Futures From Ruins

When ruins become ground for creation rather than objects from devastated pasts, they cultivate belief in what’s possible. It’s a shift that people like Tsing insist is essential to moving beyond extractive cycles of “promise and ruin, promise and ruin.”

As places where disaster has already occurred, ruins are proof that life continues even when everything goes wrong — and that beauty and connection can be cultivated in the process.

The town’s compassionate side serves as a different kind of preview, suggesting that ruins can play a powerful role in creating the more supportive futures we need. 

People have been inspired to create new spaces, rituals and infrastructure amongst ruins for millennia, artists in particular. From London to Berlin to Rome to Manila, many cities have been continually built anew atop the wreckage of their pasts, with creative groups often leading the way.

Reshaping ruins activates the future through experimentation with the past, a dynamic that both shifts embedded memories of physical spaces and diversifies what and how we imagine what can be.

(Bombay Beach) is a physical reminder that success and devastation are two sides of the same coin, knowledge that provides incentive to look beyond the nostalgia that ruins so often inspire.

Ruins have inspired similar kinds of objectification for millennia. For many, they’re visual objects, things to romanticize, fetishize and look at from afar. It’s a simplified way of seeing that lends itself to extraction more than engagement, a kind “over-aestheticization of past eras." Henri Lefebvre explored the phenomenon in 1968, writing ... See more

The ongoing work of making the spaces in which we live cultivates a kind of alchemy, in which stronger links between people and place can arise.

The dynamic echoes social and cultural geographer Tim Edensor’s idea of ruins as fluid spaces, where limits on material curiosity and imagination are let go, and exploration of alternative futures can thrive.