Decommissioned places: Ruins, endurance and care at the end of the first nuclear age

Abstract

This paper argues for a geography of deindustrialising places as spaces of inhabitation and endurance, rather than one based on narratives of progres, decline and ruination. Ruins have long been a concern for geographers, yet the material remains of modernity's grand schemes feed easily into ways of seeing and knowing deindustrialised spaces that can efface the practices through which lives and worlds are made in the present. Drawing on fieldwork in the former Soviet atomgrad of Visaginas, Lithuania, the paper both acknowledges and pulls back from the draw of the ruin. Moving away from the ruin‐temporalities of progress and decline, it offers an account of ongoing practices and modes of habitation in spaces defined by ruination. A reflexive acknowledgement of our contaminated role in making sense of such spaces allows us to be both enchanted by grand narratives of hubris and decline and to see other stories – stories of living on, of endurance, and of making lives in places circumscribed as futureless by political and economic regimes. As such, the paper offers an alternative geography of places that are decommissioned from above, paying attention to the care, commitment, makeshift practices and aesthetic projects through which their inhabitants live on. Engaging this approach through a series of small stories based on ethnographic and collaborative fieldwork alongside two photographers in Visaginas, I posit that the material and subjective remains of the dreams of the first nuclear age give rise to emergent forms of life that stand in excess to narratives of progress and decline. The ruins of Soviet nuclear modernity here operate as containers for practices of endurance and living on through changing relations of power and capital, rather than objects of melancholic loss, and as raw materials through which to forge ways of living in spaces characterised as surplus to requirement.

Urban trauma in the ruins of industrial culture: Miners’ Welfares of the Nottinghamshire coalfield, UK

“…Material remains, of course, can evoke absent pasts, but they are not always fundamental to remembering for those who knew sites before ruination or erasure (Bright, 2016;Byrne & Doyle, 2004). Relatedly, there is also the issue of bodies, life and habitability, bringing into question designations of ruins as abandonment (Dawney, 2020;Safransky, 2014). Ruins are rarely empty of human and more-than-human activity, and are often occupied -in, on and around -by existing populations that live through and with their ruination (Gordillo, 2014).…”

“…However, they are still subject to processes of material, cultural, symbolic and emotional ruination. Affective memories imbue the decaying materialities of all Miners' Welfares, whether open, derelict or demolished (Dawney, 2020;Vorbrugg, 2019).…”

“…My positionality, thus, privileges me in this research. Because many researchers are not enmeshed with the lived histories of the ruins they study, they face alternative challenges in attuning themselves to the urban traumas of industrial ruination (Dawby, 2010;Dawney, 2020;Edwards, 2016;O'Callaghan, 2018;Stoler, 2008).…”

“…However, there has been inadequate attention to the multiple ways that ruins are embodied and felt by the disparate and shared lives intimately enmeshed with them (Fraser, 2018;Hill, 2013;Safransky, 2014). Embodied (auto)ethnographies are required to reveal how variegated body-ruin relations emerge from an accumulation of habituated, embodied encounters within transforming sociopolitical contexts (Dawney, 2020;Gordillo, 2014;Martin, 2014;Till, 2012a;Tsing, 2015). The second methodological approach is archival research.…”

Tourism and rewilding: an introduction – definition, issues and review

“…,Pope (2014),Blenkinsop, Fettes, and Kentel (2015),Pinto (2017) andBrown (2019) Informal urban greenspace Current UrbanDanford et al (2018),Dawney (2019),Maller and Farahani (2018) and Kaae, Holm, Caspersen, and Gulsrud (2019) Psychological and societal benefits of human contact with wild and informal commoditisation of ecosystems, landscapes and species as attractions for tourist consumption Current AnyHall (2015),Whittle, Stewart, and Fisher (2015),Hoogendoorn, Meintjes, Kelso, and Fitchett (2018),Koninx (2018), Escalante-Pliego, Arias-Montero, Cortez-Contreras, Cantú-Guzmán, and Rodríguez-Mouriño (2019) andPellis (2019) Note: Categories partly based on Jørgensen (2015).…”