Full Description
This is the age of ruins. The wrecks of our speeding, super-sizing, impatient era can be found on the Moon and at the bottom of the sea, in the internet's haunted attics, in desecrated jungles and in abandoned shopping malls inhabited by dust and spiders. We live amid the accumulating debris of an economy that can't stop producing, building and digging, creating mountains of stuff, little of which lasts very long.
The old ruins, those pleasant antiquities, blocks of Sun-warmed marble wedged in romantic sands, are reassuring, and speak of a time when clocks turned slowly. The ruins of the industrial era, old brick-built factories, seem equally distant. They are sweetly melancholic: the wind pushes one last squeak from a rusty wheel and corridors echo with memories of heavy, well-oiled machines. The old ruins appeal to us because we're nostalgic for a world that was less frantic. We like to be fooled that ruins are from the past when, in fact, they describe our present.
This is a book about 21 new ruins. Each one challenges our ideas about what ruins look like and each one has a unique story to tell. They all linked, not just by their novelty, but because each offers a portrait of a world in which abandonment and collapse have become normalised.
Part of what makes the new ruins so strange is their uncertainty. Yesterday's ruins are frozen in time. No one is planning to rebuild Pompeii. The new ruins are queasier. They are dead but, somehow, keep breathing: the ruined virtual kingdom can be rebooted, so too the empty retail park. Perhaps even wrecked nature can be resurrected, the Amazon rebuilt, the ocean's eco-systems reconstructed. The new ruins are zombies, dead but always threatening to spring back to life.
In many cities ruins are everywhere. Ruination flows from so many aspects of modern life - its remorseless innovation as well as its destructiveness - that we may be losing our ability to see what a strange, churning world it has created. This title drags new ruins into the light and shows how extraordinary they are. You will never think of ruins in the same way again.
Contents
Introduction
Part One: New Ruins: Technology
Active Worlds: An Abandoned Alternative Reality
Ex-Data Centre, Quebec, Canda: Data Made Visible
Earth Orbit: Space Junk
The Moon: Multiple Locations: Moon Ruins
Camp Century, Greenland: Polar Ruins
Cape Aniva Nuclear Lighthouse, Russia: Nuclear Ruins
Liuting, China: An Abandoned Airport
Platform Holly, California, US: Ruins to Reefs
Part Two: New Ruins: Culture
Hyde Library, Manchester, UK: A Civic Ruin
Blackpool, UK: Seaside Ruins
The New World Department Store, Bangkok, Thailand: Mall Ruins
Shields Road, Newcastle, UK: A High Street in Ruins
Alpine Village, Italy: Ruins of Rural Flight
Forest City, Malaysia: Speculation Ruins
Ushaw College, County Durham, UK: Ex-Seminary
Palmyra, Syria: A Ruin Ruined by Islamic State
Part Three: New Ruins: Nature
Sumatra, Indonesia: Remnant Jungle
Newcastle, UK: Ruined Soil
Great Barrier Reef, Australia: Bleached Reef
The Ganges, India: Ruined River
Lahore, Pakistan: Ruined Air
Bibliography
