By Susan Ross Building deconstruction refers to the careful taking apart of a building to salvage its reusable materials and components. These are either stored on site for short-term integration in a new design, or removed to a salvage yard for use at a later date. Whereas prevailing mechanical demolition creates mounds of unsorted debris […]
Read More »
Portable toilets and urine on colonial era statues are reconciliations ruins, the things leftover that heritage helps to frame but yet cannot fully explain. As matter that remains unresolved, I think it tells us about the unfinished work of reconciliation in South Africa.
How do you communicate permanent pollution and toxicity to future generations? We held workshops with community members in Yellowknife and Dettah to make models about they would communicate the dangers of buried arsenic at the local Giant Mine into the future.
Our project aims to unveil the potential for the Commons within the outdoor urban infrastructure of Churchill Square in St. John’s, Newfoundland, by locating heat leaks from wasted heat. We wanted to find out which areas in the Square provided a bit of warmth during the long, cold winter to imagine the possibility of public congregation or reclaimed community space.
The main argument against cinematic, photogenic images of ruination is that they can work against revitalization, and obscure systemic problems that cause certain patterns of ruination and harm.
This article moves analyses of urban obsolescence beyond Marxism to demonstrate that Foucauldian theory can provide revealing insights about the stewardship of discourses of urban obsolescence through texts and visual images created by different social actors. It demonstrates how the Sydney metropolitan planning authority has deployed specific spatial and temporal ‘zoning technologies’ to demarcate and evaluate sections of the city.
Imperial Debris redirects critical focus from ruins as evidence of the past to “ruination” as the processes through which imperial power occupies the present. Ann Laura Stoler’s introduction is a manifesto, a compelling call for postcolonial studies to expand its analytical scope to address the toxic but less perceptible corrosions and violent accruals of colonial aftermaths, as well as their durable traces on the material environment and people’s bodies and minds.
This is a narrative essay. It is a story; and, unusually for academic geography, the story is primary. It narrates the story of the Scottish archaeologist Erskine Beveridge and his family, as told through a prolonged encounter with the ruins of his house situated on the Hebridean island of North Uist. A discussion of ruins, archives and fieldwork runs parallel with, but always subsidiary to, the main narrative.
Crucial infrastructures in North America have begun to reach the ends of their lifespan, with malfunctions and their effects increasingly commanding public and political attention. Our installation draws on a burgeoning conversation in anthropology on infrastructure, while emphasizing its aesthetic and material dimensions alongside its practical and functional ones.
Bodie, California is a ghost town. Or rather, it was a ghost town—now it is a historic park and tourist destination. It endures in a state of “arrested decay,” meaning that nothing can be newly constructed onsite, but neither are its standing buildings permitted to deteriorate any further. The state of California has suspended the town in its process of ruination, stabilizing its entropy and halting its decline. If its decay is forestalled, its grounds rigorously maintained and its aesthetic carefully cultivated, can it be called a ghost town any longer?
