“…: 252) writes of an aspiration in her research to record that ‘something and someone is still there, among the ruins, attached to them from the inside and not simply experiencing them from the outside’ (see also Lahusen, ). This resonates with Mah's (2009; 2010) message that we should never forget that places of ruination are also people's homes, places to which their residents may feel a deep sense of attachment; ruination as a process therefore must be understood in terms of its legacies for individuals' lives, as well as their impact on physical landscapes (Mah, ). As with Ren's explication of Girard's images of Shanghai's demolished housing, Hatherley's contribution aims to evoke some of the hidden histories of the city through an attuned reading of the ruined artefacts of the recent past.…”
Section: Moving With and Beyond The Image: The Political Translatiomentioning
This debate section gathers together contributions from cultural historians, political geographers, urban sociologists and architectural writers on new forms of ruination in contemporary landscapes. Their case studies span examples of ruins in China, North America, Ireland and Ukraine, as well as reviewing cultural representations of ruined, remote and peripheral spaces in England and Greece. Many wider cultural representations of ruined landscapes are primarily visual; whilst these have great value in alerting wider publics to the debris of global capitalism, neoliberalism and state‐sanctioned processes of cultural imperialism, what is needed within academic contributions to the ruinology literature is a deeper understanding and articulation of the wider contexts within which ruination occurs. Therefore, several contributions supplement visual representations of ruination with ethnographic and first‐person accounts of places on the ground, whereas other contributions offer readings of ruined landscapes that are rich in political histories and policy details. Connections are made to wider contemporary debates around ‘forensic architecture’ and critical archaeologies of the present and recent past. What connects these contributions is a commitment to situating ruins within their historical, policy and social contexts, and working through ruination to open out political readings of landscape.
“…: 252) writes of an aspiration in her research to record that ‘something and someone is still there, among the ruins, attached to them from the inside and not simply experiencing them from the outside’ (see also Lahusen, ). This resonates with Mah's (2009; 2010) message that we should never forget that places of ruination are also people's homes, places to which their residents may feel a deep sense of attachment; ruination as a process therefore must be understood in terms of its legacies for individuals' lives, as well as their impact on physical landscapes (Mah, ). As with Ren's explication of Girard's images of Shanghai's demolished housing, Hatherley's contribution aims to evoke some of the hidden histories of the city through an attuned reading of the ruined artefacts of the recent past.…”
Section: Moving With and Beyond The Image: The Political Translatiomentioning
This debate section gathers together contributions from cultural historians, political geographers, urban sociologists and architectural writers on new forms of ruination in contemporary landscapes. Their case studies span examples of ruins in China, North America, Ireland and Ukraine, as well as reviewing cultural representations of ruined, remote and peripheral spaces in England and Greece. Many wider cultural representations of ruined landscapes are primarily visual; whilst these have great value in alerting wider publics to the debris of global capitalism, neoliberalism and state‐sanctioned processes of cultural imperialism, what is needed within academic contributions to the ruinology literature is a deeper understanding and articulation of the wider contexts within which ruination occurs. Therefore, several contributions supplement visual representations of ruination with ethnographic and first‐person accounts of places on the ground, whereas other contributions offer readings of ruined landscapes that are rich in political histories and policy details. Connections are made to wider contemporary debates around ‘forensic architecture’ and critical archaeologies of the present and recent past. What connects these contributions is a commitment to situating ruins within their historical, policy and social contexts, and working through ruination to open out political readings of landscape.
“…Their materials and tools, environments, buildings, workshops and machines tend to be destroyed and soon replaced with the next wave of investment. This can give rise to chronic and profound feelings of dislocation in areas of industrial ruination as the material culture of generations disappears (Mah, 2010). As Walkerdine (2010, p. 111) describes, the razing of the hugely dominant steelworks in the south Wales town she studied created 'a hole at the centre of the community's imaginary ego-skin'.…”
Section: Class Collective Memory Place and Industrial Ruinationmentioning
“…Mah (), endeavouring to “‘read’ the past within the present in order to better understand the present” (p. 6), argues that [t]he process of reading the landscape reveals the deep interconnections between spatial, socio‐economic, and temporal layers … important for understanding the wider processes and complexities of industrial ruination. (p. 152)Across deindustrialized landscapes, material and architectural remains of, for example, factories, mills, and headstocks act as sites of memory for former workers and their families, “physical reminders of industrial production and decline, and of the lives which were connected to these spaces” (Mah, , p. 402). Many investigating the invocations of deindustrialized landscapes have highlighted how industrial ruins engender senses of loss, mourning, and the death of industrial ways of life (Hill, ; Mah, , ; Strangleman, ; Summerby‐Murray, ).…”
Section: Reading Deindustrialized Landscapes and Materialities Of Memorymentioning
Sections of the post‐industrial working‐class have made a notable return to media and political discourses in the context of the rise of populism across Europe and the United States. These narratives, which exclude women and BAME working‐class people, suggests the (white, male) working‐class are angry and resentful of being left behind by increasingly globalized political economies, nostalgic for the industrial ordering of work, home, and community. It seems that the political and media establishment are, selectively, understanding what has long been realized by researchers of deindustrialization. In the first, this paper surveys and critiques recent discourses on the post‐industrial working‐classes. The paper then traces the development of industrial ruination as an interdisciplinary area of academic focus, highlighting the themes of memory and temporal factors that have come to dominate the literature. The next section reviews contestations surrounding the affordances of landscapes and industrial ruins for the analysis of memory and history. Finally, the paper proposes interrelated ways to advance future study which historical–cultural geographers are well placed to carry forward. Here, I call for greater attention toward the affective and embodied dimensions of classed experience and the intersectionalities of race and gender in working‐class subjectivities. Further, I suggest there is an imperative to a deeper understanding of constitutive “affective” histories to mediate enduring social inequalities and their political and socially divisive mobilizations.
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