp. 26–​31. 70. Jefferies, After London, p. 32. 71. Ibid., p. 178. 72. Ibid., pp. 178–​80. 73. Ibid., p. 181. 74. Ibid., p. 188.

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Notes to pages 45–49 75. On the building of London’s sewer system in the 1860s and its imaginative charge, see Paul Dobraszczyk, Into the Belly of the Beast:  Exploring London’s Victorian Sewers (Reading, 2009). 76. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1935; original, 1895), pp. 92–​7. 77. On The Bed Sitting Room, see Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, pp. 44–​69. 78. The novels are The Wind From Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1965) and The Crystal World (1966). On the Aristotelian elements in Ballard’s early novels, see David Pringle, ‘The fourfold symbolism of J. G. Ballard’, Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction 4 (1973), pp. 48–​60. 79. On Ballard and Surrealism, see Jeanette Baxter, J G Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship (Farnham, 2009). 80. Sellers and O’Hara, Extreme Metaphors, p.  27 (Interview with Lynn Barber, 1970). 81. J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (London, 2011; original, 1962), p. 19. 82. Ibid., p. 29. 83. Ibid., p. 63. 84. Ibid., p. 68. 85. See Baxter, J G Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination, pp. 18–​19. Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London, 2007), p. 288, argues that Ballard’s central obsession is the ‘imagination of a dying class … the canceled future of a vanished colonial and imperial destiny’. 86. Sellers and O’Hara, Extreme Metaphors, p. 90 (interview with James Goddard and David Pringle, 1975). 87. Ibid., pp. 202–​203 (interview with Peter Rönnov-​Jensen, 1984). 88. On Miller’s photographs of wartime London, see Mellor, Reading the Ruins, pp. 124–​8. 89. Ibid., p. 136. 90. Jim Clarke, ‘Reading climate change in J.  G. Ballard’, Critical Survey 25/​2 (2013), p. 9. 91. Matthew Gandy, ‘The Drowned World: J. G. Ballard and the politics of catastrophe’, Space and Culture 9/​1 (2006), p. 86. See also Gandy, The Fabric of Space, pp. 185–​6. 92. ‘Gewalt Ohne Ende’, Die Zeit, 21 April 2009 (available at www.zeit.de/​2005/​37/​ Ballard_​interview). 93. See Victoria Woollaston, ‘New map shows how London could have become an underwater city if the Thames Barrier had never been built’, Mail Online, 9 December 2013 (available at http://​www.dailymail.co.uk/​sciencetech/​article-​ 2520867/​New-​map-​shows-​London-​underwater-​city-​Thames-​Barrier-​built. html). The map was issued by the Environment Agency in the wake of severe flooding in Britain in the winter of 2013.

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Notes to pages 49–56 94. See Gandy, The Fabric of Space, pp. 209–​13. Examples include Flooded London, a series of 3D-​images of London in 2090 produced by the media production studio Squint/​ Opera (available at http://​www.squintopera.com/​projects/​all-​work/​flooded-​london/​); the digital artists Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-​Jones’s Postcards from the Future project (www.london-​futures.com), included as part of the Future London exhibition at the Museum of London (October 2010–​ March 2011); and Ben Olszyna-​ Marzys’s stills and short film London After the Rain (2007; available at https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=6eQHVF9Xuc8). 95. See John Young, ‘With forced perspective, photographer captures London “underwater,” ’ Taxi, 15 July 2013 (available at http://​designtaxi.com/​news/​359291/​ With-​Forced-​Perspective-​Photographer-​Captures-​London-​Underwater/​). 96. Swyngedouw, ‘Apocalypse Forever?’, p.  217. The phrase ‘ecologies of fear’ comes from Davis, Ecology of Fear. 97. Swyngedouw, ‘Apocalypse Forever?’, pp. 217, 219. 98. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles, 2009), p. 112. See also David Cunningham and Alexandra Warwick, ‘Unnoticed apocalypse: the science fiction politics of urban crisis’, City 17/​4 (2013), pp. 433–​48.

Chapter 2: Remnants of disaster: ruins in post-​industrial Manchester 1. The recent regeneration of Manchester’s city centre arguably has its origins in the Manchester Phoenix Initiative, a non-​profit organization set up in 1983 comprised of businessmen, union leaders, architects and developers. On the origins of the organization see Raymond Gerrard, ‘The Manchester Phoenix Initiative’, Property Management 5/​4 (1987), pp. 355–​58. 2. See Euan Kellie, Rebuilding Manchester (Derby, 2010), pp. 145–​49. 3. Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (London, 2010), pp. 115–​55. 4. As described in the English Heritage publication Ancoats: Cradle of Indus­ trialisation (London, 2011). 5. On urban regeneration in Manchester’s city centre, see Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins, pp.  116–​38; Kellie, Rebuilding Manchester; James Peck and Kevin Ward (eds), City of Revolution: Restructuring Manchester (Manchester, 2002). On the more recent regeneration programme in East Manchester, see Georgina Blakeley and Brendan Evans, The Regeneration of East Manchester: A Political Analysis (Manchester, 2013). 6. Peck and Ward, City of Revolution, pp. 1, 4. 7. See Solnit, ‘The ruins memory’, pp. 351–​70. Solnit uses the first ten destructions of San Francisco as her principal example.

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Notes to pages 56–60 8. Ibid., pp. 352, 355. 9. Mark Crinson and Paul Tyrer, ‘Clocking off in Ancoats: time and remembrance in the post-​industrial city’, in Mark Crinson (ed.), Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City (London, 2005), pp. 66–​7. 10. Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor, MN, 1990), p. 59. 11. See Alan Kidd, Manchester (Keele, 1993), pp. 22–​5. 12. Mike Williams with D. A. Farnie, Cotton Mills in Greater Manchester (Preston, 1992), pp. 14–​18. 13. As penned by Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London, 1963), pp. 88–​138, and taken up in Harold L. Platt’s Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago and London, 2005); and Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem:  The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (London, 2004), pp. 11–​34. 14. Keith Warrender has presented an encyclopaedic account of Manchester’s subterranean spaces in his two books Underground Manchester: Secrets of the City (Timperley, 2007) and Below Manchester:  Going Deeper under the City (Timperley, 2009). 15. Warrender, Underground Manchester, pp. 35–​6. 16. On Manchester’s railway viaducts see Brian Rosa’s PhD thesis ‘Beneath the arches: re-​appropriating the spaces of infrastructure in Manchester’ (University of Manchester, 2013). On the railway viaduct as ‘subterranean’ space see David L. Pike, Metropolis on the Styx:  The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–​2001 (Ithaca, NY, 2007), pp. 15, 83, 237–​8. 17. On the extent of Manchester’s cellar dwellings, see Sandra Hayton, ‘Under­ ground dwellings’, in Warrender, Below Manchester, pp. 252–​64. Cellar dwellings feature in many accounts of Victorian Manchester, whether in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Journeys to England and Ireland (1835), p. 103; Frederich Engels’s The Condition of the Working-​Class in England in 1844 (London, 1891; original Leipzig, 1845), pp. 75, 82; or Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel Mary Barton (1848). 18. Manchester’s many watercourses are described in Geoffrey Ashworth’s The Lost Rivers of Manchester (Timperley, 1987). 19. On the development of Manchester’s sewer system, see G. F. Read, Manchester’s Main Drainage System Past and Present (Manchester, 1979). 20. Platt, Shock Cities, pp. 196–​230. 21. Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins, ‘Maps, memories and Manchester: the cartographic imagination of the hidden networks of the hydraulic city’, paper presented at Mapping, Memory and the City: An Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Liverpool, 25–​26 February 2010. 22. Isabella Varley Banks, The Manchester Man (Manchester, 1896), p. 4. 23. Ibid., pp. 5–​7.

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Notes to pages 60–69 24. Warrender, Below Manchester, p. 25. 25. Ibid. p. 2. 26. Engels, The Condition of the Working-​Class, p. 49. 27. Warrender, Below Manchester, p. 138. 28. Kellie, Rebuilding Manchester, pp. 225–​26. 29. See, as examples, http://​www.28dayslater.co.uk/​forums/​uk-​draining-​forum/​ 69398-​optimus-​prime-​manchester-​march-​2012-​a.html; http://​www.urbex forums.com/​showthread.php/​16027-​Optimus-​Prime-​Manchester-​Various-​Re-​ visits-​from-​2011; and http://​www.nichilditch-​short.co.uk/​2013/​05/​victoria-​train-​ station-​optimus-​prime.html. 30. The bridge is shown in ‘A Plan of Manchester and Salford taken about 1650’ included in John Berry’s Plan of the Towns of Manchester & Salford (1750). 31. Tim Edensor, ‘Mundane hauntings: commuting through the phantasmagoric working-​class spaces of Manchester, England,’ Cultural Geographies 15 (2008), p. 321. 32. Ibid., p. 330. 33. Kidd, Manchester, p. 193. 34. For a complete list of these shelters, see Warrender, Below Manchester, pp. 60–​131. 35. Ibid., pp. 147–​62 for the early history of the Victoria Arches. 36. See Warrender, Underground Manchester, pp. 19–​24 for the early history of the Manchester and Salford Junction Canal. 37. The Guardian, 10 August 1939. 38. Warrender, Below Manchester, p. 200. 39. From the description of the tour at Manchester Walks’ website:  http://​www. newmanchesterwalks.com/​walks-​tours/​underground-​other-​unusual-​things/​ underground-​manchester/​. Maintenance work on the tunnels has continued into 2016. 40. Crinson and Tyrer, ‘Clocking off in Ancoats’, p. 63. 41. Solnit, ‘The ruins memory’, p. 352. 42. Warrender, Underground Manchester, p. 26. 43. On the Chislehurst Caves see Eric R. Inman, Chislehurst Caves: A Short History (Orpington, 1996). 44. David L. Pike, Subterranean Cities:  The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800–​1945 (Ithaca, NY, 2005), pp. 12–​14. 45. Steve Pile, Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life (London, 2005), p. 150. 46. Ibid., p. 8. 47. Warrender, Below Manchester, p. 202. 48. Pile, Real Cities, p. 148. 49. Williams and Farnie, Cotton Mills in Greater Manchester, p. 1.

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Notes to pages 69–73 50. See Gary S. Messinger, Manchester in the Victorian Age: The Half-​Known City (Manchester, 1985), pp. 89–​109. 51. Williams and Farnie, Cottons Mills in Greater Manchester, pp. 38–​40. 52. On the mills designed by the Stott family see Duncan Garr and Julian Hunt, The Cotton Mills of Oldham (Oldham, 1985). 53. Marshall Berman, ‘Falling towers:  city life after urbicide’, in D. Crow (ed.) Geography and Identity:  Exploring and Living Geopolitics of Identity (Washington, 1996), pp. 172–​92. 54. Indeed, in Martin Coward’s Urbicide:  The Politics of Urban Destruction (London, 2009), the author does not even acknowledge that demolition is a form of urbicide (p. 131). On the history of demolition see Jeff Byle, Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition (New York, 2005). 55. On the new houses built on the site, see http://​www.livedifrent.com/​oursites/​ royd-​mill/​. 56. On the demolition of the Pruitt-​Igoe buildings as ‘scapegoating’ see Cairns and Jacobs, Buildings Must Die, pp. 204–​10. Demolition as spectacle is clearly part of the appeal of websites such as ‘Implosion World’ (http://​www.implosionworld.com/​cinema.htm). 57. On demolition as waste see Athlyn Cathcart-​Keays, ‘Is demolition the best way to regenerate?’, The Guardian, 4 June 2014 (available at http://​www.theguardian.com/​cities/​2014/​jun/​04/​is-​demolition-​ever-​the-​best-​way-​to-​regenerate); and Deyan Sujdic, ‘Celebratory demolition? The whole idea stinks’, Observer, 2 January 2005 (available at http://​www.theguardian.com/​artanddesign/​2005/​ jan/​02/​architecture). 58. Simmel, ‘The ruin’, pp. 259–​66. 59. On urban exploration and the ethics of photographing ruins, see Garrett, Explore Everything, pp. 30–​38. 60. As of 17 November 2015, Google Maps still showed Royd Mill extant: https://​ www.google.co.uk/​maps/​@53.526398,-​2.131231,3a,75y,252.44h,90t/​data=!3m 4!1e1!3m2!1sdvha93419HOpKaMS-​bQvHQ!2e0. Redevelopment of the site into 52 homes for private rental was nearly complete when I visited the site on the same day. 61. Williams and Farnie, Cottons Mills in Greater Manchester, p. 6. A fire in a mill in Ancoats provided a dramatic scene early on in Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton (1848), pp. 47–​53. 62. See Frank Peel and E. P. Thompson, The Rising of the Luddite: Chartists and Plug-​Drawers (London, 1968). 63. On the 1960s slum clearances in Manchester, see John Parkinson-​Bailey, Manchester: An Architectural History (Manchester, 2000), pp. 191–​93. 64. See http://​www.salfordonline.com/​gmfnews_​page/​27244-​salford_​firefighters_​ tackle_​empty_​mill_​blaze.html for an account of the fire on 7 April 2011. 65. W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants (London, 2002), pp. 168–​69.

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Notes to pages 73–80 66. See http://​www.reelstreets.com/​index.php?option=com_​films&task=view&id= 409&film_​ref=hell_​is_​a_​city_​-​_​trailer&limitstart=0 for a list of the locations used in Hell is a City. 67. See http://​www.reelstreets.com/​index.php/​component/​films/​?task=view&id= 991&film_​ref=taste_​of_​honey for the locations used in A Taste of Honey. 68. Kidd, Manchester, p. 189. 69. Jon Savage, ‘The things that aren’t there anymore’, Critical Quarterly 50:  1/​2 (2008), pp. 181–​83, 187–​96. On the post-​punk scene in Hulme, see Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins, pp. 121–​27. 70. See Mélanie van der Hoorn, Indispensable Eyesores:  An Anthropology of Undesired Buildings (Oxford. 2009), p. 2. 71. ‘Historic mill is “derelict eyesore”  –​Akhtar’, Oldham Evening Chronicle, 10 August 2010. Available at http://​www.oldham-​chronicle.co.uk/​news-​features/​ 8/​news/​45591/​historic-​mill-​is-​derelict-​eyesore-​akhtar. 72. Accounts of Hartford Mill by urban explorers can be found on numerous websites, for example 28 Days Later (http://​www.28dayslater.co.uk/​forums/​tags/​ hartford.html). 73. ‘Rejoicings at Oldham’, Illustrated London News, 16 January 1864, p. 66. 74. On the history of the Platt company, see http://​www.platt.co.uk/​history2.htm. 75. On the relationship between ruins and empire, see Stoler, Imperial Debris. 76. Edensor, Industrial Ruins, p. 154. 77. Ibid. 78. On the history of McConnel and Kennedy’s mills, see Ancoats: Cradle of Industrialization, pp. 14–​25, and Williams and Farnie, Cotton Mills in Greater Manchester; on Murrays’ Mills see I. Miller and C. Wild, A & G Murray and the Cotton Mills of Ancoats (Lancaster, 2007). 79. On the regeneration of Ancoats, see Blakeley and Evans, The Regeneration of East Manchester, pp.  67–​70; and Crinson and Tyrer, ‘Clocking off in Ancoats’. 80. See Shelina Begum, ‘Work starts on historic Murrays’ Mill in Ancoats, Manchester’, Manchester Evening News, 9 May 2016. Available at http://​www. manchestereveningnews.co.uk/ ​ business/ ​ property/​ work-​ s tarts-​ h istoric-​ murrays-​mills-​11303734. 81. Crinson and Tyrer, ‘Clocking off in Ancoats’, p. 66. 82. As set out in Oscar Newman’s influential book Defensible Space:  People and Design in the Violent City (New York, 1972). 83. See Jill Burdett, ‘Ancoats on the up; mills, flats and outdoor terraces’, Manchester Confidential, 8 August 2013. Available at http://​www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/​news/​ancoats-​on-​the-​up-​mills-​flats-​and-​outdoor-​terraces. 84. See http://​www.royalmills.co.uk/​about. 85. On the design of Brunswick Mill, see Williams and Farnie, Cotton Mills in Greater Manchester, pp. 74–​5, 154–​56.

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Notes to pages 80–84 86. See http://​www.skyscrapercity.com/​showthread.php?t=203236&page=22 for the details of the planning application submitted. 87. Author’s interview with John Parke in Brunswick Mill, 13 March 2014. 88. Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, p. 15. 89. Ibid., p. 41. 90. On regeneration strategies in East Manchester see Blakeley and Evans, The Regeneration of East Manchester. 91. Ibid., pp. 156–​85 on the consultation process in the redevelopment of East Manchester. 92. See, for example, Urban Splash’s publication New Islington: Manchester’s Millennium Community (Manchester, undated), pp. 6–​8, 10–​11, 34. On postwar slum clearances in Manchester, see Rosemary Mellor, ‘Hypocritical city: cycles of urban exclusion’, in Peck and Ward, City of Revolution, pp. 215–​18; Parkinson-​Bailey, Manchester, pp. 155–​93; and Savage, ‘The things that aren’t there anymore’, pp. 187–​90. 93. Gaskell, Mary Barton, p. 13. 94. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class, p. 83. 95. Miller and Wild, A & G Murray and the Cotton Mills of Ancoats, p. 2. 96. Kidd, Manchester, p. 46. 97. This misunderstanding of the meaning of the word palimpsest in relation to the built environment of Ancoats is characteristic of Paul Knox, Palimpsests: Biographies of 50 City Districts (Basel, 2011), pp. 22–​29. For more extensive histories of the area, see the Ancoats special edition of the Manchester Region History Review 7 (1993). 98. New Islington, p. 10. 99. On the history of the New Islington Mill, see Miller and Wild, A & G Murray and the Cotton Mills of Ancoats, pp. 40–​49. 100. Ibid., p. 40. 101. Andy Beckett, ‘The estate we’re in’, The Guardian, 24 February 2007. Available at http://​www.theguardian.com/​artanddesign/​2007/​feb/​24/​architecture. 102. As of late 2016, construction was underway for three multistorey apartment buildings lining the Rochdale Canal (built by Manchester Life Development Company), and 44 of the new luxury 2-​and 3-​bedroom private houses on the Cotton Field site (starting at £220,000 in June 2015 for a two-​bedroom property) have been constructed and sold by Urban Splash on the New Islington site. Even though buyers have had some say in the way in which the new spaces are used, the modular designs are a far cry from the original client-​led design scheme proposed by Urban Splash in 2008. On the new houses, see http://​www.urbansplash. co.uk/​documents/​brochure/​HOUSE_​PLASMAPRES_​AUG14_​USWEB.pdf. 103. See New Islington, pp.  10–​11. As stated in this publicity for the new area, ‘over three quarters of the existing residents were unwilling to consider other forms of home’ (p. 10).

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Notes to pages 84–96 104. Len Grant, From the Ground Up: New Islington, 2001–​2007 (Manchester, 2007). 105. Ibid., p. 8. 106. Ben Campkin, Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (London, 2013), especially pp. 164–​68. 107. Ibid., p. 166. 108. Len Grant, Cardroom Voices (Manchester, 2004), ‘Jean’. 109. See http://​vimeo.com/​5274583 (accessed 14 April 2014). 110. Beckett, ‘The estate we’re in’. 111. Grant, Cardroom Voices, preface. 112. See http://​www.ancoatsdispensarytrust.co.uk/​ancoats+hospital+and+ardwic k+and+ancoats+dispensary-​12.html for a history of the building. 113. Quoted in Richard Goulding, ‘In the way of the bulldozers’, Mule, 1 March 2013. Available at http://​manchestermule.com/​article/​in-​the-​way-​of-​bulldozers. 114. Ibid. 115. Amy Glendinning, ‘Ancoats Dispensary is saved after mystery donor stumps up last-​minute £28,000’, Manchester Evening News, 27 March 2015. Available at http://​w ww.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/​news/​greater-​manchester-​ news/​ancoats-​dispensary-​saved-​-​-​after-​8929104#ICID=sharebar_​twitter. 116. See http://​www.ancoatsdispensarytrust.co.uk/​cofhexhibition-​216.html for more information on the 2015 exhibition. 117. All quotations are paraphrased from the author’s interviews with Chris Simpson and Patrick Sudlow (13 March 2014) and Jackie Marston (9 April 2014). 118. See Michel de Certeau and L. Giard, ‘Ghosts in the city,’ in M. de Certeau, L Giard and P. Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2:  Living and Cooking (Minneapolis, 1998), p. 33.

Chapter 3: Fantasy and experience: ruin gazing in Varosha 1. See Edensor, Industrial Ruins, p. 91; and also Garrett, Explore Everything, p. 54. 2. Edensor, Industrial Ruins, p. 149. 3. See Garrett, Explore Everything, pp. 32–​6. A highly nuanced reading of what ruins might mean for notions of heritage is provided in Caitlin DeSilvey’s ‘Observed decay:  telling stories with mutable things’, Journal of Material Culture 11/​3 (2006), pp. 318–​38. 4. On the history of Varosha in relation to the Cyprus conflict, see Gülgün Kayim, ‘Crossing boundaries in Cyprus:  landscapes of memory in the demilitarized zone’, in Marc Silberman, Karen E. Till and Janet Ward (eds), Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe (London, 2012), pp. 211–​16. On the wider Cyprus conflict, see Andrew Borowiec,

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Notes to pages 96–102 Cyprus:  A  Troubled Island (Westport, CT, 2000); Vangelis Calotychos, Cyprus and its People:  Nation, Identity, and Experience in an Unimaginable Community, 1955–​1997 (Boulder, CO, 1998); and James Ker-​Lindsay, The Cyprus Problem: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2011). 5. See John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London, 2010), pp. 137–​44. As Alan Weisman stated to me in an email correspondence (13 January 2013), obtaining official permission to visit Varosha took him many months of writing to officials to arrange to be escorted to selected areas of the town. 6. Weisman, The World Without Us, pp. 91–​7. Turkey is the only country in the world to recognize the legitimacy of the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus. Indeed, in the run-​up to my visit to Varosha in Spring 2013, as a financial crisis engulfed the Greek part of the island (part of the Eurozone), the British media carefully avoided any references to the northern part of the island as a de facto separate state that was largely unaffected by the crisis. 7. In the years following my visit to Varosha, I have been approached by a number of urban explorers interested in gaining access to the town. 8. Garrett, Explore Everything, p. 53. 9. Ibid., pp. 63–​4. 10. I borrow the term ‘voyagers’ from Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London and New York, 2002), p. 16. 11. See Marshall Berman, ‘Falling towers:  city life after urbicide’, in D. Crow (ed.), Geography and Identity:  Exploring and Living Geopolitics of Identity (Washington, 1996), pp. 172–​92; Mike Davis, ‘Dead cities: a natural history’, in Davis, Dead Cities, pp. 361–​99; Graham, ‘Postmortem city’; and Hewitt, ‘Place annihilation’. 12. Martin Coward, Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction (London, 2009), pp. 35–​8. 13. Ibid., p. 38. 14. See Kayim, ‘Crossing boundaries in Cyprus’, pp. 211–​14. 15. Weisman, The World Without Us, pp. 92–​3. 16. On the Brooklyn Bridge in imaginative representations of New York’s future ruin, see Page, The City’s End, pp. 81–​2, 160, 169, 176, 218, 226. As Nick Yablon has noted, the earliest representations of the Brooklyn Bridge in ruins emerged soon after its completion in 1883 (Yablon, Untimely Ruins, pp. 173–​ 4). Recent examples include the films I Am Legend (2007), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Oblivion (2013); and Alexis Rockman’s painting Manifest Destiny (2004). 17. See Broderick, ‘Surviving Armageddon’. 18. Sontag, ‘The imagination of disaster’, pp. 215, 225. 19. See David Sirota, ‘Our addiction to disaster porn’, 2010. Available at http://​ www.creators.com/​opinion/​david-​sirota/​our-​addiction-​to-​disaster-​porn.html;

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Notes to pages 102–105 Timothy Recuber, ‘Disaster porn!’, Contexts 12/​2 (2013), pp. 28–​33; and John Walliss and James Aston, ‘Doomsday America: the pessimistic turn in post-​9/​11 apocalyptic cinema’, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 23/​1 (2011), pp. 53–​ 64. More nuanced readings are provided by Anthony McCosker, ‘De-​framing disaster:  affective encounters with raw and autonomous media’, Continuum 27/​3 (2013), pp. 382–​96; and Karen J. Renner, ‘The appeal of the apocalypse’, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 23/​3 (2012), pp. 203–​11. 20. See Sharon Lee Dawdy, ‘Clockpunk anthropology and the ruins of modernity’, Current Anthropology 51/​6 (2010), p. 762; and Yablon, Untimely Ruins, p. 4. 21. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1988; original, 1757), p. 92. 22. Ibid., p. 93. 23. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London, 2003), pp. 67–​8. 24. Ibid., p. 106. 25. Quoted in Cynthia Cockburn, The Line:  Women:  Partition and the Gender Order in Cyprus (London, 2004). p. 169. 26. See Sevgul Uludag, ‘The beautiful Varosha, now a ghost’, 14 July 2013, posted on the website of Yeralti Notlari. Available at http://​sevgululudag.blogspot. co.uk/​2013/​07/​the-​beautiful-​varosha-​now-​ghost.html. 27. Quoted in Kayim, ‘Crossing boundaries in Cyprus’, p. 226. 28. See ‘Varosha today’, The Varosha Blog, 25 August 2010. Available at http://​ www.rhinocarhire.com/​The-​Varosha-​Blog/​Varosha-​Today.aspx. 29. See Paul Dobraszczyk, ‘Into the Forbidden Zone: Varosha, ghost city of Cyprus’, Rag-​picking History, 30 March 2013. Available at http://​ragpickinghistory.co.uk/​ 2013/​03/​30/​into-​the-​forbidden-​zone-​varosha-​ghost-​city-​of-​cyprus/​. 30. Paraphrased from an email correspondence between the author and Afghi, 8 September 2013. 31. Paraphrased from an email correspondence between the author and Olia, 10 December 2014. 32. Paraphrased from an email correspondence between the author and George, 5 August 2014. 33. Email correspondence between the author and Afghi, 8 September 2013. 34. Quoted from an email correspondence between the author and Olia, 10 December 2014. 35. For George’s comments, see https://​www.flickr.com/​photos/​10483759@N04/​ 8601189908/​in/​album-​72157633115261197/​. 36. Coward, Urbicide, p. 12. 37. Uludag, ‘The beautiful Varosha’. 38. Indeed, the establishment of a ‘bi-​community’ in Varosha is the aim of Bicommunal Famagusta Initiative, a Turkish-​Cypriot association that is calling for the old city of Famagusta to be designated a World Heritage site and Varosha to be reconstructed as a resort (see Uludag, ‘The beautiful Varosha’).

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Notes to pages 105–109 39. On the Famagusta Ecocity Project, see http://​ecocityproject.com/​famagusta/​. 40. The film, titled The Famagusta Ecocity Project: A Story Seeking its Documentary (Vasia Markides, 2013) is available at https://​vimeo.com/​75332054. 41. See Richard Hopper and Vibeke Venema, ‘Varosha:  the abandoned tourist resort’, BBC News Magazine, 14 January 2014. Available at http://​www.bbc. co.uk/​news/​magazine-​25496729. 42. On the project participants, see http://​ecocityproject.com/​famagusta/​our-​ team/​. 43. Quoted on the project’s website at http://​ecocityproject.com/​famagusta/​. The project leaders organized a public meeting in Cyprus on 16 April 2014, where former residents of Varosha voiced their concerns about the project’s aims. Summarized on the project website (see http://​ecocityproject.com/​blog/​2014/​ 04/​16/​hopes-​fears/​), these concerns centred on fears that the existing built environment of Varosha would be radically transformed by the proposal; many expressed the desire to renovate extant buildings rather than demolish and rebuild, and some wanted at least part of the town to be preserved as a memorial to its time of abandonment. 44. Coward, Urbicide, p. 12. 45. Andreas Schönle, Architecture of Oblivion: Ruins and Historical Consciousness in Modern Russia (DeKalb, IS, 2011), p. 230. 46. George Stewart, Earth Abides (London, 1999; original, 1949). This novel, along with Jefferies’s After London, provided a focus for Mike Davis’s analysis of the imagination of dead cities (Davis, ‘Dead cities’, pp. 363–​79). 47. Broderick, ‘Surviving Armageddon’, pp. 373–​9. 48. Ibid., p. 373. Broderick relates the theme of the ‘hero’ in post-​apocalyptic cinema of the 1980s to the emergence of increasingly pessimistic imagery of genocidal nuclear stockpiles in the late 1970s coupled with a ‘renewed bellicose Christian fundamentalism’ (p. 379). The post-​9/​11 period has also seen a plethora of apocalyptic films in the ‘hero’ mould, including The Matrix Revolutions (2003), War of the Worlds (2005), I Am Legend (2007), The Road (2009), The Book of Eli (2010), After Earth (2013), and Oblivion (2013). 49. W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. Trans. M. Hulse (London, 2002; original, 1995), pp. 233–​37. 50. On post-​ apocalyptic television programmes, see Renner, ‘The appeal of the apocalypse’, pp.  205–​208; on the Fallout series, see Martin Pichlmair, ‘Assembling a mosaic of the future:  the post-​nuclear world of Fallout 3’, Eludamos 3/​1 (2009), pp. 107–​13. 51. Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, p. 179. 52. Žižek, Living in the End Times, p. 82. 53. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1979), p. viii. 54. See The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, 2013), 1:01:28–​1:02:52.

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Notes to pages 109–115 55. See Kevin Boyle, ‘Children of Men and I Am Legend: the disaster-​capitalism complex hits Hollywood’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 51 (2009), pp. 8–​13; and Žižek, Living in the End Times, pp. 61–​3. 56. Johannes von Moltke, ‘Ruin cinema’, in Hell and Schönle, Ruins of Modernity, p. 411. 57. Ibid., p. 413. 58. William Viney, ‘Ruins of the future’, in John Scanlan and J. F. M. Clark (eds), Aesthetic Fatigue:  Modernity and the Language of Waste (Cambridge, 2013), p. 141. See also Viney, Waste: A Philosophy of Things, pp. 153–​76. 59. Tim Edensor, ‘Walking through ruins’, in Tim Ingold and J. L. Vergunst (eds), Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot (Farnham, 2008), p. 127. 60. Ibid., p. 134. 61. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, p. 237. 62. See Baishya, ‘Trauma, post-​apocalyptic science fiction’, p. 5. 63. As also argued by Dawdy, ‘Clockpunk anthropology’, p. 773; and Viney, ‘Ruins of the future’, p. 159. 64. Greg Garrard, ‘Worlds without us: some types of disanthropy’, SubStance 1/​127 (2012), pp. 40–​42. In Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (London, 1964; original, 1927), the section ‘Time passes’ charts the interior of a house as it ages without the presence of its inhabitants (pp. 143–​63). 65. As first set out in James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia as seen through the atmosphere’, Atmospheric Environment 6 (1972), pp. 579–​80. 66. On disanthropic television programmes, see Mark S. Jendrysik, ‘Back to the garden:  new visions of posthuman futures’, Utopian Studies 22/​1 (2011), pp. 34–​51. On Life After People, see Christine Cornea, ‘Post-​apocalyptic narrative and environmental documentary: the case of “Life After People” ’, in Christine Cornea and Rhys Owain Thomas (eds), Dramatising Disaster: Character, Event, Representation (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 151–​66. On Wall*E, see Christopher Todd Anderson, ‘Post-​apocalyptic nostalgia: WALL-​E, garbage, and American ambivalence toward manufactured goods’, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 23/​3 (2012), pp. 267–​82; and Hugh McNaughton, ‘Distinctive consumption and popular anti-​consumerism: the case of Wall*E’, Continuum 26/​5 (2012), pp. 753–​66. 67. Garrard, ‘Worlds without us’, p. 43. 68. Žižek, Living in the End Times, p. 80. 69. Weisman, The World Without Us, pp. 91–​100. 70. Simmel, ‘The ruin’, p. 261. 71. Ibid., p. 266. 72. DeSilvey, ‘Observed decay’, p. 324. 73. Ibid., p. 323. 74. Ibid., p. 328.

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Notes to pages 116–119 75. See Tim Edensor, ‘Waste matter –​the debris of industrial ruins and the disordering of the material world’, Journal of Material Culture 10/​3 (2005), pp. 311–​32; and DeSilvey, ‘Observed decay’. 76. Edensor, ‘Waste matter’, p. 330. 77. DeSilvey, ‘Observed decay’, p. 328. 78. See Ayla Jean Yackley, ‘Ghost town may hold the key to Cyprus reunification talks’, Independent, 12 August 2012. Available at http://​www.independent.co.uk/​ news/​world/​europe/​ghost-​town-​may-​hold-​the-​key-​to-​cyprus-​reunification-​ talks-​8034868.html. A number of factors have contributed to the renewed interest in Varosha: Cyprus’s presidency of the European Union in 2012; the decision by the European Court of Human Rights in January 2012 ordering Turkey to pay about €20 million to 13 hotel and other business owners in Varosha for the loss of their property; the discovery of vast fields of natural gas off the coast of northern Cyprus; and the financial crisis in Greek-​occupied Cyprus in 2013. 79. Ibid. 80. See the website of the project at http://​www.go4famagusta.org. 81. See Theodora Vardouli, and Elefthera Xanthouli, and Athanassios Stathopoulos, ‘The RECorder: a participatory digital platform for the rehabilitation of the city of Famagusta in Cyprus’ (2011). Available at http://​architecture.mit.edu/​computation/​publication/​recorder-​p articipatory-​digital-​ platform-​rehabilitation-​city-​famagusta-​cyprus. 82. Lebbeus Woods, War and Architecture (New York, 1993), p. 10. 83. A concern mirrored by Denis Maher, ‘900 miles to paradise, and other afterlives of architecture’, in Donald Kunze, David Bertolini and Simone Brott (eds), Architecture Post-​Mortem: The Diastolic Architecture of Decline, Dystopia, and Death (Farnham, 2013), p. 229.

Chapter 4: Disaster and memory: the ruins of Chernobyl and Pripyat 1. The Chernobyl disaster has been the subject of countless books and articles, most of which focus on the causes and after-​effects of the accident from a scientific point of view. The self-​proclaimed ‘definitive’ history is Richard F. Mould’s Chernobyl Record: The Definitive History of the Chernobyl Catastrophe (Bristol and Philadelphia, 2000); other significant sources include Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl (Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2013); and Jim Smith and Nicholas A. Beresford, Chernobyl: Catastrophe and Consequences (Berlin, 2005). 2. See ‘ “Chernobyl Diaries”:  Horror flick RIPPED by victim support group’, TMZ, 21 May 2015. Available at http://​www.tmz.com/​2012/​05/​21/​chernobyl-​diaries-​horror-​flick-​ripped-​by. The charity was the Friends of Chernobyl Centers, U.S. (see http://​www.friendsofchernobylcenters.org/​movie.html).

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Notes to pages 120–121 3. The Kiev travel agent was SoloEast Travel, who have significantly upscaled their Chernobyl tours since 2007 after guiding some high-​profile groups, such as the BBC’s Top Gear presenters in 2014; in late 2015, they were offering 2-​day tours of Chernobyl’s zone. See http://​www.tourkiev.com. 4. See Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism. 5. See Richard Sharpley, ‘Shedding light on dark tourism:  an introduction’, in Richard Sharpley and Philip Stone (eds), The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism (Bristol, 2009), p. 18. According to travel agents, the average dosage of radiation received on a five-​hour visit to Chernobyl is no more than the exposure on a single transatlantic flight (see Sarah Johnstone, ‘Chernobyl’, in Ukraine (London, 2005), p. 75). 6. As acknowledged by Philip Stone, ‘Dark tourism:  morality and new moral spaces’, in Sharpley and Stone, The Darker Side of Travel, pp. 56–​72. 7. Imogen Wall, ‘Postcard from hell’, Guardian, 18 October 2004. Available at http://​www.theguardian.com/​world/​2004/​oct/​18/​nuclear.russia. 8. See Dobraszczyk, ‘Petrified ruin’; and ‘Chernobyl diaries’. 9. Ulrich Beck, ‘The anthropological shock: Chernobyl and the contours of the risk society’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32 (1987), pp. 153–​65. 10. On Chernobyl and tourism see Ganna Yankovska and Kevin Hannam, ‘Dark and toxic tourism in the Chernobyl exclusion zone’, Current Issues in Tourism 17/​10 (2014), pp. 929–​39; Philip R. Stone, ‘Dark tourism, heterotopias and post-​ apocalyptic places: the case of Chernobyl’, in Leanne White and Elspeth Frew (eds), Dark Tourism and Place Identity: Managing and Interpreting Dark Places (London, 2013), pp. 79–​94; Svetlana Bodrunova, ‘Chernobyl in the eyes: mythology as a basis of individual memories and social imaginaries of a “Chernobyl child” ’, Anthropology of East Europe Review 30/​1 (2012), pp.  22–​3; Sarah D. Phillips and Sarah Ostaszewski, ‘An illustrated guide to the post-​catastrophic future’, Anthropology of East Europe Review 30/​1 (2012), pp. 129–​33; and Jeff Goatcher and Viv Brunsden, ‘Chernobyl and the sublime tourist’, Tourist Studies 11/​2 (2011), pp. 115–​37. Tourism to Chernobyl has been popularized in such books as Andrew Blackwell, Visit Sunny Chernobyl: Adventures in the World’s Most Polluted Places (London, 2013), and Dom Joly, The Dark Tourist: Sightseeing the World’s Most Unlikely Holiday Destinations (London, 2010). 11. The most important sources that focus on the testimonies of Chernobyl’s ‘sufferers’ (as they are officially designated in Ukraine) are Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl:  Chronicle of the Future. Trans. Antonina W. Bouis (London, 1999); and Petryna, Life Exposed. 12. See the statement issued by the Friends of Chernobyl Centers, U.S. at http://​ www.friendsofchernobylcenters.org/​movie.html; and Thom Davies, ‘The real Chernobyl diaries:  notes from Ukraine’, The Independent, 13 July 2012. Available at http://​blogs.independent.co.uk/​2012/​07/​11/​the-​real-​chernobyl-​ diaries-​notes-​from-​ukraine/​.

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Notes to pages 122–128 13. Guillaume Grandazzi, ‘Commemorating the Chernobyl disaster: remembering the future’, Eurozine, 21 April 2006, trans. Mischa Gabowitsch. Available at http://​www.eurozine.com/​articles/​2006-​04-​21-​grandazzi-​en.html. 14. See Henry Hamman and Stuart Parrott, Mayday at Chernobyl (London, 1987), pp. 10–​11. 15. See Mould, Chernobyl Record, pp. 50–​72. 16. See James H. Bater, The Soviet Scene:  A  Geographical Perspective (London, 1989), p.  29; and Judith Pallot and Denis J.  B. Shaw, Planning in the Soviet Union (London, 1981), pp. 246–​53. 17. Stas Tyrkin, ‘In Stalker Tarkovsky foretold Chernobyl’, Komsomolskaya Pravda, 23 March 2001. Available at http://​people.ucalgary.ca/​~tstronds/​nostalghia.com/​TheTopics/​Stalker/​sharun.html. On the symbolism of Stalker’s zone, see Geoff Dyer, Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room (Edinburgh, 2013). 18. Robert Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (London, 2008), p. 69. 19. Julia Voznesenskaya, The Star Chernobyl. Trans. A. Meyers (London, 1987), p. 155. 20. Quoted in Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl, p. 56. 21. Ibid., p. 78. 22. Ibid., p. 174. 23. Ibid., p. 26. 24. Smith, The Architecture of Aftermath, pp. 154–​5. 25. In the months after the 9/​11 terrorist attacks, ground zero became a place of mass tourism: in 2002 the site attracted 3.5 million visitors –​almost double the number that annually visited the observation platform of the World Trade Center prior to the attacks. See Sharpley, ‘Shedding light on dark tourism’, p. 5. On the memorialization of the 9/​11 attacks, see David Simpson, 9/​11:  The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago, 2006). 26. Of the countless books and articles that consider the technological causes and environmental after-​effects of the Chernobyl accident, the most significant English-​language ones are Zhores Medvedev, The Legacy of Chernobyl (New York, 1990); and Mould, Chernobyl Record. 27. On the New Safe Confinement structure, see http://​www.ebrd.com/​what-​we-​ do/​sectors/​nuclear-​safety/​chernobyl-​new-​safe-​confinement.html. 28. Stone, ‘Dark tourism’, p. 81. 29. Peter Gould, Fire in the Rain:  The Democratic Consequences of Chernobyl (Baltimore, 1990), p. 26. 30. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA, 1992), pp. 177–​8. 31. Adriana Petryna, ‘Sarcophagus:  Chernobyl in historical light’, Cultural Anthropology 10/​2 (1995), p. 197.

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Notes to pages 128–134 32. Sarah D. Phillips, ‘Chernobyl’s sixth sense: the symbolism of an ever-​present awareness’, Anthropology and Humanism 29/​2 (2004), p. 70. 33. On Shevchenko’s film, see Susan Schuppli, ‘The most dangerous film in the world’, in Roy Le Frederik, Nele Wynants, Robrecht Vanderbeeken, and Dominiek Hoens (eds), Tickle Your Catastrophe (Ghent, 2010), pp. 130–​45. The film was also incorporated in artists Jane and Louise Wilson’s film The Toxic Camera (2012), shown together with their photographs of Pripyat, Atomograd (Nature Abhors a Vacuum) at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 6 October 2012–​27 January 2013. 34. See Phillips and Ostaszewski, ‘An illustrated guide’, pp. 129–​33. In June 2011, the Ukrainian authorities suspended all tours to Chernobyl’s zone after prosecutors declared most of them to be illegal. However, the move was short-​lived, with most tours resuming in early 2012. See Andrew Osborn, ‘Chernobyl’s “illegal” tours stopped’, Telegraph, 20 September 2011. Available at http://​www. telegraph.co.uk/​news/​worldnews/​europe/​russia/​8777543/​Chernobyls-​illegal-​ tours-​stopped.html. 35. I describe my tour in more detail in Dobraszczyk, ‘Petrified ruin’, pp. 370–​89. 36. Petryna, Life Exposed, p. 4. 37. On the Kiev memorial, see James A. Southers, ‘New Heroes of Chernobyl memorial opens –​Kiev’, Demotix, 26 April 2011. Available at http://​www. demotix.com/ ​ n ews/ ​ 6 70498/ ​ n ew- ​ h eroes- ​ c hernobyl- ​ m emorial- ​ o penskiev#media-​670487. 38. Tatiana Kasperski, ‘Chernobyl’s aftermath in political symbols, monuments and rituals’, Anthropology of East Europe Review 30/​1 (2012), pp. 93–​4. 39. Ibid., pp. 93–​5. 40. Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl, pp. 5–​23. 41. Petryna, Life Exposed, pp. 115–​48. 42. On Innocent Saturday, see Johanna Lindbladh, ‘Coming to terms with the Soviet myth of heroism 25 years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster: an interpretation of Aleksandr Mindadze’s existential action movie Innocent Saturday’, Anthropology of East Europe Review 30/​1 (2012), pp. 113–​27. 43. Chernobyl Diaries received little critical approval or attention on its release in 2012, apart from several online articles criticizing its tasteless approach to the subject. An interview with the film’s writer/​producer Oren Peli and Chase Whale can be found at Next Movie, 25 May 2012. Available at http://​www. nextmovie.com/​blog/​oren-​peli-​interview-​chernobyl-​diaries/​. 44. Hammam and Parrott, Mayday at Chernobyl, pp. 9–​11. 45. Phillips and Ostaszewski, ‘An illustrated guide’, pp. 129–​33. 46. The 2008 television programme Life After People used Pripyat to examine what the world would look like after 20 years without humans.

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Notes to pages 137–142 47. The looting of Pripyat forms part of Chernobyl’s victims’ experience in Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, pp.  32–​3. See also Andrea Zink, ‘Approaching the void –​Chernobyl in text and image’, Anthropology of East Europe Review 30/​1 (2012), p. 105; and Jennifer L. Johnson, ‘Orphaned structures: reading abandoned buildings through an anthropological lens’, Crimes of the Free, 1 April 2007. Available at http://​crimesofthefree.blogspot.com. 48. See Robert Polidori, Zones of Exclusion:  Pripyat and Chernobyl (Göttingen, 2003), back cover. 49. Anne Marie Todkill, ‘Overexposure:  the Chernobyl photographs of David McMillan’, CMAJ 164/​11 (2001), p. 1604. 50. See Quintin Lake, Drawing Parallels:  Architecture Observed (London, 2009), p. 149. 51. As of 12 December 2016, there were 2,970,000 Google search results for the town, most of which included photographs; and nearly 55,000 images on the photography-​sharing website Flickr. 52. Wall, ‘Postcard from hell’. 53. See Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay, p. 184. 54. See Phillips and Ostaszewski, ‘An illustrated guide’, p.  134. On the mural of The Simpsons, see Paul Mullins, ‘Negotiating disaster and apprehension: representing Chernobyl’, Archaeology and Material Culture, 25 November 2012. Available at http://​paulmullins.wordpress.com/​2012/​11/​25/​negotiating-​ disaster-​and-​apprehension-​representing-​chernobyl/​. 55. On tourists’ interventions in Pripyat, see Stone, ‘Dark tourism’; and Mary Mycio, ‘Chernobyl:  a photoessay’, Kyiv Post, 26 April 2011. Available at http://​www.kyivpost.com/​opinion/​op-​ed/​chernobyl-​a-​photoessay-​102918. html?flavour=mobile. 56. According to the project’s website, www.Pripyat.com was founded in 2004 by former residents of the town and has since grown into the world’s largest online community about the Chernobyl disaster, receiving over 90,000 hits per month. Other similar sites include the network Vkontakte (http://​vk.com/​ chernobyl_​world and http://​vk.com/​chernobyl_​group). 57. Other documentary films about Pripyat include White Horse (Christophe Bisson and Maryann De Leo, 2008); and Pripyat:  City of the Future (David Bickerstaff, 2006). 58. Phillips and Ostaszewski, ‘An illustrated guide’, p. 132. 59. Ibid., pp. 135–​6. 60. Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl, pp. 32–​3. 61. Ibid., p. 86. 62. Ibid., p. 131. 63. Other recent fictional films that have used Pripyat as a setting include A Good Day to Die Hard (John Moore, 2013); Land of Oblivion (Michale Boganim, 2011); and Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Michael Bay, 2011).

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Notes to pages 142–149 64. Jim Rossignoi, ‘S.T.A.L.K.E.R. interview, with Anton Bolshakov of CSG Gameworld’, Rock Paper Shotgun, 10 December 2007. Available at http://​www. rockpapershotgun.com/​2007/​12/​10/​stalker-​interview/​. 65. Claire Sponsler, ‘Beyond the ruins: the geopolitics of urban decay and cybernetic play’, Science Fiction Studies 20 (1993), pp. 253–​4. 66. Phillips and Ostaszewski, ‘An illustrated guide’, p.  129. Nick Rush-​Cooper  –​ himself a Chernobyl guide –​has researched the links between the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games and tourism at the Chernobyl site. See Nicholas Rush-​Cooper, ‘Exposures: exploring selves and landscapes in the Chernobyl exclusion zone’, unpublished PhD thesis, Durham University, 2013. 67. Bodrunova, ‘Chernobyl in the eyes’, p. 23. 68. See Nick Rush-​Cooper, ‘Into the zone: how gamers experience the real Chernobyl’, Rock Paper Shotgun, 14 May 2014. Available at http://​www.rockpapershotgun. com/​2014/​05/​14/​in-​the-​zone-​how-​gamers-​experience-​the-​real-​chernobyl/​. 69. Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl, pp. 73, 85. 70. Ibid., p. 121. 71. See Chase Whale’s 2012 interview with Oren Peli, the writer/​producer of Chernobyl Diaries. Available at http://​www.nextmovie.com/​blog/​oren-​peli-​ interview-​chernobyl-​diaries. 72. See http://​www.friendsofchernobylcenters.org/​movie.html; and Davies, ‘The real Chernobyl diaries’. 73. Davies, ‘The real Chernobyl diaries’. 74. Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl, p. 101. 75. Ibid. See also Petryna, Life Exposed, p. xx. 76. See http://​www.nextmovie.com/​blog/​oren-​peli-​interview-​chernobyl-​diaries/​. 77. Frank Uekoetter, ‘Fukushima and the lessons of history: remarks on the past and future of nuclear power’, in Jens Kersten, Frank Uekoetter and Marcus Vogt, Europe After Fukushima:  German Perspectives of the Future of Nuclear Power (Munich, 2012), pp. 29–​30. 78. Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver, ‘Introduction’, in Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver (eds), The Memory of Catastrophe (Manchester, 2004), p. 7. 79. James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-​Apocalypse (Minneapolis, 1999), p. 25. 80. Huyssen, Present Pasts, p. 69.

Chapter 5: Urban futures, art and the imagination of Detroit 1. Bianna Golodryga, ‘Detroit bouncing back from bankruptcy’, Yahoo News, 17  December 2014. Available at http://​news.yahoo.com/​detroit-​bounces-​ back-​from-​bankruptcy-​211308136.html.

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Notes to pages 149–154 2. Wills Robinson, ‘The tiny urban island of downtown Detroit, lost in the wide open spaces of a depopulated city: skyscrapers give way to scrubland, farms and countryside in amazing aerial shots’, Mail Online, 16 December 2014. Available at http://​www.dailymail.co.uk/​news/​article-​2875525/​The-​tiny-​urban-​island-​ downtown-​D etroit-​Aerial-​pictures-​city-​s-​skyscrapers-​surrounded-​abandoned-​homes-​housing-​plots-​mansions-​sprawling-​countryside.html. 3. David Sheridan, ‘Making sense of Detroit’, Michigan Quarterly Review 38/​3 (1999), pp. 321–​22. 4. Ibid., p. 322. 5. Julie Pincus and Nichole Christian’s Canvas Detroit (Detroit, 2014) gives a sense of the range of artists working in the city in recent years. 6. On the Kresge Foundation’s arts and culture funding, see http://​kresge.org/​ programs/​arts-​culture. 7. See the website of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCAD) at http://​ www.mocadetroit.org. 8. On Detroit Artists Market, see http://​www.detroitartistsmarket.org. 9. Jerry Herron, ‘Detroit:  disaster deferred, disaster in progress’, South Atlantic Quarterly 106/​4 (2007), pp. 663–​83. 10. A similar approach has been applied to a small number of art projects in Andrew Herscher, ‘Detroit art city: urban decline, aesthetic production, and public interest’, in Margaret Dewar and Jane Manning Thomas (eds), The City After Abandonment (Philadelphia, 2013), pp. 64–​83. 11. J. G. Ballard, ‘Chronopolis’ (1960), in The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (New York and London, 2009), pp. 150–​68. 12. Ibid., p. 156. 13. Julia Czerniak, ‘Introduction’, in Czerniak, Formerly Urban, p. 22. 14. See the website of Loveland at https://​makeloveland.com/​us/​mi/​wayne/​ detroit. See also Anon., Detroit Future City: 2012 Detroit Strategic Framework Plan (Detroit, 2012), p.  272. The book is available to download at http://​ detroitfuturecity.com/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2014/​12/​DFC_​Full_​2nd.pdf. 15. Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis:  Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (New York, 1996). Detroit’s racial segregation has also been dealt with in Reynolds Farley, Sheldon Danzinger and Harry J. Holzer’s Detroit Divided (New  York, 2002); and Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca, NY, 2004). 16. See, for example, Sidney Fine’s exhaustive Violence in the Model City:  The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (Detroit, 2007); and Hubert G. Locke’s contemporaneous account of the disturbances in Detroit Riot of 1967 (Detroit, 1969). 17. Epitomized in Ze’ev Chafets’s provocative book Devil’s Night:  And Other True Tales of Detroit (New  York, 1990). A  more academic account from this

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Notes to pages 154–157 period is Jerry Herron’s AfterCulture:  Detroit and the Humiliation of History (Detroit, 1995). 18. Two recent popular accounts include Mark Binelli’s The Last Days of Detroit: Motor Cars, Motown and the Collapse of an Industrial Giant (New  York, 2014); and Charlie LeDuff ’s Detroit: an American Autopsy (London, 2014). 19. See, for example, Daniel Okrent, ‘The tragedy of Detroit: how a great city fell –​ and how it can rise again’, Time, 24 September 2009. Available online at http://​ content.time.com/​time/​magazine/​article/​0,9171,1926017,00.html. This story, which launched Time’s year-​long residency in Detroit, featured on the cover of this edition of the magazine along with the final photograph included in Marchand and Meffre’s Ruins of Detroit. 20. As parodied in Thomas Morton’s, ‘Something, something, something, Detroit’, Vice, 1 August 2009. Available at http://​www.vice.com/​read/​something-​ something-​something-​detroit-​994-​v16n8. Dora Apel provides a concise account of the city’s deterioration in the last decade (against the background of this media scrutiny) in Beautiful Terrible Ruins, pp. 27–​57. 21. Laurence Goldstein, ‘The image of Detroit in twentieth-​century literature’, Michigan Quarterly Review 25/​2 (1986), pp. 269–​91. 22. Ibid., pp. 275–​77. 23. ‘An Abandoned Factory, Detroit’, in Philip Levine, On the Edge (Iowa City, IO, 1963). 24. Goldstein, ‘The image of Detroit’, p. 282. 25. Joyce Carol Oates, them (New York, 1992; original, 1969), p. 232. 26. An encyclopedic list of documentaries on Detroit is provided in Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins, p. 176, n. 27. 27. See Binelli, The Last Days of Detroit, p. 15. On recent productions set in Detroit, see the website of Pure Michigan Film Office at http://​www.michiganfilmoffice.org/​made-​in-​michigan/​coming-​soon/​default.aspx. 28. See Jonathan Romney, ‘Film of the week: It Follows’, Filmcomment, 12 March 2015 (available at http://​www.filmcomment.com/​entry/​david-​robert-​mitchell-​ it-​follows-​review). On the film’s portrayal of Detroit, see also Mark Binelli, ‘How It Follows uses Detroit to explore the horror of urban decay’, Slate, 1 April 2015. Available at http://​www.slate.com/​authors.mark_​binelli.html. 29. A prediction that has also been repeated elsewhere. See, for example, Francis Grunow, ‘Detroit may be bankrupt, but it’s 600 feet above sea level’, modelD, 11 February 2014 (available at http://​www.modeldmedia.com/​features/​ neighborhood3-​21114.aspx). 30. On photography and Detroit’s ruins, see Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins, pp. 75–​ 100; Nate Millington, ‘Post-​ industrial imaginaries:  nature, representation and ruins in Detroit, Michigan’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37/​1 (2013), pp. 279–​96; and Andrew Emil Gansky, ‘ “Ruin porn”

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Notes to pages 157–159 and the ambivalence of decline:  Andrew Moore’s photographs of Detroit’, Photography and Culture 7/​2 (2014), pp. 119–​39. 31. Most notably, Vergara’s two photographic books The New American Ghetto (New Brunswick, NJ, 1997) and American Ruins (New York, 1999). 32. The most influential definition of ‘ruin porn’ remains John Patrick Leary’s article ‘Detroitism’, Guernica, 15 January 2011. Available at https://​www. guernicamag.com/​features/​leary_​1_​15_​11/​. See also Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins, pp. 20–​24, 91–​92; and Gansky, ‘ “Ruin porn” and the ambivalence of decline’. 33. Yves Marchand and Roman Meffre, The Ruins of Detroit (Göttingen, 2010), p. 16. 34. Ibid., p. 42. 35. See Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins, pp.  104–​ 106; and Millington, “Post-​ industrial imaginaries’, p. 21. 36. Thomas J.  Sugrue, ‘City of ruins’, in Marchand and Meffre, Ruins of Detroit, pp. 9–​15. 37. See Vergara, New American Ghetto, pp. 215–​25. Vergara had originally published his proposal as ‘American Acropolis’, New Statesmen & Society 9/​385 (1996), pp. 16–​20. 38. Andrew Moore, Detroit Disassembled (New York, 2010), p. 119. 39. Marchand and Meffre, Ruins of Detroit, p. 224. 40. Leary, ‘Detroitism’. 41. See Julia Reyes Taubman, Detroit: 138 Square Miles (Detroit, 2011). Taubman’s photographs were published by the Museum of Contemporary Art probably as a response to the exhibition Detroit Revealed: Photographs, 2000–​2010 held at the Detroit Institute of Arts, 16 October 2011–​29 April 2012. Vermeulen’s exhibition, Photographs from the Detroit Walk-​in Portrait Studio, was held at the Detroit Institute of Arts, 14 November 2014–​15 May 2015. A more recent photo-​book is J. Gordon Rodwan and John G. Rodwan’s, Detroit Is: An Essay in Photographs (Detroit, 2016). 42. Sheridan, ‘Making sense of Detroit’, p.  324. On Woodward’s plan, see Perry L. Norton, ‘Woodward’s vision of Detroit’, Michigan Quarterly Review (1986), pp.  155–​66. On the 1805 fire, see F. Clever Bald, The Great Fire of 1805 (Detroit, 1951). 43. See Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow (New York, 1929), pp. 42–​47, which featured Smith, Hinchman and Grylls’s Greater Penobscot Building (1928), Albert Kahn’s Fisher Building (1928), and Donaldson and Meier’s David Stott Building (1929). 44. On the Futurama exhibit, see A. Morshed, ‘The aesthetics of ascension in Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63/​1 (2004), pp. 74–​9.

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Notes to pages 159–162 45. See W.  J.  V. Neill, ‘Lipstick on the gorilla:  the failure of image-​led planning in Coleman Young’s Detroit’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 19/​4 (1995), pp. 639–​53. 46. On Detroit’s Empowerment Zones, see Jason Young, ‘Line frustration’, in Georgia Daskalakis, Charles Waldheim and Jason Young (eds), Stalking Detroit (Detroit, 2002), pp. 132–​37. 47. Joann Muller, ‘Gilbertville:  A  billionaire’s drive to rebuild the Motor City’, Forbes, 20 October 2014. Available at http://​www.forbes.com/​sites/​joannmuller/​2014/​09/​29/​gilbertville-​a-​billionaires-​drive-​to-​rebuild-​the-​motor-​city/​. 48. Binelli, Last Days of Detroit, pp. 62–​3. Grace Lee Boggs, who died in 2015, also featured prominently in the documentary film Requiem for Detroit? (Julien Temple, 2010). 49. Rebecca Solnit, ‘Detroit arcadia:  exploring the post-​ American landscape’, Harper’s Magazine, July 2007, p.  73. Available at http://​harpers.org/​archive/​ 2007/​07/​detroit-​arcadia/​. 50. Most notably in the title of the book Detroit Canvas (2014) and also in Chris Freitag’s photo-​book Detroit Graffiti (Atglen, PA, 2014), p. 7. 51. Herron, ‘Detroit: disaster deferred’, p. 671. 52. Millington, ‘Post-​industrial imaginaries’, p. 281. See also Melena Ryzik, ‘Wringing art out of the rubble of Detroit’, New York Times, 3 August 2010. Available at http://​www.nytimes.com/​2010/​08/​04/​arts/​design/​04maker.html?_​r=0. 53. On demolition in Detroit, see Solnit, ‘Detroit arcadia’, p. 68. Between 1978 and 1998, the city issued 108,000 demolition permits. The more recent upsurge in demolitions of vacant homes has been led by non-​profit organizations such as Motor City Blight Busters (see http://​www.mcbbdetroit.com). 54. The site was purchased by Manuel ‘Matty’ Moroun in early 2015. Moroun is a prominent landowner in Detroit, holding the Ambassador Bridge that links Detroit with Canada and the abandoned Michigan Central Station, which is currently being renovated. 55. See Binnelli, The Last Days of Detroit, p. 108. 56. See http://​scotthocking.com/​zone.html for Hocking’s photographs of the I-​94 Industrial Park. 57. See Daskalakis, Waldheim and Young, Stalking Detroit. This was one of the first publications to see architects and theorists actively embrace and work through Detroit’s erasure and abandonment. 58. Anon., Detroit Future City, p. 30–​31, pp. 93–​153. 59. Ibid., p. 93. 60. A thoroughgoing critique of the Detroit Future City plan as one that is dominated by a neoliberal market-​driven logic is Daniel Clement and Miguel Kanai’s ‘The Detroit Future City: how pervasive neoliberal urbanism exacerbates racialized spatial injustice’, American Behavioral Scientist 59/​3 (2015), pp. 369–​85.

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Notes to pages 164–168 61. See Pincus and Christian, Canvas Detroit, pp. 44–​7. 62. Ibid., pp. 146–​57. The project was also documented during Time’s residency in Detroit: see Karen Dybis, ‘Bringing a dead house back to life’, Time, 26 April 2010. Available at http://​detroit.blogs.time.com/​2010/​04/​26/​brining-​a-​dead-​ house-​back-​to-​life/​. 63. On all the houses transformed by Power House Productions, see the website of the company at http://​www.powerhouseproductions.org. 64. Pincus and Christian, Canvas Detroit, pp. 60–​65. See also Vince Carducci, ‘Art of the commons:  envisioning real utopias in post-​industrial Detroit’, Detroit Research 1 (2014), p. 79. 65. Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins, p.  110; and Pincus and Christian, Canvas Detroit, pp. 70–​75. On Canilao’s work, see the artist’s website at http://​www. monicacanilao.com. 66. Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins, p.  110; and Pincus and Christian, Canvas Detroit, pp. 94–​7. On Wolf ’s project and his other work, see the artist’s website at http://​www.ben-​wolf.com/​installation/​dormer-​house. 67. Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins, p.  110; and Pincus and Christian, Canvas Detroit, pp. 88–​93. 68. Pincus and Christian, Canvas Detroit, pp. 221–​3. 69. See the website of the Imagination Station at http://​facethestation.tumblr.com. 70. Conversation between the author and Detroit Hostel ‘ambassador’ Kevin Ward, 11 April 2015. 71. Pincus and Christian, Canvas Detroit, p. 72. 72. Ibid., p. 45. 73. On the Heidelberg Project see:  John Beardsley, ‘Eyesore or art? On Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project’, Harvard Design Magazine 7 (1999), pp. 5–​9; Deborah Che, ‘Connecting the dots to urban revitalization with the Heidelberg Project’, Material Culture 39/​1 (2007), pp. 33–​49; and Wendy S. Walters, ‘Turning the neighborhood inside out:  imagining a new Detroit in Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project’, TDR 45/​4 (2001), pp. 64–​93. 74. On the 2014 fires, see the project’s website at http://​www.heidelberg.org/​news_​ publications/​. On the 1999 demolitions, see Joy H.  Colby, ‘City tears down more of “Heidelberg Project” ’, Detroit News, 8 April 1999. Available at http://​ detnews.com/​1999/​features/​9904/​08/​04080020.htm. More recent problems have included vandalism and break-​ins in November 2015. 75. See http://​www.heidelberg.org/​who_​we_​are/​. 76. On neighbourhood objections to the Heidelberg Project, see Walters, ‘Turning the neighborhood inside out’, p. 77. 77. Che, ‘Connecting the dots’, p. 38. 78. On the history of the Michigan Theater, see Dan Austin, Lost Detroit: Stories Behind the Motor City’s Majestic Ruins (Charleston, NC, and London, 2010),

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Notes to pages 168–173 pp. 119–​34. On the building of Detroit’s ‘movie palaces’, see W. Hawkins Ferry, The Buildings of Detroit: A History (Detroit, 1980), pp. 323–​6. 79. See Kent Kleinman and Leslie van Ouzer, ‘Detroit’s Michigan’, in Daskalakis, Waldheim and Young, Stalking Detroit, pp. 73–​7. 80. The Michigan Theater also featured in Marchand and Meffre, Ruins of Detroit, pp. 78–​81 and back cover; and Moore, Detroit Disassembled, pp. 74–​5. 81. On the history of the Dequindre Cut and the recent extension of the project, see http://​detroitriverfront.org/​riverfront/​dequindre-​cut/​dequindre-​cut. 82. See John Gallagher, Reimagining Detroit:  Opportunities for Redefining an American City (Detroit, 2010), p. 108. 83. Barrett Watten, ‘Learning from Detroit:  the poetics of ruined space’, Detroit Research 1 (2014), p. 199. 84. Lebbeus Woods, ‘Radical reconstruction’, in Lebbeus Woods, Aleksandra Wagner and Michael Menser, Radical Reconstruction:  Lebbeus Woods (New York, 1997), p. 15. 85. See Woods’ War and Architecture for his Sarajevo projects. 86. For an overview of recent street art in Detroit, see Freitag, Detroit Graffiti and the author’s associated website at http://​piecesofdetroit.com. 87. See Athlyn Cathcart-​Keays, ‘Is graffiti a force for good or evil?’, The Guardian, 7 January 2015. Available at http://​www.theguardian.com/​cities/​2015/​jan/​ 07/​urban-​graffiti-​force-​good-​evil. See also Samuel Merrill, ‘Keeping it real? Subcultural graffiti, street art, heritage and authenticity’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 21/​4 (2015), pp. 369–​89. On the 2008 Tate Modern exhibition, see Alice Fisher, ‘How the Tate got streetwise’, Observer, 11 May 2008. Available at http://​www.theguardian.com/​artanddesign/​2008/​may/​11/​art.exhibition. 88. Katie Rucke, ‘A photographic look at how graffiti is healing Detroit’, Mint Press News, 27 January 2014. Available at http://​www.mintpressnews.com/​graffiti-​art-​work-​in-​bankrupt-​detroit/​177917/​. More recent works since my visit to Detroit in April 2015 include 18 new murals created in Eastern Market in September 2015 (see http://​www.dailydetroit.com/​2015/​09/​27/​these-​18-​new-​ and-​amazing-​street-​murals-​in-​detroit-​rival-​anything-​in-​the-​world/​). 89. The 16 new murals were exhibited at the Past is Present show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, 6 September 2013–​5 January 2014. 90. Detroit Research and Elysia Borowy-​Reeder, ‘Interview with Elysia Borowy, MOCAD’s new Director’, Detroit Research 1 (2014), p. 105. 91. See Pincus and Christian, Canvas Detroit, pp. 99–​111. 92. On the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative, see the company’s website at http://​www.miufi.org. 93. Pincus and Christian, Canvas Detroit, pp.  37–​9. See also the Detroit Mural Factory’s website at http://​detroitmuralfactory.tumblr.com. On Cassell’s work, see http://​www.halimacassell.com.

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Notes to pages 173–177 94. On the design of Lafayette Gardens, see Beth Hagenbuch, ‘Lafayette Greens: an urban garden’, website of Kenneth Weikal, Landscape Architecture, 20 October 2011. Available at http://​www.kw-​la.com/​kenweikal/​2011/​10/​lafayette-​greens-​an-​urban-​garden/​. 95. Pincus and Christian, Canvas Detroit, pp. 12–​17. See also the Alley Project’s Facebook page at https://​www.facebook.com/​tapgallery. I  am grateful to Ingrid LaFleur for taking me to visit some of the murals on 7 April 2015. 96. Ibid., p. 195. 97. On the Grand River Creative Corridor, see the project’s Facebook page at https://​www.facebook.com/​GRCCDETROIT. 98. Steve Neavling, ‘Graffiti “war” between Sintex, out-​of-​towners turns ugly in Detroit’, Motor City Muckraker, 24 November 2014. Available at http://​motorcitymuckraker.com/​2014/​11/​24/​graffiti-​war-​between-​sintex-​out-​of-​towners-​ turns-​ugly-​in-​detroit/​. On Sintex’s work see https://​sintexart.carbonmade. com. I am grateful to Joe Krause and Jeffery Jimison for this information on the work of Sintex and for showing me some of his work on 10 April 2015. 99. See Che, ‘Connecting the dots’, p. 37. 100. Ibid., p. 42. 101. Jim Munroe and Shannon Gerard, Sword of My Mouth: A Post-​Rapture Graphic Novel (San Diego, CA, 2010). 102. On the history of the Museum of Contemporary Art, see http://​www.mbad. org/​about.html. 103. Conversation between the author and Olayami Dabls at the African Bead Museum, 7 April 2015. I  am grateful to Ingrid LaFleur for providing the opportunity to visit the museum and talk with the artist. 104. Pincus and Christian, Canvas Detroit, pp. 53–​4. 105. Ibid., pp. 256–​9. On the Russell Industrial Center, see http://​russellindustrialcenter.com. 106. Solnit, ‘Detroit arcadia’, p. 70. 107. Gallagher, Reimagining Detroit, pp. 41–​66. 108. Millington, ‘Post-​industrial imaginaries’. 109. Ibid., pp. 289–​91. 110. See Gallagher, Reimagining Detroit, p. 41. 111. On the history of urban farming in Detroit, see Laura Lawson, ‘The planner in the garden: a historical view into the relationship between planning and community gardens’, Journal of Planning History 3/​2 (2004), pp. 151–​76. On Henry Ford’s arcadian urban vision, see J. R. Mullin, ‘Henry Ford and field and factory: an analysis of the Ford sponsored village industries experiment in Michigan, 1918–​ 1941’, Journal of the American Planning Association 48/​4 (1982), pp. 419–​31. 112. On the installation, see the website of Art X Detroit at http://​www.artxdetroit. com/​art-​x-​detroit-​2015/​artists/​kate-​daughdrill/​. On the work of Daughdrill, see the artist’s website at www.kdaughdrill.com.

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Notes to pages 178–183 113. See http://​www.artxdetroit.com/​art-​x-​detroit-​2015/​artists/​kate-​daughdrill/​. 114. See Gallagher, Reimagining Detroit, p. 47. 115. For example, in the Spring of 2009, Detroit businessman John Hantz proposed the creation of Detroit’s first large commercial farm in the city, but this was blocked by existing local small-​scale farms. See Gallagher, Reimagining Detroit, p. 58. 116. See, for example, Sara Safransky, ‘Greening the urban frontier: race, property, and resettlement in Detroit’, Geoforum 56 (2014), pp. 237–​48. 117. On Sestok’s recent work, see Pincus and Christian, Canvas Detroit, pp. 248–​55. 118. See Julia R. Myers, Subverting Modernism: Cass Corridor Revisited, 1966–​1980 (Ypsilanti, MN, 2013). On the relationship between the Cass Corridor movement and Detroit’s contemporary art scene, see Vince Carducci, ‘Specters of the Cass Corridor’, Huffington Post, 13 June 2012. Available at http://​www.huffingtonpost.com/​vince-​carducci/​specters-​of-​the-​cass-​corr_​b_​1587603.html. 119. See Che, ‘Connecting the dots’, p. 38. 120. See www.heidelberg.org. 121. See Jaweed Kaleem, ‘Welcome to Camp Heidelberg’, Detroit Free Press, 29 July 2005. 122. See the website of the artist at http://​scotthocking.com/​index.html. 123. See Michael H. Hodges, ‘Birth, death, regeneration mix in new Scott Hocking exhibit’, Detroit News, 24 December 2012; and Sarah Margolis-​Pineo and Scott Hocking, ‘Seeing beauty in all stages: an interview with Scott Hocking’, Detroit Research 1 (2014), pp. 56–​7. 124. See Alex Altman, ‘Detroit tries to get on a road to renewal: amid old Detroit’s ruins, urban visionaries are plotting the city’s comeback’, Time, 6 April 2009, p.  43. Available at http://​content.time.com/​time/​magazine/​article/​ 0,9171,1887864,00.html. 125. See Glen Mannisto, ‘Scott Hocking’s long look at the end of the world’, Detroit Research 1 (2014), p. 68. 126. See Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins, p. 106. 127. Author’s interview with Scott Hocking, 14 April 2015. 128. Ibid. 129. Pineo and Hocking, ‘Seeing beauty in all stages’, p. 53. 130. Ibid., p. 55. 131. A point argued by Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins, pp. 104–​106. 132. Pincus and Christian, Canvas Detroit, p. 195. 133. Ibid., pp. 224–​27. 134. Ibid., pp. 202–​207. 135. On the history of St Agnes Church, see http://​detroiturbex.com/​content/​ churches/​stagnes/​. 136. Construction of the United Community Hospital was completed in 1974 and the building was shut down in 2006. On the hospital’s history see http://​ detroiturbex.com/​content/​healthandsafety/​uch/​index.html.

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Notes to pages 185–192 137. Anon., ‘Zombie apocalypse theme park could take over abandoned neighborhood in Detroit’, Huffington Post, 7 February 2012. Available at http://​www. huffingtonpost.com/​2012/​07/​02/​zombie-​apocalaypse-​detroit-​theme-​park_​ n_1644298.html. See also https://​w ww.indiegogo.com/​projects/​z -​world-​ detroit–​3#/​story for the project’s funding page. On the wider association of  Detroit with zombies, see Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins, pp. 136–​52. 138. Walters, ‘Turning the neighborhood inside out’, p. 78.

Chapter 6: Suspended futures: urban ruins in reverse 1. See http://​www.nuovoapartments.co.uk/​about. The Nuovo Apartments were developed by UK Land & Property with significant funding from the government-​ led Homes & Community Agency. Although scheduled to open in October 2014, the apartments were only completed in late 2015 (see http://​www.nuovoapartments.co.uk/​news/​n/​nuovo-​apartments-​opens-​its- ​doors-​on-​4th-​october). 2. See the website of the artists’ collective Alterazioni Video at http://​www.alterazionivideo.com/​incompiuto-​abitare_​oct08.pdf. 3. Brian Dillon, ‘Introduction: a short history of decay’, in Brian Dillon (ed.), Ruins: Documents of Contemporary Art (London, 2011), p. 16. 4. Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History (London, 2012), pp. 58–​9. 5. A point emphasized in Tim Edensor’s keynote paper ‘Ruins are everywhere’, Big Ruins, 14 May 2014, University of Manchester. 6. Dillon, ‘Introduction’, p. 14. 7. The article, which also included Smithson’s photographs, was originally published as ‘The monuments of Passaic’, Artforum, December 1967, pp. 52–​57. 8. Many of these are brought together in Brian Dillon’s anthology Ruins and in his more recent exhibition Ruin Lust held at Tate Britain, London, 4 March –​ 18 May 2014, and the accompanying exhibition catalogue Ruin Lust: Artists’ Fascination with Decay from Turner to the Present Day (London, 2014). 9. Maher, ‘900 miles to Paradise’, p. 229. 10. David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (London, 2011), pp. 184–​214. 11. On the global speculative building boom and its antecedents, see Christopher Marcinkoski, The City That Never Was: Reconsidering the Speculative Nature of Contemporary Urbanization (Princeton, NJ, 2015). 12. See Isabel Concheiro, ‘Spain interrupted –​on the form of the financial bubble’, Digital Architecture Papers 1 (2012). Available at http://​www.architecturalpapers.ch/​index.php?ID=4#. 13. See Bill Powell, ‘Inside China’s runaway building boom’, Time, 5 April 2010. Available at http://​content.time.com/​time/​magazine/​article/​0,9171, 1975336,00.html.

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Notes to pages 193–194 14. For example, see Anne Stevenson-​Yang, ‘In China there’s not one city without terrifying stretches of empty houses’, Forbes, 28 October 2013. Available at http://​www.forbes.com/​sites/​realspin/​2013/​10/​28/​in-​china-​theres-​not-​one-​ city-​sans-​terrifying-​stretches-​of-​empty-​houses/​. A more recent assessment is provided in Pingyao Lai, ‘Growth slowdown in China since 2008: will there be a hard landing in the near future?’, China & World Economy 23/​3 (2015), pp. 42–​58. 15. On Ireland’s ‘ghost’ estates, see Rob Kitchin, Cian O’Callaghan and Justin Gleeson, ‘The new ruins of Ireland? Unfinished estates in post-​Celtic Tiger Ireland’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38/​3 (2014), pp. 1069–​80. 16. See Rupert Neate, ‘Scandal of Europe’s 11m empty homes’, Guardian, 23 February 2014. Available at http://​www.theguardian.com/​society/​2014/​feb/​ 23/​europe-​11m-​empty-​properties-​enough-​house-​homeless-​continent-​twice. Although Spain currently has the largest number of empty homes (as of late 2015), it is by no means exceptional: in 2014, France and Italy both had around 2 million; Germany, 1.8 million, and the UK, around 700,000. 17. See Concheiro, ‘Spain interrupted’. On the longer history of Spain’s property boom, see Marcinkoski, The City That Never Was, pp.  57–​97; and I.  López and E.  Rodríguez’s article ‘The Spanish Model’, New Left Review 69 (2011). Available at http://​www.newleftreview.org/​?view=2895. 18. See http://​www.nacionrotonda.com for their on-​going documentation project. The photographs were published in print as Nacion Rotonda (Madrid, 2015). Aerial views also predominate in Marcinkoski’s The City That Never Was. 19. On the history and development of Valdeluz, see Sarah M. Taslimi, ‘Arrested development:  a deep map exploration of community building in Ontario and Spain’, unpublished MA thesis, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, 2014, pp. 133–​51. Available to download at https://​atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca/​…/​ Taslimi_​Sarah_​201404_​MLA_​pdf.pdf?. 20. Cuidad Valdeluz was marketed by its developers as the first city in Spain to be ‘made from scratch’, and a promotional video for the town features a full-​ formed streetscape, green parks and state-​of-​the-​art services (see http://​www. cuidadvaldeluz.com). 21. For example, see Aditya Chakrabortty, ‘Nightmare for residents trapped in Spanish ghost towns’, Guardian, 28 March 2011. Available at http://​www. guardian.co.uk/​world/​2011/​mar/​28/​residents-​trapped-​spanish-​ghost-​towns; and Dan Hancox, ‘Spain’s empty housing project Valdeluz’, Newsweek, 20 June 2014, available at http://​www.newsweek.com/​2014/​07/​11/​nobody-​gets-​out-​ here-​alive-​255733.html. Magali Coroughe’s photographic series of Valdeluz is exceptional in its focus on the town’s residents (see http://​corougemagali. photoshelter.com/​search?I_​DSC=valdeluz).

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Notes to pages 194–200 22. Taslimi, ‘Arrested development’, p. 192. 23. Ibid., p. 204. 24. See James Goddard and David Pringle’s 1975 interview with J. G. Ballard in Sellars and O’Hara, Extreme Metaphors, p. 82. Other prominent examples of Ballard’s work that engage with concrete architectures are the novels Crash (1973) and Concrete Island (1974), and the short stories ‘The concentration city’ (1957) and ‘The ultimate city’ (1976). 25. J.  G. Ballard, ‘The terminal beach’ (1964), in The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (London & New York, 2009), pp. 589–​604. 26. Ibid., p. 593. 27. Ibid., p. 592. 28. Ibid., p. 591. 29. Ibid., p. 603. 30. Simon Sellars, ‘Stereoscopic urbanism: J G Ballard and the built environment’, in Nic Clear (ed.), Architectures of the Near Future (London, 2009), p. 86. 31. The literature on modernist mass-​housing projects is enormous, the best introduction perhaps being Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment (Abingdon, 2001). The most important architectural studies are Florian Urban, Tower and Slab: Histories of Global Mass Housing (Abingdon, 2011); and, in Britain, Miles Glendinning, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (London, 1994). 32. Katie Beswick, ‘Ruin lust and the council estate’, Performance Research 20/​3 (2015), p. 29. 33. Forty, Concrete and Culture, pp. 166–​67. 34. On the history and recent regeneration of the Aylesbury estate, see Campkin, Remaking London, pp.  77–​104. In January 2015, a group of squatters occupied part of the estate, protesting the demolition of the building and more widely the gentrification of London (see Ben Quinn, ‘Six arrested as police help in evictions from London estate’, Guardian, 18 February 2015. Available at http://​w ww.theguardian.com/​s ociety/​2015/​feb/​18/​six-​arrested-​as-​p olice​​help-in-​evictions-​from-​london-​estate). 35. See Laura Oldfield Ford and Mark Fisher, Savage Messiah (London, 2011). 36. On the history of the Park Hill estate, see Hatherley, Guide to the New Ruins, pp.  87–​ 100; Matthew Hollow, ‘Governmentality on the Park Hill estate’, Urban History 37/​1 (2010), pp. 117–​35; David Levitt, ‘Park Hill:  the facts’, in Park Hill: Sheffield (Herne Bay, 2012). On ‘streets in the sky’ see Joe Moran, ‘Imagining the street in postwar Britain’, Urban History 39/​1 (2012), pp. 166–​86. 37. Hollow, ‘Governmentality on the Park Hill estate’, p. 128. 38. Hatherley, Guide to the New Ruins, pp. 89–​90. 39. See Rowan Blair Colver, A Poet, on Park Hill? (Sheffield, 2010), pp. 10–​11.

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Notes to pages 200–205 40. Jeremy Till, ‘Modernity and order: architecture and the welfare state’, in Park Hill, p. 22. 41. On the listing of Park Hill see Elain Harwood, ‘Keeping the past in England: the history of postwar listing’, Journal of Architecture 15/​5 (2010), pp. 671–​82; and Martin O’Rourke, ‘A Future for Park Hill’, in Susan Macdonald (ed.), Preserving Postwar Heritage:  The Care and Conservation of mid-​twentieth-​ Century Architecture (Abingdon, 2001), pp. 169–​76. 42. Hatherley, Guide to the New Ruins, p. 97. The first decade of the regeneration process was documented in episode 2 of the BBC4 series Romancing the Stone (2013). 43. In July 2015, soon after the new flats were launched, I visited the estate on one of the National Trust’s Brutal Utopia tours, part of their series of events Brutal Utopias: A National Trust Celebration of Brutalist Architecture. 44. See the website of the nursery at http://​www.graceowennursery.co.uk. When I visited the estate in Autumn 2014, there were two occupied flats in the older section of Park Hill; by July 2015, only one remained. 45. Owen Hatherley, ‘Regeneration? What’s happening in Sheffield’s Park Hill is class cleansing’, Guardian, 28 September 2011. Available at http://​www.theguardian. com/​commentisfree/​2011/​sep/​28/​sheffield-​park-​hill-​class-​cleansing. 46. In July 2014, according to Sheffield Council, the number of people waiting for council housing in Sheffield was around 30,000. See Anon., ‘Sheffield tops Yorkshire’s council house waiting list with 30,000’, The Star, 22 July 2014. Available at http://​www.thestar.co.uk/​news/​local/​sheffield-​tops-​yorkshire-​scouncil-​house-​waiting-​list-​with-​30-​000-​1-​6742227. Hatherley (‘Regeneration?’) cited the much higher figure of 60,000 in 2011. 47. Ibid. 48. David Sillitoe, ‘The utopian estate that’s been left to die’, The Guardian, 5 March 2014. Available at http://​www.theguardian.com/​artanddesign/​the-​camera-​ eye/​2014/​mar/​05/​park-​hill-​sheffield-​utopian-​estate-​left-​to-​die. 49. Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology (New York, 1994; original, 1975), p. 13. 50. Forty, Concrete and Culture, pp. 170–​71, 178–​80. 51. Till, ‘Modernity and order’, pp. 18–​21. 52. Ibid., p. 30. 53. Cairns and Jacobs, Buildings Must Die, p. 54. 54. See Daniel M. Abramson, ‘Obsolescence:  notes towards a history’, Praxis: Journal of Writing and Building 5 (2003), pp. 106–​12. 55. Cairns and Jacobs, Buildings Must Die, pp. 105–​11. 56. Abramson, ‘Obsolescence’. 57. Cairns and Jacobs, Buildings Must Die, p. 106. 58. On the artists’ project, see http://​w ww.alterazionivideo.com/​new_​sito_​av/​ projects/​incompiuto.php. The artists’ collective was founded in Milan in 2004

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Notes to pages 205–212 and its members are Paololuca Barbieri Marchi, Alberto Cafferelli, Matteo Erenbourg, Andrea Masu and Giacomo Porfiri. 59. See Peter Popham, ‘Concrete jungle: how Italy’s modern ruins became art’, The Independent, 8 August 2010. Available at http://​www.independent.co.uk/​arts-​ entertainment/​architecture/​concrete-​jungle-​how-​italyrsquos-​modern-​ruins-​ became-​art-​2043240.html. 60. An interactive map of all the projects documented by Alterazioni Video can be viewed at http://​www.incompiutosiciliano.org/​opere. 61. Alterazioni Video produced its own ‘manifesto’ for the unfinished buildings, published as ‘Sicilian Incompletion Manifesto’ in Arbitaire, October 2008, p. 193. 62. On the 2010 festival, see Popham, ‘Concrete jungle’; and Pablo Arboleda, ‘Sicilian incompletion: participatory conservation strategies to transform the negative perception of the unfinished public works in Sicily’, MA thesis, BTU Cottbus-​Senftenberg, 2014, pp. 9–​10. 63. Popham, ‘Concrete jungle’. 64. See also Bonnett, Off the Map, p. 150. 65. Alterazioni Video, ‘Sicilian Incompletion Manifesto’, p. 2. 66. Ibid., p. 7. 67. Ibid., p. 8. 68. Ibid., p. 2. 69. See Paul Virilio, ‘Bringing the unliveable alive’, Arbitaire, October 2008, p. 207. 70. See Arboleda, ‘Sicilian incompletion’, p.  9. The proposal for the athletics and polo stadium was presented at the Center of Audiovisual Production, Barcelona Architecture Workshop, 2008; that for the swimming pool at the Florence Step Architecture Workshop in 2009. 71. Alterazioni Video, ‘Sicilian Incompletion Manifesto’, p. 2. 72. Forty, Concrete and Culture, p. 29. 73. Alan Berger, Drosscape:  Wasting Land in Urban America (New  York, 2007), p. 39.

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Filmography 8 Mile (Curtis Hanson, 2002) 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007) 1984 (Michael Radford, 1984) After Earth (M. Night Shyamalan, 2013) Bed Sitting Room, The (Richard Lester, 1969) Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963) Book of Eli, The (Allen and Albert Hughes, 2010) Chernobyl Diaries (Bradley Parker, 2012) City of the Future (David Bickerstaff, 2006) Colony, The (TV series, 2005) Crow, The (Alex Proyas, 1994) Dark Knight Rises, The (Christopher Nolan, 2012) Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, 2014) Day the Earth Caught Fire, The (Val Guest, 1961) Detropia (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2012) Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014) Famagusta Ecocity Project, The: A Story Seeking its Documentary (Vasia Markides, 2013) Flood (Tony Mitchell, 2007) Girl with all the Gifts, The (Colm McCarthy, 2016) Godzilla (Gareth Edwards, 2014) Good Day to Die Hard, A (John Moore, 2013) Hell is a City (Val Guest, 1960) Hunger Games, The: Mockingjay Part 1 (Francis Lawrence, 2014) I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2008) It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2015) Land of Oblivion (Michale Boganim, 2011) Last Man on Earth, The (Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow, 1964) Last Man of Earth, The (TV series, 2015–​) Life After People (TV series, 2009–​2010) Lost River (Ryan Gosling, 2014) Matrix Revolutions, The (Andy and Lana Wachowski, 2003) Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011) Oblivion (Joseph Kosinski, 2013) Omega Man, The (Boris Segal, 1971)

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Filmography Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013) Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, The (Sophie Fiennes, 2013) Pripyat (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 1999) Pripyat: City of the Future (David Bickerstaff, 2006) Road, The (John Hillcoat, 2009) Reign of Fire (Rob Bowman, 2002) Red Dawn (Dan Bradley, 2012) Requiem for Detroit? (Julien Temple, 2010) Robocop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987) Romancing the Stone (TV series, 2013) Seven Days to Noon (John and Ray Boulting, 1950) Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979) Survivors (TV series, 2008–​2010) Taste of Honey, A (Tony Richardson, 1961) Thor: The Dark World (Alan Taylor, 2013) Transformers: Age of Extinction (Michael Bay, 2014) Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Michael Bay, 2011) Traveling Husbands (Paul Sloan, 1931) V Subbotu [Innocent Saturday] (Aleksandr Mindadze, 2011) Walking Dead, The (TV series, 2010–​) Wall*E (Andrew Stanton, 2008) War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005) White Bus, The (Lindsay Anderson, 1967) White Horse, The (Christophe Bisson and Maryann De Leo, 2008) World, The Flesh and The Devil, The (Ranald MacDougall, 1959)

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Index Note: Books are indexed by author, except where there is extensive discussion, in which case both  author and title are included. Films are indexed by title. Page numbers in bold show major coverage; those in italics show illustrations. 8 Mile (film) 168 28 Days Later (film) 32–​5, 34, 42–​3, 51, 183 28 DaysLater (online forum) 14 28 Weeks Later (film) 42 abandoned buildings 153–​5, 162–​5, 192–​8 see also Pripyat; Varosha aerial bombardment Baghdad 42–​3 Dresden 34, 35 London 30–​1, 33–​4, 38–​42, 48 Manchester 63–​8 World War II 4 African Bead Museum 175, 176, 180 After London (Jefferies) 43–​5, 52 Aldiss, Brian 29 Alexievich, Svetlana, Voices from Chernobyl 131, 141, 145 Alterazioni Video 205, 207, 208–​10 Ancoats Angel Meadow 76 Cardroom estate 83, 84–​7 Dispensary campaign 88–​91, 88 New Islington 83–​91, 85 ruin and redevelopment 81–​3, 189 Apel, Dora 8–​9, 13, 181

Archaeological Park of Sicilian Incompletion 207–​8, 210 arson 72, 154, 165, 166, 167 Aylesbury estate (London) 199 Ballard, J. G. 26, 29 ‘Chronopolis’ 152–​3, 187 The Drowned World 46–​9, 50–​1, 197 ‘The terminal beach’ 190, 196–​8 Bangkok, Sathorn Unique building 205 Banks, Isabella Varley, The Manchester Man 60–​1 Bed Sitting Room, The (film) 45–​6, 46, 52 Beetham Tower (Manchester) 53, 54 Benjamin, Walter 4, 10–​11, 34 Billy Liar (film) 72 Bloch, Ernst 4 bomb damage see aerial bombardment Boyle, Danny, 28 Days Later 32–​5, 34, 42–​3, 51, 183 Brunswick Mill 80, 81 Burke, Edmund 101, 102 Cairns, Stephen 3 Campkin, Ben 86, 199 Canilao, Monica 163, 163, 165

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Index capitalism 6, 7, 49, 51, 192, 204–​5 Cardroom estate (Manchester) 83, 84–​7 Cardroom Voices 86 Cassell, Halima 173, 178 Celine, Ferdinand, Journey to the End of the Night 155 CGI (computer-​generated imagery) 5, 32, 33–​4, 42–​3, 109 Chernobyl 119–​33 accident 119 contamination 120 fiction and 122, 123 film and 119, 121, 122–​3, 128, 132–​3, 144–​5 memorials 129–​32, 130 radiation exposure 145 radioactive zone 122–​4 reactor sarcophagus/​shelter 124–​8, 125, 126, 132 symbolic meanings 121–​2 tourism 120, 121, 128–​9, 143 victims 121, 131–​2, 141, 145 Chernobyl: Chronicle of Difficult Weeks 128 Chernobyl Diaries (film) 119, 121, 132–​3, 144–​5 China, ghost cities 192–​3 Christopher, John, The Death of Grass 42 ‘Chronopolis’ (Ballard) 152–​3, 187 cinema see film climate change 5, 25 Coleman, Alice, Utopia on Trial 202 computer games 107, 142–​4, 143 concrete 190–​1, 199, 202–​3, 208–​9 cotton mills alternative uses 78 Brunswick Mill 80, 81 conservation 75–​6 demolition 69–​73, 77–​8 dereliction and decay 73–​8

Hartford Mill 75–​8, 75, 77 Manchester conurbation 57–​8, 68–​9, 68 New Islington 83–​4 Royal Mills 78–​80 Royd Mill 69–​71, 70 salvage 78–​81 Coward, Martin 97–​8, 105 Crinson, Mark 56, 66, 79 Crow, The (film) 156 culverting 58–​63 Cupcake Girls (Detroit) 162, 165 Cyprus Famagusta Ecocity Project 105–​6, 117 Turkish invasion 98 see also Varosha Dabls, Olayami 175, 176, 180 Daughdrill, Kate 177–​8 Davis, Mike 4–​5 Day the Earth Caught Fire, The (film) 32 Day of the Triffids, The (Wyndham) 29–​32, 32–​3, 42, 48, 51 Demers, Mrs J. F. 200 demolition Ancoats Dispensary campaign 88–​91 Cardroom estate 83, 86–​7 cotton mills 69–​73, 77–​8 Detroit 161–​2, 165 Dequindre Cut (Detroit) 168–​70, 169 deserted city see empty city Detroit 149–​88 abandoned buildings 153–​5, 162–​5 boosterism 158–​9 contradictory views 149–​50 creative scene 151–​3, 160–​88 demolitions 160–​2 dystopian imaginaries 155–​7

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Index Detroit (cont.) and financial crisis (2008) 154 graffiti 183–​5, 184 Great Fire (1805) 158–​9 Heidelberg Project 165–​6, 174–​5, 180, 185–​7, 186 I-​94 Industrial Park 150, 161 Imagination Station 164 murals 170–​6, 171, 172, 174, 176, 183 Packard Plant ruins 149, 157, 175, 181, 181, 182 parks 178–​9 photographs 157–​8, 160, 161, 173 post-​industrial decline 17–​18, 149–​50, 150 race and 154, 155–​7, 159, 165, 172, 173–​5 regeneration 158–​9, 178–​80 sculptures 178–​9, 179, 181, 181, 182 urban farming 177–​8 utopian imaginaries 157–​60 zombie theme park idea 185 Detroit Future City 161–​2 Detropia (film) 156, 160, 162 Dickens, Charles, Hard Times 69 disanthropic imagination 111–​17 Doré, Gustave, ‘The New Zealander’ 23, 24, 35, 43, 158 Dresden 34, 35 Drowned World, The (Ballard) 46–​9, 50–​1, 197 ecocities 105–​6 ecosophy 9–​10 Edensor, Tim 8, 10, 13, 14, 62–​3 Edge of Tomorrow (film) 42, 43, 51 Egret, Christophe 201 Eliot, T. S., The Waste Land 40 empty city as allegory 27–​9 China’s ghost cities 192–​3

as hostile 29–​32 as illusion 32–​5 Manchester 73–​5 as post-​human 111–​18 see also former residents; new ruins; Varosha Engels, Friedrich, on the river Irk 60 English Heritage 13, 200 entropy 191, 196–​7 Ernst, Max 47 Famagusta Ecocity Project 105–​6, 117 Ferris, Hugh, The Metropolis of Tomorrow 159 fiction Chernobyl 122, 123 climate fiction 49–​51 ‘cosy’ catastrophe 29–​32 Detroit 155 disaster fiction 46–​8 invasion anxiety 36–​8 last man trope 27–​9, 106–​11 post-​apocalypse 27–​32, 36–​8 wartime ruination 38–​42 see also individual authors film Chernobyl 119, 121, 122–​3, 128, 132–​3, 144–​5 Detroit 155–​7 disanthropic fantasy 112 disaster cinema 5, 101–​2 filmography 276–​7 illusion of urban emptiness 32–​5 invasion anxiety 33–​4, 42–​3 post-​apocalyptic hero 5, 107, 109 zombie genre 185 see also individual film titles financial crisis (2007–​2008) 18, 154, 192–​3, 198–​9, 211 floods London 25, 25, 46–​52, 50 Manchester 59, 60

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Index New Orleans 49 former residents Cardroom estate 84, 86–​8 Pripyat 11, 139, 141–​2, 141, 143–​5 Varosha 103–​5, 106, 117 Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and its Discontents 8 Fukushima nuclear accident 17, 145, 146 Gaia hypothesis 111–​12 Gandy, Matthew 49 Garrett, Bradley, Explore Everything: Place-​Hacking the City 12–​14 Gaskell, Elizabeth, Mary Barton 82 gentrification 78, 79–​80 Gibbon, Edward, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 4, 27 Gilbert, Dan 159 graffiti 183–​5, 184, 201 see also street art Graham, Stephen 26 Grainville, Cousin de, Le Dernier Homme 27 Grant, Len 86 Guattari, Félix 9–​10 Guyton, Tyree 165–​6, 175, 180 Hartford Mill 75–​8, 75, 77 Harvey, David 192 Heidelberg Project 165–​6, 174–​5, 180, 185–​7, 186 Hell Is A City (film) 73 Herron, Jerry 160 High, Steven 8–​9 Hiroshima 45 Hocking, Scott 161, 180–​3, 181 housing Cardroom estate 83, 84–​7 demolition of modernist blocks 71–​2 gentrification projects 78, 79–​80 social housing 199, 201–​2, 203–​4 Huyssen, Andreas 146

I am Legend (film) 5, 109–​10 imagination creative engagements with ruins 212–​13 Detroit’s dystopian 155–​7 Detroit’s utopian 157–​60 dysanthropic imagination 111–​17 of London future flooding 25, 25, 46–​52, 50 of London’s ruin 17, 26 of nuclear war 31, 45–​6, 46 and ruin exploration 95–​6 and urban destruction 3–​8, 10 see also fiction; film imperial decline 4, 23, 35, 36 incomplete buildings 18, 204–​11 invasion fears 33, 36–​8, 42–​3 Irk culvert 58–​63, 58, 62 It Follows (film) 156–​7 Jacobs, Jane 3 Jameson, Fredric 7 Japan atomic bombs 124 Fukushima nuclear accident 17 Jefferies, Richard, After London 43–​5, 52 Jerrold, Blanchard, London: A Pilgrimage 23, 24 Jordan, Rupert 49, 50 Joy, Kevin 173, 183 junk art 178–​9, 179 Kahn, Albert 179–​80 Kasperski, Tatiana 131 Kearney, Krysta 162 Koshelkov, Alex 25 Lake, Quintin 137, 138 Last Man on Earth, The (film) 107, 109 ‘last man’ trope 27–​9, 106–​11 Last Man, The (Shelley) 27–​9, 51

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Index Le Queux, William, The Invasion of 1910 36 Leary, John Patrick 158 Leonard, Elmore, Primeval City 155 Levine, Philip, On the Edge 155 Lindsey, Hal 111 Linn, Jeffrey, London Bay 49 Lisbon earthquake 4 London 23–​52 Aylesbury estate 199 bomb ruins 30–​1, 33–​4, 38–​42, 48 destroyed city 36–​43, 51 empty city 27–​35, 51 flooding 25, 25, 46–​52, 50 invasion scenarios 36–​8 post-​apocalyptic imaginings 17, 27–​35 sewage 44–​5 submerged city 43–​52 Victorian London 23–​5 looting 137, 142 Lost River (film) 156 Lovelock, James 111–​12 Lynn, Jack 199 Macaulay, Rose, The World My Wilderness 38–​40, 41, 51 McMillan, David 137 Maher, Denis 191–​2 Malone, Andy 173 Manchester 53–​92 air-​raid shelters 63–​8, 65, 67 Beetham Tower 53, 54 Duke’s Tunnel 57 floods 59, 60 historical legacy 79–​81 industrial decline 56, 73–​5 Irk cattle bridge 61–​2, 62 Irk culvert 58–​63 New East Manchester Urban Development Company 82 New Islington 83–​91, 85

regeneration 17, 53, 55–​6, 78–​88 underground development 57–​8 underground ruins 58–​68 see also Ancoats; cotton mills; Oldham Manchester and Salford Junction Canal 63–​8 Marchand, Yves, The Ruins of Detroit 157–​8 Marxism 4, 7 Meffre, Romain, The Ruins of Detroit 157–​8 memory collective memory 56 historical legacy 79–​81 of industry 75–​6 lingering remains of ruin 37–​8 Pripyat 11, 134–​7, 136 staged memory 139, 140 urban monuments 127 see also former residents Merrifield, Andy 7 Michigan Theatre (Detroit) 166–​8, 168 Miller, Lee 48 Moore, Andrew, Detroit Disassembled 157–​8 Morris, William, News From Nowhere 44 murals 139, 170–​6, 171, 172, 174, 176, 183 Nagasaki 45 National Trust 76 nature Detroit 177 Giarre 205, 207, 208, 208, 210 London 31–​2 Pripyat 138, 141 Varosha 112 neoliberalism 192 New Brutalism 199, 202–​3 New Islington 83–​91, 85

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Index New Orleans, floods 49 new ruins Ancoats 82, 189 and entropy 191, 196–​7 future potential 211–​13 Giarre 205–​11, 206, 207 in J. G. Ballard’s fiction 190 Park Hill estate 199–​204, 200 unfinished architecture 191–​2 unfinished infrastructure 193, 195, 198 Valdeluz 193–​8 New York 4, 33, 102, 124 post-​apocalyptic film 5, 36, 109 Newell, Catie 164 Nineteen Eighty-​Four (Orwell) 41 nuclear power 145–​6 nuclear war imagined 31, 45–​6, 46 Oates, Joyce Carol, them 155 Oldfield Ford, Laura 199 Oldham Hartford Mill 75–​8, 75, 77 Platt family 76–​7, 77 Royd Mill 69–​71, 70 Omega Man, The (film) 32, 109 Only Lovers Left Alive (film) 156, 157 Orford Ness 109, 110 Orr, Jane 162 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-​Four 41 Packard Plant ruins (Detroit) 149, 157, 175, 181, 181, 182 pandemics 27–​9, 33 Park Hill estate (Sheffield) 199–​204, 200 Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, The (film) 109 Petryna, Adriana 128, 131, 145 photographs 137–​8, 157–​8, 160, 161, 173

Pile, Steve 68 Platt, John 76–​7, 77 Polidori, Robert, Zones of Exclusion 137 population growth 27–​9, 33, 36 post-​apocalypse 5, 27–​32, 36–​8, 106–​11 Powerhouse Productions 162 Priest, Christopher, Fugue for a Darkening Island 42 Pripyat 133–​45, 134 artistic interventions as staged memory 139, 140 children’s toys 11, 139, 141 computer games 142–​4 evacuation 133–​4, 141–​2 films 132–​3, 141 former residents 11, 139, 141–​2, 141, 143–​5 looting 137, 142 photographic images 137–​8 signs of memory 11, 134–​7, 136 tourism 143 traumatic experience 16–​17 utopian socialist town 133, 135, 136 Pripyat (film) 141 Red Dawn (film) 156 regeneration Detroit 158–​9, 178–​80 Manchester 17, 53, 55–​6, 78–​88 Reign of Fire (film) 42, 51 Requiem for Detroit (film) 156 Revok (artist) 174, 174 Rivera, Diego 171 Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky) 122, 142 Robocop (film) 156 Royal Mills 78–​80 Royal Urbis 193 Royd Mill 69–​71, 70 ruin aesthetics 8–​14, 209

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Index ruin exploration 12–​16, 61, 63, 76, 95–​6, 183–​5, 184 Ruin Lust exhibition 199 ruin porn 5, 8, 13–​14 ruins abandoned buildings 153–​5, 162–​5, 192–​8 gradations of 182 incomplete buildings 18, 204–​11 integration into the present 7–​8 as voids 145–​6 ruins in reverse see new ruins Rush-​Cooper, Nick 143 Russell Industrial Center (Detroit) 179–​80 salvage 78–​81, 179–​80 Sarajevo 170 Schönle, Andreas 106 Sebald, W. G. Emigrants, The 73 Rings of Saturn, The 107, 110 Sellars, Simon 198 Serres, Michel 56–​7 Seven Days to Noon (film) 32 Sheffield, Park Hill estate 199–​204, 200 Shelley, Mary, The Last Man 27–​9, 51 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 28 Sheridan, David 149–​50 Sicily, Giarre 205–​11, 206, 207 Simmel, Georg 4, 112–​13 Sintex (artist) 173–​4, 174, 183 slum clearances 72 see also regeneration Smith, Ivor 199 Smithson, Robert 191 social control 203–​4 social division 26, 204 social housing 199, 201–​2, 203–​4 Solnit, Rebecca 56, 159–​60, 176 Solomon, Kobie, Chimera 176 Sontag, Susan 5, 8, 101–​2

Spain construction industry 192 unfinished buildings 193 Valdeluz 103–​8, 194, 196 S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (computer games) 142–​4, 143 Stalker (film) 122–​3, 142–​3, 161 Star of Chernobyl, The (novel) 123 street art 139, 170–​6, 171, 172, 174, 176, 183 see also graffiti Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, Roadside Picnic 122 sublime gaze 100–​2 Sugrue, Thomas, The Origins of the Urban Crisis 154 Surrealism 46–​7, 48 Sword of my Mouth (graphic novel) 175 Swyngedouw, Erik 5, 49–​50 Tarkovsky, Andrei 122–​3 Taslimi, Sarah 194 Taste of Honey, A (film) 73, 74, 83 Taubman, Julia Reyes, Detroit: 138 Square Miles 158 television 107, 112, 183 ‘The terminal beach’ (Ballard) 190, 196–​8 Thor: The Dark World (film) 42 Till, Jeremy 203 time ‘Chronopolis’ 152–​3, 187 lifespan of buildings 205 mythic time 183 in ruined cities 152–​3 stopped clocks 185–​7, 186 and walking in ruins 110–​11 Time Machine, The (Wells) 45 tourism, Chernobyl 120, 121, 128–​9, 143 tower blocks 199–​201, 200, 202, 204

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Index Transformers: Age of Extinction (film) 156 Traveling Husbands (film) 155 unfinished buildings see new ruins urban entropy 44–​6, 150, 187, 191, 196–​7 urban exploration see ruin exploration urban farming 177–​8 Urban Splash 83–​7, 85, 88–​90, 201 urbicide 97–​106 V Subbotu (Innocent Saturday) (film) 132–​3 Valdeluz 103–​8, 193–​8, 194, 196 Varosha 95–​118 ecstatic experience 16–​17, 108 ‘Forbidden Zone’ 96, 98–​101, 99, 100 former residents 103–​5, 106, 117 ‘last man’ perception 107–​8, 110–​11 as post-​human 112–​17, 113, 114, 116 potential role in reunification talks 105–​6, 117 redevelopment possibilities 105–​6, 117–​18 urbicide 97–​106, 104 Vergara, Camilo 157, 158 Vermeulen, Corine 158, 161 Vidler, Anthony 127 Virilio, Paul, Bunker Archaeology 202–​3 voyeurism 13–​14, 138 Wall*E 112 Wall, Imogen 137–​8 War in the Air, The (Wells) 38

War of the Worlds, The (Wells) 36–​8, 43, 51 Warrender, Keith 63 Watten, Barrett 169 Weisman, Alan, The World Without Us 112 Wells, H. G. Time Machine, The 45 War in the Air, The 38 War of the Worlds, The 36–​8, 43, 51 Whiteread, Rachel 199 Williams, Evan Calder 107 Williams, Joseph, Detroit Macabre 155 Wolf, Ben, Dormer House 163 Womersley, Lewis 199 Woods, Lebbeus 118, 169–​70 Woodward, Augustus B. 158–​9 Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse 111 World My Wilderness, The (Macaulay) 38–​40, 41, 51 World, The Flesh and the Devil, The (film) 32 World War II atomic bombs 124 invasion resistance 43 London ruins 30–​1 Manchester mills 72 Nazi fortifications 202–​3 urban destruction 4, 33–​4, 35 Wyndham, John 29 Day of the Triffids, The 29–​32, 32–​3, 42, 48, 51 Yablon, Nick 2, 9 Yamasaki, Katie 178 Z World Detroit (theme park) 185 Žižek, Slavoj 7, 109, 112 zones 96, 98–​101, 122–​4

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