Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay

Despite the fact that Detroit still retains a population of over 900,000 souls, the assumption that nobody actually lives in Detroit anymore obscures the difficult subject of what happens on the margins of a city. This research asks the question of what does happen when a city’s pain is aestheticized without a deeper engagement of the intersections of history, race, space and place. This essay will discuss Detroit’s public art projects and movements spanning the twentieth century from the City Beautiful movement to Diego Rivera’s murals to the Heidelberg Project. It will explore how Detroiters have been endowed with an innate sense of activism and social justice, countering the abstract magnificence of the famed ‘ruins of Detroit’ and offering a human perspective on abandonment.

This article appropriates philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s neologism solastalgia, originally coined to refer to the sensation of existential anguish during environmental crisis, to refer to the city of Detroit, the phenomenon of “ruin porn” and the effect this media has on its residents. Ruin porn creates a cyclical consciousness of trauma for residents as it continually perpetuates images of Detroit as a ruined wasteland incapable of self-governance or improvement beyond the assistance of the white, elite establishment. This paper will utilize Albrecht’s work in tandem with urban studies to explore how ruin porn affects Detroit residents and the representation of the city at large.

The UrbEx phenomenon has produced numerous websites and publications, both as guides for locating particularly enticing ruin sites, and as guides for how to have the kind of experience that explorers seek: namely, to be the first to encounter something not yet valued by others, and to produce a visual record of its ephemerality, while those who come after can only replicate the experience. Exploring the exploration guidebooks themselves offers a unique insight into “how to” have the desired sublime experience long associated with visiting ruins, particularly with reference to urban ruins photography. This chapter will explore the impulse towards routinising desired types of ruin photography and UrbEx adventures through an examination of “how to” UrbEx photography books and websites.

Apocalyptic narratives focusing on urban wastelands have become ever-present in twenty first century media. Artists Stephen Crompton and Corey George capture images that evoke similar emotional tenor, drawing on the despair of a world where humanity’s impact on the landscape are in drawn-out states of death and reclamation by nature. While Crompton’s photo series The American Mall focuses on the slow decline of malls across America, George’s Alas, Babylon series details the casualties of the boom-and-bust cycles in the housing industry in Florida. Their photos bookend the same kinds of devastation seen in post-apocalyptic fiction, but also show America in a state of pre-apocalyptic decay. This chapter argues how the work of Crompton and George offers an additional intervention in understanding the widespread appeal of apocalyptic narratives.

Pitcairn Island, South Pacific is a remote 5 km² island known the world over for its famed connection to the Mutiny on the Bounty and its resultant mixed Anglo-Polynesian language and culture. Although captivated observers remain perpetually fascinated by the history and plight of the 50-odd population of Bounty descendants still resident on this faraway British outpost, there exists scant documentation of several pertinent cultural elements of this exemplary society for the study of isolation, linguistic change, and architectural and language-based ruining. As the Pitcairn Island language—Pitcairn—crumbles and fights against the tides of purported modernity and necessary innovation, so, too, do many archaeological artefacts and traditional architectural techniques. Here, one observes the aesthetics of ruin and demise in two old houses, which are steeped in earlier building traditions, in parallel with change, progress, and development–devolution in other spheres of culture like language. The ruining of language and the rusting of the former architecture on Pitcairn Island are but two associated traditional bedfellows, which offer insight into a broader imaginary of corrosion. Using the recent account of a dilapidated house being mistaken for a junkyard by a visitor during fieldwork in 2016, this chapter makes claims relating language, architectural, and archaeological collapse. The worded and built ruining on Pitcairn Island sees the death of a language, the likely dying out of a people, and the tarnished ness of tangible and intangible lost artefacts as being diachronically steeped. It is argued that this aesthetic of expiry and collapse on and of Pitcairn Island is an ideal case study in identifying alternate ruinscapes, observing ruin architecture, and addressing the isolation of ruining. An argument is advanced which considers how architectural documentation renders the cultural documenter a ruin photographer of architectural decay, just as the linguist writes and records (of–about) the disappearance of concomitant spoken tropes.

This study seeks to determine the value and use of contemporary ruins in the centre of Gosford, a regional city of New South Wales, Australia, where aspirations to progress are offset by stories and physical traces of abandonment and decay produced as a consequence of urban decline. In Gosford, local public sentiment typically positions decay as hindrance to progress, and representative of broader perceptions of the city’s stagnation. Yet these dilapidated structures are spaces of unconventional and transient historical significance. The condemned buildings occupy an uneasy space between commercial or civic functions, and rejuvenation or demolition, and are frequented by urban explorers, street artists and the city’s youth. This study will form the groundwork for an interactive audio geography tour in the public sphere.

This chapter analyses ruin porn from the perspective of the Internet, and specifically virtual online experiences. Not least where sexual pornography is so heavily associated with its experience via the Internet, as opposed to an act that occurs in ‘real’ life or even via static photographic representations, this chapter explores how ruin porn is accessed and experienced online. Online ruin porn is analysed here within the theoretical framework of virtual dark tourism. In analysing this online aspect of ruin porn, this chapter looks specifically at the case study of Chernobyl, and also assesses the limitations of online experiences, not only in terms of dark tourism more widely but also museum engagement with online and enhanced virtuality experiences as a method of measurement.

In the last 15 years there has been a multitude of post-apocalyptic films projecting the long term implications of an apocalyptic disaster. The design and use of settings of landscapes, settlements, and waters freed of human beings are remarkably similar in choice and style: vast wastelands, ruins of landmarks, and overgrown cities reminding of the once enormous impact of humanity on earth while simultaneously stressing its perishability and nature’s ‘revenge’. In this chapter, I discuss the aesthetics and (narrative) functions of land- and urbanscapes in post-apocalyptic media, investigate tendencies in their composition overlapping individual productions and media (also including web series, documentaries, and reality TV shows), and thus demonstrate the creation, nature, effects, and functions of post-apocalyptic ruins, wastelands, and other settings across media.

Industrial ruins, abandoned places and landscapes of urban decay have to an increasing extent come to surface in popular representations of towns and cities. Their appearances are widely circulated also through various social media platforms and online networks. Together, these “cultures of circulation” weave an increasingly complex imaginary texture of the recent past. In this chapter, I explore the cultural tensions between the rough, but no less phantasmagorical, materiality of decaying urban areas and the increasingly ephemeral cultures of online circulation. Exploring such a field, I argue, is a good way of grasping the different ways in which people imagine, mediate and relate to the half-forgotten remnants of the modern past, as well as a starting point for mapping the contested landscapes of the spreadable city.