Unbuilding cities: Demolition, ruins and narratives of the urban past

Abstract

Much recent discussion in urban studies has been drawn to the accelerated destruction of urban space, where striking scenes of demolition and renewal are posited as an index of the uneven incorporation of cities and regions into a new world order of global capital. While the disappearance of old buildings and neighborhoods has been mourned, critiqued or celebrated by residents and visitors alike, these sites and sights have also become a resource for formulating new narratives of the city. Drawing from both contemporary and historical case studies, this paper traces a genealogy of the ways in which destruction have been theorized and explores the ways in which spectacles of demolition and ruins have been narrated by different agents to achieve specific purposes. A persistent concern is, how do these spaces of “unbuilding” reinscribe or erase the historical processes through which they formed? How do the competing tales reconstruct existing discourses of the city and rewrite its histories?