The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay (International Library of Visual Culture)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.74 (563 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B01N5UO88B |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 564 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-04-10 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Cities are imagined not just as utopias, but also as ruins. Seen in a certain light, for example, urban ruin and decay are a challenge to capitalist narratives of unbounded progress. Examining ruins in Chernobyl, Detroit, London, Manchester and Varosha, this book demonstrates that how we discuss and depict urban decline is intimately connected to the histories, economic forces, power structures and communities of a given city, as well as to conflicting visions for its future.. It reveals that ruination presents a complex opportunity to envision new futures for a city, whether that is by rewriting its past or throwing off old assumptions and proposing radical change. They can equally imply that power structures thought to be deeply ingrained are temporary, contingent and even fragile. The Dead City unearths meanings from such depictions of ruination and decay, looking at representations of both thriving cities and ones which are strugglin
`The Dead City is an elegantly argued and lacerating insight into our contemporary collective "ruin lust". Garrett, University of Sydney . The book binds together stunning images and carefully crafted prose in an elegy to ruin aesthetics, moving adroitly between critical commentary to personal experience and propelling the reader into unexpected introspection.' Bradley L
Paul Dobraszczyk is a visiting lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. His research focuses on visual culture and the built environment from the 19th century onwards, and he is co-editor of Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within (2016) and Function & Fantasy: Iron Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Ce