The New Urban Ruins

Abstract

This book provides an innovative lens to consider contemporary urban challenges, taking as its point of departure two overlapping claims. The first is that although the topics of ruins and vacant spaces have been widely discussed in the urban studies literature, their role in the production of both urban landscapes and the economic, social and cultural geographies of cities is not adequately understood. The second is that urban vacancy will play an even greater role in urban development, politics and experimentation in the future. Spaces officially designated as ‘vacant’ are the sites of contested activity, use, and representation. Centring urban vacancy as a core feature of urbanisation, the contributors develop new empirical insights that rethink ruination, urban development and political contestation over the re-use of vacant spaces in (post-)crisis cities across the globe. Chapters are organised into three thematic sections. The first section, ‘Rethinking ruination in the post-crisis context’, advances the conceptual linkages between the literatures on ruins and vacant space. The second, ‘The political economy of urban vacant spaces’, centres urban vacancy as a core feature of cities, constituting the interface between urban land markets and cultural understandings of use/exchange value. The third section, ‘Re-appropriating urban vacant spaces’, explores vacant spaces as an important point of political antagonism. Using international case studies from the Global North and Global South, the book sheds important new light on the complexity of forces and processes shaping urban vacancy and its re-use, exploring these as both lived spaces and sites of political antagonism.