Industrial Ruins: Spaces, Aesthetics, and Materiality (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPTim Edensor's new book is not the usual tour through the world of material-cultural studies and industrial archeology. Instead, it is about industrial space, how it is socially produced and commodified, and how it can be imbued with new meanings that recall original intentions while simultaneously allowing people to ascribe their own uses and activities that can stand in opposition to the original intentions of industrial manufacturing. Edensor celebrates the industrial ruin and tells what such spaces and the artifacts they contain reveal about ourselves and the ways we occupy space.
The author begins his book with a nostalgic recalling of summers spent at his grandparents' cottage in Scotland, where, as a means of whiling away long afternoons, he took to visiting the "Haunted House"—the residential ruin of an old industrial baron and its surrounding estate. Although this episode helps to explain some of the author's attraction to ruins, it only indirectly applies to his main thesis. Edensor is not interested in haunted houses, but rather in industrial ruins, particularly the ruins of twentieth-century, large-scale manufacturing enterprises with their vast shop floors and, often, their equally vast open areas that once served as temporary holding facilities for the automobiles of the workers and their bosses.
Edensor is highly critical of the current tendency to assign such spaces to the category of "waste," without material and social value in the post-industrial urban life of contemporary Western society. Rather, he develops a postmodern approach that explores the new kinds of space that these industrial ruins produce—space imbued with meanings and activities that can stand in juxtaposition to the dominant interpretations of postindustrial society. His work, as he puts it, serves "as a celebration of ruinous spaces which unfolds into a critique of contemporary processes of ordering urban space" (p. 53). As distinctly messy spaces lacking the sense of order [End Page 821] they once exuded, these industrial ruins stand in sharp contrast to the regulated and controlling spaces of the twenty-first-century urban realm.
Yet, Edensor's work is not only about the space of ruins. He also discusses the various sorts of objects that inhabit those spaces. The detritus of former processes of manufacture and commodification are of particular interest for the ways they become imbued with new meanings. The designation of these once-useful objects as "waste" provides a means for their reclassification as objects with essentially new purposes, such as sculpture, playground equipment, historical monument, and so forth. One of the characteristics of power, Edensor argues, "is the ability to make decisions about what is required, and therefore about what objects get to be produced and in what form." The other side of this "decommissioning of space and things is their reclamation by industries concerned with renovation, recycling and preservation and by less organized individuals and groups" (p. 105).
The objects found in the space of industrial ruins, far from being waste, confound our notions about use and exchange value. Through their classification as ruin and waste, these objects escape "the assignations which previously delineated their meaning and purpose and so we are able to relate to them in imaginative, sensual, conjectural and playful fashion—free from the constraining effects of norms surrounding their value or function" (p. 123). In this sense, an encounter with the industrial ruin is a liberating experience. It is precisely their fragmentary nature and lack of fixed meaning that renders industrial ruins more profoundly meaningful.
In all of this there is very little that is new. Edensor draws very heavily on the work of such seminal thinkers as Henri Lefevbre, Walter Benjamin, David Harvey, and Arjun Appadurai. It is an intellectual heritage that places his work solidly within the postmodern turn of human geography. Edensor's contribution, thus, is illustrative more than groundbreaking. His selection of industrial ruins does, however...
