Postindustrial Ecologies: Industrial Rubble, Nature and the Limits of Representation

Abstract

Ex-industrial areas, which occupy about 15 per cent of Bucharest’s surface, have generated emergent ecologies during the post-socialist period. The open-ended, eclectic and hard-to-define nature of such sites resists the common interpretations in terms of (industrial) heritage, nature, creative industries or speculative real estate development. Consequently, such postindustrial ecologies should be approached in a non-teleological way: neither as sanitized ruins, nor as fetishised nature, but as provisional ex-industrial materialities transformed by new human and non-human actors. I identify four main processes unfolding in such sites: urban mining; use as playgrounds for children; use as refuges for marginal humans and animals; and struggles for signification. None of these predominates.