The Post-Industrial Sublime or Forgetting Love Canal

In: Dialectics of Space and Place across Virtual and Corporeal Topographies
Author:
Karen Wilson Baptist
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If ‘space is a practiced place’ as de Certeau pronounces, then what is a post-industrial ruin? Expunged from the practices of everyday life, these sites degrade, abandoned structures corrode and oxidize, graffiti proliferates, the feral returns. This suggests a moral imperative within the aesthetic of the ruin, a reminder of the temporal nature of human existence and the redemptive power of wild nature. Ruins have long been muse for aesthetic contemplation, inspiring centuries of art, music, philosophy, garden art, architecture, and landscape architecture. The ruin hosts a haunted presence where the spectral absence embodied within its presence evokes human folly; our ambitions of eminence and immortality are revealed as futility, supplanted by images of desolation, decay, and death. The post-industrial ruin is equally a representation of human vanitas, but the melancholy that the post-industrial edifice inspires transports mourning beyond an artful inducement of sadness, for here is reflected the loss of industry, the urban decay, and the extinction of the working class that accompanies the off-shore migration of labour in a late-capitalist society. Equally, our grief may encompass an ecological mourning, for the deathscape of these drosscapes may include profoundly toxic leachates whose environmental impact endures well beyond the lives of the labourers and the products once manufactured here. Thus a post-industrial aesthetic is equally evocative of human conceit; in the ruins of human endeavors, our actions are no longer washed over by the wild, rather, we are implicated in our wantonness, greed, and destructiveness of culture and of nature. In contemporary design practice, post-industrial sites are the new pleasure grounds, a utilitarian solution for the Twenty-first century Park - redemptive, functional, and picturesque. This chapter reflects upon the moral imperative potentialised by contemporary representations of the post-industrial sublime, and ponders if we have too swiftly forgotten the lessons of Love Canal.

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