The ghosts of industrial ruins Ordering and disordering memory in excessive space, Visual Culture
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Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2005, volume 23, pages 829 ^ 849
DOI:10.1068/d58j
The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering
memory in excessive space
Tim Edensor
Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, Manchester Metropolitan
University, John Dalton Extension, Chester Street, Manchester M1 5GD, England;
e-mail:
Received 8 April 2004; in revised form 13 July 2004
Abstract. In this paper I investigate how the effects of the disordered spaces of industrial ruins can
interrogate and contest the normative ways in which memory is spatialised in the city. By focusing upon
confrontations with the ghosts which haunt ruins, I will suggest that the affective and sensual memories
conjured up act as an antidote to the fixed, classified, and commodified memories purveyed in heritage
and commemorative spaces. In contradistinction to the didactic and constrained remembering that
prevails across Western cities, a form of remembering which is inarticulate, sensual, and conjectural
allows improvisatory scope to supplement and challenge ordered forms of social remembering.
De Certeau claims that places are ``haunted by many different spirits, spirits one can
`invoke' or not'', for ``haunted places are the only ones people can live in'' (1984,
page 108). The urge to seek out the ghosts of places is bound up with the politics of
remembering the past and, more specifically, with the spatialisation of memory and
how memory is sought, articulated, and inscribed upon space. Dominant strategies of
remembering tend to exorcise haunted places, for ghosts are fluid, evanescent entities
and they disturb the reifications through which performances, narratives, and experiences
of memory become fixed in space. Yet the selective organisation of the memorable stands
against the workings of memory, which is characterised by discontinuities and irrup-
tions and cannot be fixed or conveniently erased. And, because of imperatives to bury
the past too swiftly in search of the new, modernity is haunted in a particularly urgent
fashion by that which has been consigned to irrelevance but which demands recogni-
tion of its historical impact. In this paper I move into the haunted realms of industrial
ruinsöderelict foundries, mills, workshops, and factoriesömarginal sites which con-
tinue to litter the increasingly postindustrial cities of the West, now bypassed by the
flows of money, energy, people, and traffic within which they were once enfolded.
Ruins are sites which have not been exorcised, where the supposedly over-and-done-
with remains. Haunted by disruptive ghosts, they seethe with memories, but these
wispy forms can rarely be confined. They haunt the visitor with vague intimations of
the past, refusing fixity, and they also haunt the desire to pin memory down in place.
The politics of spatialising memory evokes a broader tension between contradictory
modern desires: the uneven conflict between the yearning for order and the simultaneous
longing for disorder or transgression (Berman, 1982). A logocentric, `Appollonian' inclina-
tion (Rojek, 1995) desires to order the world aesthetically and epistemologically,
whereas a `Dionysian' tendency seeks out the antithesis of this regulation in carnival,
indeterminacy, and excess, and in the sensual experience of flux and the mixing of
people, activities, space, and things. The rapid and continual change of modernity, in
which everything that is solid turns into air, may be perceived as threatening chaos
or embraced as exciting. Perhaps it is in the contemporary Western city that these
tensions are most evident, the site of an ongoing battle between regulatory regimes
concerned with strategies of surveillance and aesthetic monitoring, and tacticians who
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transgress or confound them, who seek out or create realms of surprise, contingency, and
misrule (de Certeau, 1984). Accordingly, the spatialisation of memory is embedded in
strategies to determine where and how things, activities, and people should be placed.
Inevitably, however, there are sites where remembering may be experienced, practised,
and articulated otherwise. Before I elaborate upon how ruins are exemplary alternative
sites of memory, I will briefly reprise some of the ways in which the spatialisation of
memory has been theorised in the context of wider regulatory processes.
Theorising memory in place
Sites of memory
It needs to be emphasised that remembering is a thoroughly social and political process,
a realm of contestation and controversy. The past is ``constantly selected, filtered and
restructured in terms set by the questions and necessities of the present'' (Jedlowski, 2001,
page 30). Memories are selected and interpreted on the basis of culturally located
knowledge and this is further ``constituted and stabilised within a network of social
relationships'' (page 34), consolidated in the `common sense' of the everyday. Although
practices of inscribing memory on space are enormously varied, there are undoubtedly
tendencies to fix authoritative meanings about the past through an ensemble of
practices and technologies which centre upon the production of specific spaces, here
identified as monumental `memoryscapes'ömediatised spaces, heritage districts, and
museums.
First, remembering in space has focused upon the construction of specific mem-
oryscapes: ``rhetorical topoi'' (Boyer, 1994) through which iconographic forms and
commemorative stages organise a relationship with the past. Special sites for collective
remembering encompass war memorials, monuments to the contemporaneously
esteemed (often soldiers, statesmen, philanthropists, industrialists, and scientists), and
memorials to military heroes. Typically drenched in masculinised, classed, and racial-
ised ideologies (Edensor and Kothari, 1996), an established iconography designates
particular relationships and continuities with selective characters, places, and events
from the past. Moreover, such sites serve as the venue for a range of collective enactions,
ranging from `official' ceremonies to touristic rituals (Edensor, 1997)ösynchronised
and disciplined rituals which fix the performative styles of imprinting memory on space.
Consequently, such sites can obviate the need for active remembering, producing a
``singular sense of the past'' which becomes ``assumed, closed down as [an area] of
contestation or debate'' (Massey, 1995, page 183).
Second, contemporary processes of social remembering have been described as
becoming increasingly externalised, staged outside the local through the intensified
mediatisation and commodification of popular sites, myths, and icons (see Misztal,
2002; van Dijk, 2004). Mediated imaginary geographies circulate through adverts, soap
operas, `classic' rock music stations, and remade `classic' movies. For instance, the
national(ist) myth of William Wallace has been plucked from Scotland and trans-
formed into a Hollywood film, Braveheart. Replete with images of `romantic' highland
rurality, it has become embedded in the touristic promotion of the town of Stirling,
newly labeled `Braveheart Country' (Edensor, 2002). A host of other leisure and
consumption spaces, including theme parks, shopping malls, and festival marketplaces,
are similarly mediated by imagery and stage props drawn from televisual and film worlds.
Third, memory is imprinted upon space through the production of `historic' dis-
tricts where formerly industrial or commercial buildings are converted into upmarket
accommodation, retail space, or office space. Typically, facades are retained, although
divested of the patina which testified to previous usage, but age value is reencoded
via `antique' street furniture. These makeovers select only a few `heritage' features,
The ghosts of industrial ruins
831
removing all clutter so space may be themed coherently (Gottdiener, 1997). These
normative processes disguise a politics wherein developers and experts remember space
for middle-class inhabitants, businesses, shoppers, and tourists, raising wider questions
about which fragments and spaces of memory are incinerated, dumped, or buried and
which pass into social and institutional memory.
Fourth, heritage and museum spaces seamlessly banish ambiguity and the multi-
plicity of the past to compile a series of potted stories, display boards, audiovisual
presentations, and themed simulacra which attempt to capture the `feel' of a histor-
ical period, performing a narrative and dramatic fixing, and which potentially limit
the interpretative and performative scope of visitors. Although more dramatic, spec-
tacular, `interpretive' techniques of transmitting ideas about the past have replaced
`legislative' presentations (Bauman, 1987) the selection of particular stories, charac-
ters, events, and other fragments to stimulate memory persists. Moreover, the
arrangement of selective artefacts in orderly displays eclipses mystery and ``stabilises
the identity of a thing'' (Thomas, 1991, page 4). Such objectsöchampioned as `best
preserved', `most valuable', or `typical'öare positioned against uncluttered back-
grounds and do not mingle with other fragments, disguising the excessive sensual
and semiotic effects they bear. These exhibitions memorialise culture via `publicly
sanctioned narratives' and institutionalised rhetoric which masquerade as `scientific'
(Ferguson, 1996) and which articulate semiotic frameworks for understanding objects
(Hooper-Greenhill, 2000).
Common threads of memory
Although these realms of memory are separable in terms of motivations, histories, and
origins, there are nevertheless a number of commonalities between them. As already
mentioned, a prevalent critique is that memory is increasingly detached from place
through the mediating influences of expertise, commerce, and media, themselves
increasingly disembedded from place. Accordingly, such external, even `prosthetic'
(Lansberg, 2001), memories spectacularise local particularity (Auge¨ , 1995), replacing
memories embedded in everyday habit and social interaction, as ``the surroundings in
which memory is an essential component of everyday existence'' exist no longer (Nora,
1996, page 1). Ironically, such practices of memory may attempt to realign places with
the past because of a broader sense of detachment and displacement (Giddens, 1991).
Accordingly, social remembering is increasingly cosmopolitan for collective memories
transcend ethnic and national boundaries as cultures become deterritorialised and
are transmitted into the local via the global media. Levy and Sznaider consider that
such memories are reembedded, reconciled with national, regional, or ethnic memories
for they ``evolve from the encounter of global interpretations and local sensibilities''
(2002, page 92), whereas Misztal (2004) argues that, as place-bound memories fade,
memory is typically articulated through disparate and fragmented `memory groups'
stretched across space.
Another key common denominator is that these sites of memory rely on pervasive
spatial regulation for their power, through which scientific presentation and spectac-
ular display are often blended with retail techniques. As I have mentioned, objects in
display cases are illuminated, alone, and labeled irrespective of their multiple con-
tingent uses and sensual qualities. And sites are organised as specific places designed
to convey particular memories, and, similarly, are ``relegated to a space outside of the
erosion of socio-biological time'' (McAllister, 2001, page 104), encoded as if preserved
at a particular juncture. These purifying regimes of encoding and spacing through
which things are detached from previous contexts are part of the `regimes of place'
through which sites are understood, practised, and experienced (McDowell, 1999) and
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their efficacy in imprinting memories on space requires the removal of clutter, which
might generate a profusion of matter and meaning.
Equally importantly, the regimes of memory that are materialised in space also
require that people comport themselves `appropriately'. Bennett shows how the orga-
nisation of museums, as exemplary spaces of memory, was devised to develop ``new
norms of public conduct'' (1995, page 24), by inculcating performative conventions
coordinated by attendants and guided by the layout of display cases and sequential
routes to ensure compliance with ``a programme of organised walking'' (page 186), for
instance. Similarly, modes of surveillance curb `inappropriate' behaviour at sites of
memory, and monuments are often the site of ceremonies in which disciplined manoeu-
vres and prescribed enactions limit interpretation by instilling embodied `habit memo-
ries' (Connerton, 1989). Typically, performances within these uncluttered, sensually
regulated landscapes are dominated by the visual apprehension of space, a crucial
factor in the stimulation of memories.
My identification of these tendencies through which memory is imprinted on space
is not intended to suggest that remembering at these sites is either uncontested or
immobile. For instance, memorials inevitably articulate the semiotic conventions of
the era in which they were built, and popular familiarity with these significations may
decline so that sites are reinterpreted according to contemporary understandings
(Warner, 1993). And, far from being disembedding practices, the technologies and
techniques of mediation may also be utilised by individuals: for instance, through
photography and video recording, acts of memory making which ``mediate between
individuality and collectivity'' (van Dijk, 2004, page 270). Moreover, although the
production of Braveheart cited above might appear to be an exemplary case of
the disembedding of memory from space, it was repatriated by audiences in Scotland
and used to enchant a host of competing political objectives (Edensor, 2002), reinvigor-
ating debates about the role of mythic memories within national identity. Similarly, as
Santos (2003) points out, objects displayed in museums may be loaded with remem-
bered meanings and trajectories of desires which confound institutional interpretations.
Escaping from dominant ideologies, such artefacts may be ``memory's shadows'' which
``spring to life unbidden, and serve as ghostly sentinels of our thought'' (Samuel, 1994,
page 27). My depiction might also seem to neglect alternative versions of heritage and
contesting performances of remembrance mobilised by the powerless and neglected,
confirming a view of the heritage industry as monolithic, uncritical, and irredeemably
conservative (Hewison, 1987; Wright, 1985). Moreover, such an analysis might be accused
of being outdated. For instance, the `postmuseum' offers wider scope for interpretative
licence, decentring traditional, authoritative, and expert narratives (Hooper-Greenhill,
2000).
However, although my critique here does indeed focus upon `official', ideologically
laden versions of the past, I also include those `alternative', `dissonant' or `contested'
forms of heritage which centre around particular ethnic, class, and gendered identities.
Although such attempts have laudably installed neglected subjects into memory, an
identity-based approach to heritage can equally reify the past, suggesting that it
directly refers ``to entities that existed in the past, compartmentalised and ready to
be claimed, rather than being socially and culturally constructed in identity struggles
of the present'' (Landzelius, 2003, page 206). Accordingly, these supplementary micro-
narratives and their alternative sites of memory equally deny the multiplicity and mystery
of the past, instead offering routes through which we might situate ourselves in relation
to an unfolding, linear past through the disciplined encoding of polysemic fragments
within a particularistic heritage to reaffirm essentialised preconceptions of identity.
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Although there are no doubt political imperatives to stabilise contingently certain
memories in place, and such sites provide important anchoring functions, the critical
argument mobilised here, which prefigures the discussion of more disorderly, haunted
spaces of memory, is premised on the danger that such regulated, commodified, highly
encoded, desensualised sites of memory might become all-pervasive in the spatialisa-
tion of memory. Those sites identified above consolidate the idea that there are places
for remembering and places where memories and the past are irrelevant. The inscrip-
tion of memory on space is thus caught up in regulatory regimes which determine
where and how things, activities, and people should be placed, ``people here, traffic
there; work here, homes there; rich here; poor there'' (Berman, 1982, page 168), and is
enmeshed in the production and maintenance of single-purpose or `purified' spaces
(Sibley, 1988) in which preferred activities occur, creating a spatially and socially
segmented world. Such a `machinic episteme' (Lash, 1999), which informs an apparatus
of policing, planning regulations, zoning policies, place promotion, boundary main-
tenance, and the regulation of flows of traffic, people, and money, also incorporates a
politics of memory. All too easily, identifications of outsider threats construct those
who are `out of place' (Cresswell, 1996), and parallels can be drawn with the kinds of
outsider memories which must be expunged to maintain preferred versions of history.
For, strongly classified spaces in which supposedly unlike people, things, practices, and
memories are kept apart contrast with ``weakly classified spaces'' which possess blurred
boundaries and allow different elements to mingle, allowing a wide range of encounters
and greater self-governance and expressiveness (page 414). It is to these spaces, which
are also other sites of memory, that I now turn.
Sites of excess and memory
The modern city can never become a wholly Appollonian, seamlessly regulated realm
for it continues to be haunted by the neglected, the disposed of, and the repressed,
most clearly in marginal sites where ghostly memories cannot be entirely expunged.
Within the interstices of the city there are a host of other spaces, part of a ``wild zone'',
a ``contingent site of occupation and colonisation which avoids the objective processes
of ordered territorialisation'' (Stanley, 1996, page 37). What Ford (2000) calls the
`spaces between buildings', the unadorned backsides of the city, the alleys, culverts,
service areas, and other microspaces, along with wastelands, railway sidings, spaces
behind billboards, and unofficial rubbish tips, as well as the `edgelands' or `urban
fringe' (Shoard, 2003), are spaces ``where aesthetics and ethics merge and where there
are no defined boundaries and constant ruptures in terms of value'' (Stanley, 1996,
page 38).
The lack of intensive performative and aesthetic regulation in these spaces makes
evident the hidden excess of the urban order, the surplus of production, the superfluity
of matter and meaning which violates order and disrupts the capitalist quest for the
always new. Here the supposedly obsolete and irrelevant are not so tirelessly dispensed
with. These marginal spaces and their cluttered materialities invoke Bataille's idea that
production always generates its negative, a formless spatial and material excess which
rebukes dreams of unity (1991). For, as Neilsen remarks, ``the concrete matter of the
city will always exceed the ambition and attempts to control and shape it, and will
always have features that cannot be exposed in the representations that planning has
to work with'' (2002, page 54). As a consequence, there is a profusion of urban
resourcesöspaces, things, meaningsöthat can be utilised in innumerable ways. This
glut reveals the limitations of the commodified, planned city, for, as Tagg (1996,
page 181) observes, spectacular urban regimes ``are never coherent, exhaustive or closed
in the ways they are fantasised as being ... they cannot shed that ambivalence which
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