Ruins as pieces of the Real: Images of a post-apocalyptic present

Project Loops, “Edgelands” and the Permanent Reimagining of Landscape

“…In the years following the financial crisis of 2008, abandoned and "unrealized" development sites, or "stalled spaces", "modern ruins" and "ghost estates", as they have been referred to in planning literature, news media and political geography research (Boyle et al 2014;Arboleda 2016Arboleda , 2020, became a subject of much scrutiny, debate and public attention. As noted by Olsen and Pétursdóttir (2014b) and Pohl (2021), images of "crisis-scapes" and "modern ruins" like construction projects and housing estates that had been abandoned mid-construction proliferated in news media across Euroamerican contexts. Along with other "disaster" sites across the world, these material forms became increasingly symbolic visual and material evidence of credit-and debt-selling economies in peril.…”

Apocalyptic urban surrealism in the city at the end of the world

“…This challenge resonates with that posed by a small but growing number of critical theorists -both in the field of urban studies and beyond -who argue that the apocalypse seemingly forewarned by the Anthropocene should be approached, not as a future event to be avoided, but as an ongoing process that is already unfolding unevenly across our planetary present (Calder Williams, 2011;Cunningham and Warwick, 2013;Pohl, 2021;Swyngedouw, 2022;Zupancˇicˇ, 2017). Such an approach requires new 'arts of noticing' through which 'we might look around to notice this strange new world, and.…”

“…The principal target of Koolhaas’s critique is the classical modernism of Le Corbusier. But the Anthropocene is proving to be an even more fertile ground for such apocalyptic fantasies (Pohl, 2021; Swyngedouw, 2022), and for the concomitant conviction that new urban forms can save the world (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2020; Keil, 2020).…”

Sustainability and impossible worlds

“…At the same time, the ecological disaster in Ukraine is not potential but already actual and real, as the war produces enormous effects that will probably last for centuries. 12 The nuclear fear, or nucleomituphobia, is political not only because it is connected to war and international conflicts but also because it can be framed as a dispositive of depoliticisation, staging a universal threat to the survival of humankind, announcing the premature termination of ‘our’ civilisation and of our ‘proper’ political destinies (Pohl, 2021; Swyngedouw, 2013). Such ‘universal we’ is, of course, an unrealistic discursive construction.…”