Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality

by Tim Edensor

Across Western cities, there is an increasing obsession with producing manicured landscapes. Standing in contrast to these aesthetically and socially regulated spaces are the neglected sites of industrial ruins, places on the margin which accommodate transgressive and playful activities. Providing a different aesthetic to the over-coded, over-designed spaces of the city, ruins evoke an aesthetics of disorder, surprise and sensuality, offering ghostly glimpses into the past and a tactile encounter with space and materiality. Tim Edensor highlights the danger of eradicating such evocative urban sites through policies that privilege homogeneous new developments. It is precisely their fragmentary nature and lack of fixed meaning that render ruins deeply meaningful. They blur boundaries between rural and urban, past and present and are intimately tied to memory, desire and a sense of place. Stunningly illustrated throughout, this book celebrates industrial ruins and reveals what they can tell us about ourselves and our past.

Genres: Nonfiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2005

About the author

Tim Edensor is Reader in Cultural Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has contributed to five areas of scholarship: geographies of tourism, national identity, industrial ruins and urban materiality, geographies of rhythm and spaces of illumination and darkness.

Reviews

[Tito Quiling, Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read about urban ruins, whose traditional views from others as being unproductive, empty spaces that are eyesores to the project urban modernity by most cities. Many times, we forget that there are important histories held by different corners, buildings, even natural spaces that once defined the landscape and used by people at some point. Makes us wonder if man does have command of shaping different environments or spaces, or do we will never master them given the constant comeuppance of ruins--in many iterations.

[Archie Hamerton]

I can see it’s an influential book — Ahmed’s What’s the Use has a strong flavour of Edensor — but I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced by the early dismissal of the 18th century cult of the picturesque ruin as remote from this project. I actually think there’s something to be said about how the aesthetic ruin — how aesthetic philosophy writ large — demands disinterestedness of the observer in order to appreciate its beauty; perhaps this is impossible of the industrial ruin because one cannot be disinterested in it: it is a ruin of capital, of interest — the very people who declare it to be an eyesore and call for it to be torn down, for the land to be made useful, do so because they stake interest in it

[Doreen · Rating 5 out of 5]

what we overlook in our daily lives, industrial buildings that have fallen into disuse, Edensor takes as a case study for exploring space, cultural production, social practices, and post-human relations in urban environments. He both contextualizes our relation to ruins historically via film, literature, and philosophy and at the same time examines their function within a post-industrial world. For anyone interested in writing relevant books on contemporary culture, this book is a fabulous model. His personal investment in his subject matter and his interdisciplinary methodology foster an incredibly dense yet accessible book. His personal photographs provide another narrative layer of his journey in probing the many wonders and functions of ruins and their ability to unravel and challenge binaries that have contributed to maintaining social order.

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Academic British fellow waxes poetic about modern industrial ruins. There are some good ideas here, but this book really needs to be translated into more accessible language. The obfuscation of seemingly commonplace tropes is readily apparent when attempting the refutation of dystopian metaphors in favor of a more egalitarian perspective on the delineations of post-industrial space.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting project to consider the value and context of "wastelands" at the heart of urban landscapes. It includes a variety of photographs, some quite compelling, but none of them labeled which was disappointing. Edensor makes a case for not labeling them but his explanation did not suffice and I felt I needed captions to better contextualize them within the text. The philosophical exercise he is engaged in for theorizing space as a lived-in place -- even when it comes to wasted spaces and industrial ruins -- is intriguing but it gets a little thin theoretically sometimes. Edensor also plays it a little fast and loose with other theoretical texts. It is nevertheless a useful text to read to think about landscape and the urban environment, particularly as he makes some good points about how natural features come to interact with engineered spaces.

[Caito · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book on the history of ruins, and the value they still bring to society. Sometimes a little repetitive, but overall very interesting.