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.
Industry Reviews
'A whole new world is opened up through the pages and images of this exceptional publication.' Iain Borden, Director of the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. 'A beautiful book, moving and thought-provoking.' Avery F. Gordon, University of California, Santa Barbara 'Read this book, and you will never look at landscape in the same way again.' Paul Cloke, University of Bristol 'An important addition to the bookshelves of industrial archaeologists, historians of the working class and students of contemporary culture.' Rob Shields, University of Alberta, Canada 'In his compelling new monograph Industrial Ruins: Space Aesthetics , and Materiality, Tim Edensor sets out to undertake a much-needed landscape; what he finds by the end of his journey can hardly be considered terra nullius.' Benjamin Morris, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge 'Edensor celebrates the industrial ruin and tells what such spaces and the artifacts they contain reveal about ourselves and the ways we occupy space. ... Additionally, Industrial Ruins is illustrated throughout with the author's own eerie black-and-white, decontextualized photographs. These are well selected and masterfully used to illuminate the points he makes and the conclusions he draws.' Technology and Culture (Vol 47, October 2006) 'Industrial Ruins is an important piece of work about the frail memories of Western industrial capitalism and industrial ruins that signify the 'transience of all earthly things despite the utopian promises of endless social advancement' (p 11). The book provides a story about the mobility and fluidity of people through time and space and forces us to think about how we define, describe, and interact in the placed we call our own.' Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2008, issue 26/4
