The ruins of modernity are inevitably the ruins of the North. Actual or imagined ruined cities (the real Detroit or a post-apocalyptic London) are always Euro-American industrial or post-industrial metropolises (Vergara 1999; Woodward 2002; Edensor 2005; Jorgensen and Keenan 2012). These ruins are receiving growing attention by researchers, who often see them as metaphors of a diverse kind—including of our cultural anxieties and fears, of colonialism, capitalism, of the end of master narratives (Hell and Schönle 2010; Dillon 2011; Stoler 2013). They are also scrutinized by cultural heritage managers and politicians who try to transform them into spaces of memory, of leisure and consumption, or both. The post-industrial ruins of the South have received much less attention in recent debates on ruination, decay, recovery, and gentrification, although there are a few significant exceptions, most notably the work of Gordillo (2009, 2014) in Argentina and also Rodríguez Torrent et al. (2011, 2012) and Vilches (et al. 2008, 2011) in Chile. This is due to several reasons: one of them is the fact that southern urbanization and industrialization are usually perceived as a recent process. They are too young to have generated ruins: after all, none of the diverse southern ‘miracles’ of which economists speak (South-east Asian, Brazilian, African, and so on) dates from before the 1960s. It is well known that when companies do outsourcing, it is the so-called emerging economies that benefit from it: new factories for the South, new ruins for the North. Another reason is that the long-term process of modernity is still very much associated with Euro-American history. The rest of the globe is seen as having a later, incomplete, or surrogate modernity, as post-colonial historians have abundantly criticized (Chakrabarty 2000). In addition, the cultural and political conditions of the North have enabled the emergence of popular engagements with ruins, such as urban exploring or video games, that have made their processes of metropolitan ruination more conspicuous at a global level (Garrett 2013; Pétursdóttir and Olsen 2014: 4).
Integration: 12 Proposals
