Abstract
This article calls for a consideration of the reuse aesthetics of urban ruins in terms of cultural valuations related to the political status of social practices. In the context of debates on ruins in the field of memory studies and along the division between politics and the political, I argue for the recognition of affective atmospheric practices based upon performative knowledge-making and reenactments of atmospheres from the past. As demonstrated by an example of reuse in Berlin in the 2000s, these practices recall rituals and routines from the pasts of ruins by performatively exploring their futures. This position will be critically situated within the debate about “socially engaged arts” and the neoliberal “creative city” policies in the city of Berlin. It will also be presented as a cultural value-making in conflict with the paradigm of historical reconstruction in architecture and planning aimed at creating architectural replications from the archive. The article concludes with a reflection on reenactments as cultural value-making, a perspective that may have an effect on heritage policies.
Highlights
Urban ruins have been analyzed as artifacts of affect and of memory
There are the “creative city” policies in the context of neoliberal authorities, the “culturalization” (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 173) of urban life, and the support of homegrown “memorial entrepreneurs” (Jordan, 2006, p. 2), engaging with the performative aesthetics of urban ruins; on the other, we find the planning paradigm of “stony Berlin,” which seeks to reintroduce the nostalgic idea of a European city of the nineteenth century by means of historical reconstruction, attempting to replicate original designs based solely upon archival materials
These included strolling through the ruin to feel the disconnect from Socialist-era marches involving the palace and from its German Democratic Republic (GDR) inscriptions, and the bourgeois enjoyment of fancy cocktails in the temporary bar, which was at odds with the nonconsumerist experience in Socialistera palace restaurants. In all of these reenacted practices, the aesthetics of the ruin were exploited to spotlight the time difference between the actual state of the existing built structure and the virtuality of the past in order to value the potentialities of using the structure for new architectural programmings. This methodical approach of valuing the aesthetics of the site based on reenactments differs from the major planning device currently in use—historical reconstruction—which dominated the conflict in this case study, through the paradigm of stony Berlin and the reconstruction of the city castle
Summary
Urban ruins have been analyzed as artifacts of affect and of memory. They have been studied as the raw materials of cities with high mutability and affective excess, dismantled from their architectural classifications, typologies, and representational connotations (DeSilvey, 2006; Edensor, 2005). Urban ruins, practice theory, cultural activism, affective atmospheres
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