Rethinking the American City: An International Dialogue

4 Ruins

71 4 4 ruIns MileS orvell whAt iS A ruin? Anything in the built environment can fall into ruins: from houses to Main Street stores, from office buildings to factories, from infrastructure (railroad lines and highways) to utility plants, from gas stations to shopping centers and malls to whole cities (Detroit is the most obvious example, but also ghost towns). The word ruin—at least in the traditional sense—implies a gradual process rather than a sudden catastrophe, an incremental falling into decay. For the present, we are not interested in ruins that have been produced instantaneously, such as the World Trade Center or Dresden after the firebombing; these latter ruins, engendered by war and violence, have a meaning that attaches to their creation, or decreation, and they can gain an almost immediate symbolic significance. The more gradually created ruin devolves piece by piece, changing by degrees until an irreversible moment , rarely marked in any formal way, when the thing—whether building, bridge, town, or city—is marked or remarked through a deliberate verbal or visual response and moves into another category of perception. Taking the long view, we have, of course, had ruins since the beginning of human construction; things are built, they are used, they are abandoned, they fall apart. Within that process, we could elaborate on the rise and fall of civilizations, and Gibbon (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) and Shelley (Ozymandias) have been our historical and moral guides in previous centuries. There is no dearth of commentary on the history of ruins and encounters with ruins.1 As ruins have proliferated in the last twenty-five years or so, they have initiated a cycle of commentary that seeks to come to terms with the phenomenon , and I am trying today to come to terms with that commentary, so that the question I am asking is, “How do we think about ruins?” MILES ORVELL 72 Let us begin with the commonsense notion that ruins are negative, the sign of a dysfunctional social and economic system: we walk through a section of the city with decaying housing and boarded-up windows and doors, or abandoned factories with every window smashed, or train tracks overgrown with weeds—areas that can be found in virtually every major city of a certain age—and think: this is very bad. These areas are dangerous ; they are crack houses and dens of other iniquities; they house filth, disease, and crime; they are places to avoid, the visible sign of urban neglect and civic failure. Structures that are no longer viable are, in many cases, simply abandoned, with insufficient motivation or capital to rebuild or reinvest in the land. What has caused these places to fall into ruin? The process can be described historically as a progression: cities that once were manufacturing centers have lost their industrial plants and factories as jobs have moved to areas with cheaper labor costs—whether the Southern United States or Southeast Asia or China. Urban neighborhoods are part of a causal chain that begins with the global economy, for after the factories are abandoned, the workers become unemployed, their unions are subject to dissolution, the houses fall into disrepair and are abandoned, the tax base decays, schools decay, shopping centers suffer, stores close, whites flee to the suburbs, new business avoids the city, the infrastructure decays, and so the cycle goes on until we wind up where we are, in fact, today with the older manufacturing centers of the United States.2 Even where the core of the city has held strong—as in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia—we have peripheral areas, previously working-class neighborhoods, that are wastelands, filled with acres of ruins. In other cities, such as Detroit, which are unable to adapt to a late twentieth-century information economy and lack the wax wings of the financial industry, the vital core has sagged disastrously, and the city is a vast ruined landscape of office buildings. (Yes, Marx had it right, anticipating the global markets of capitalism and their effects on the local: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind” [Manifesto of the Communist Party].3) RUINS 73 From this perspective, we can see urban ruins as the inevitable product of decisions made...