The Optimism of Absence: An Archaeology of Displacement, Effacement, and Modernity

In the 1960s Edward J. Zebrowski turned the razing of Indianapolis, Indiana into a compelling show of forward-looking community optimism illuminating the power of displacement. When Zebrowski’s company toppled the Knights of Pythias Hall in 1967, for instance, he installed bleachers and hired an organist to play from the back of a truck as the twelve-storey Romanesque Revival structure was reduced to rubble. Two years later, the ‘Big Z’ hosted a party in the Claypool Hotel and ushered guests outside at midnight to watch as the floodlit building met its end at the wrecking ball (Figure 12.1). Zebrowski’s theatricality perhaps distinguished him from the scores of wrecking balls dismantling American cities, but his celebration of the city’s material transformation mirrored the sentiments of many urbanites in the wake of World War II. The post-war period was punctuated by a flurry of destruction and idealistic redevelopment in American cities like Indianapolis just as the international landscape was being rebuilt from the ruins of the war. In 1959 the New York Times’ Austin Wehrwein (1959: 61) assessed the University of Chicago’s massive displacement in Hyde Park and drew a prescient parallel to post-war Europe when he indicated that ‘wrecking crews have cleared large tracts, so that areas near the university resemble German cities just after World War II’. Indeed, much of Europe was distinguished less by ruins and redevelopment than demolition and emptied landscapes removing the traces of warfare that states wished to reclaim or efface; in the United States, urban renewal likewise took aim on impractical, unappealing, or otherwise unpleasant urban fabric and the people who called such places home (see also Ernsten, Chapter 10, for this process associated with the policies of apartheid in Cape Town). These global projects removed wartime debris and razed deteriorating prewar landscapes, extending interwar urban renewal projects that embraced the fantasy of a ‘blank slate’ as they built various unevenly executed imaginations of modernity. However, many optimistic development plans in Europe and the United States alike were abandoned or disintegrated into ruins themselves, simply leaving blank spaces on the landscape. Consequently, the legacy of urban renewal and post-war reconstruction is not simply modernist architecture; instead, post-war landscape transformation is signalled by distinctive absences dispersed amidst post-war architectural space and traces of earlier built environments.

Conclusion: A Future for Urban Contemporary Archaeology

Historical, contemporary, and future-oriented urban identities are presently being challenged worldwide at an unprecedented pace and scale by the continuous influx of people into cities and the accompanying effects of deindustrialization, conflict, and social differentiation. Archaeology is unique in its capacity to contribute a materialist perspective that views recent and present-day struggles of cities as part of longer term cycles of urban life that include processes of decay, revitalization, and reclamation. The aim of this volume is to position contemporary archaeology in general, and studies of cities in particular, as central to the discipline of archaeology and as an inspiration for further interdisciplinary, materially engaged urban studies. In doing so the contributing authors collectively challenge prevailing approaches to cities. Whereas scholars have routinely conceptualized contemporary cities within the bounds of particular analytical categories, including cities as gendered, deindustrialized, global, or urban ecological units of study (see Low 1996 for an overview), the cities discussed in this volume do not fit neatly into these individual analytical units, nor do they exist outside the influence of capitalist policies or institutions (Harvey 2012: xvii). They are instead recognized by the authors as operating within increasingly globalized systems, but also, following Jane Jacobs’ concept of open cities (2011), as places that are full of alternative possibilities. Rather than adhering to particular classifications of cities, the volume’s contributions are intentionally broad and attentive to the dynamics of the local and everyday in specific urban places—the politics, people, interventions, and materialities of specific urban places and the ways in which these dynamics operate across conceptual categories, temporal boundaries, and spatial terrain. Contemporary Archaeology and the City consciously employs a critical, materially engaged perspective that considers urban centres as both discrete and networked entities that are interrelated with places beyond geopolitical city limits. While many cities have characters formed from their vibrancy and centrality, their successful functioning often also relies upon the exploitation and even ruination of peripheral and rural hinterlands. The preceding chapters are original contributions inspired by the fieldwork of archaeologists who work in Europe, North America, Africa, Australia, and Western Asia. They incorporate a diversity of perspectives from across contemporary archaeology and beyond in responding to very different national, social, institutional, and cultural contexts.

A Renaissance with Revenants: Images Gathered from the Ruins of Cape Town’s Districts One and Six

In this chapter I explore District One and District Six, two inner-city areas in Cape Town, South Africa, by means of a series of images gathered from its ruins. As a point of departure I quote Neville Lister. Lister is the first-person narrator of Ivan Vladislavić’s novel Double Negative (2011). He is a white middle-class young man from Johannesburg whose life overlaps with the city’s post-apartheid transformation. Vladislavić’s story, in which Lister becomes a photographer, was inspired by a volume of photographs of Johannesburg taken by renowned South African photographer David Goldblatt (Goldblatt 2010). As his protagonist finds himself in the post-apartheid city, Vladislavić highlights the complexities of attempts at representing a coherent visual narrative regarding South Africa’s disjunctive urban history. Over the course of the last decade or so I have visited Cape Town many times. My personal life converged with the city’s transformation as a result of fortuitous encounters I had first as a student, then as a tourist, and finally as a researcher. The six photographs discussed as part of this chapter are the product of collaborations in 2013 and 2014. Recalling the epigraph of Bettina Malcomess and Dorothee Kreutzfeldt’s book about Johannesburg, Not No Place (2013), I suggest the impressions conveyed by the images include, at best, ‘fragments of spaces and times’ representing post-apartheid Cape Town. Referring to Walter Benjamin and Thomas More, Malcomess and Kreutzfeldt describe the capture of the ‘double negative’ of the utopia (translated as ‘no place’), the materialization of ‘impossibility and always deferred potential’ (Malcomess and Kreutzfeldt 2013: 12). Like these critics, I focus on the difficulty of capturing the complex transformation undergone by Cape Town’s District One and District Six (see also Penrose, Chapter 8, for issues in capturing complex, capitalist transitions). Cape Town appeared as number one on the New York Times list ‘52 places to go to in 2014’. Journalist Sarah Khan wrote, ‘Cape Town is reinventing itself, and the world is invited to its renaissance’ (Khan 2014). It is a story about boutique shops, property values, gentrification, self-stylization, and the self-conscious craft of hipster appeal.

Repercussions of Differential Deindustrialization in the City: Memory and Identity in Contemporary East Belfast

Contemporary archaeology has often combined the study of material culture with a strong social justice imperative, including examining the causes of abandonment of social housing (Buchli and Lucas 2001) and constructing lived experiences of homelessness (Zimmerman et al. 2010). Within this burgeoning field, archaeologies of cities have a significant role to play in interpreting the social implications of transition and change in the city by engaging with the spatial and temporal dimensions of material realities. By explicitly materializing the forgotten or hidden aspects of the post-industrial city, contemporary archaeology allows us to view global processes through the lens of local material expressions. Hilary Orange’s edited volume Reanimating Industrial Spaces (2014) is indicative of the current fascination in contemporary archaeology with the meaning of abandoned places of industry, the link between people and places and the often difficult transition from functional industrial places to post-industrial heritage spaces. Such volumes use a variety of methodological approaches to show how people, place and materials constitute the contemporary, post-industrial city. In doing so they reveal how contemporary archaeology has the potential to critique official narratives that frequently highlight resurgence and development while ignoring inconvenient truths of degradation, unemployment and poverty (see also Ernsten, Chapter 10). The latter experiences speak to this case study of East Belfast in Northern Ireland. For a society of its size Northern Ireland has been the subject of intense political and academic scrutiny, indeed often being accused of over-analysis to the point of exceptionalism (including Whyte 1990). Much of the research has centred on social relationships in urban areas impacted by internecine violence, however, in recent years this focus has shifted to the persisting problems of segregation and sectarianism as a remnant from the Troubles (c.1968–c.98) into the peace process. With the fifteen-year anniversary of the Belfast Agreement of 1998 (hereafter ‘the Agreement’) in 2013—a peace accord that at the time was positively greeted as the end of violence and initiating a move toward ‘normalisation’ (Irish News 2005)—there has been much debate as to the ongoing lack of substantive societal change. At the level of civic politics progress has been made, even if it has been non-linear and at times in danger of derailment.

Artist Spaces in Berlin: Defining and Redefining a City through Contemporary Archaeology

The contemporary city of Berlin is known for its art and for its community of practising artists, along with its ‘weirdness, perpetual incompleteness, and outlandishness . . . and the liveliness inherent in these qualities’ (Schneider 2014: 7). One of Berlin’s primary energy currents comes from the role of artists and the creative verve that abounds in the city. Artists use and reuse the physical environment of the post-Berlin Wall city and the surrounding environs (the Wall was officially taken down in 1989, although parts of it still remain) in temporary and permanent project spaces. The buildings and project spaces artists occupy are entwined with the history of the city— a history manifest in the city’s form, aesthetics, and economics. A similar dialectic exists inside artist spaces; artists actively define and redefine studio spaces through their practices as their manners and methods are simultaneously defined, confined, and reflective of the restrictions and allowances that interiors provide. This chapter is a contemporary archaeological analysis of the physical elements of four artists’ studios and buildings, the placement of artist communities within the city, and an exploration of the meanings of space and community in broader context. We highlight the reuse of historically significant buildings and the materiality and physicality of artists’ spaces within a broader context of the political economy of creativity. The use of Berlin for creative practice reflects many of the problems associated with the ‘Creative City’ and so-called creative economy. The art practices inside studios are reflective of the political economy of the world of art. The placement, availability, and tenuousness of the buildings themselves attest to problems associated with the adoption of creative capital by neoliberal capitalist agendas. The archaeological project can be used to document the micro and the macro—the interior and the exterior—of the economically circumscribed worlds of the artist, documenting an important moment in the development of a global cultural hotspot. The chapter considers project spaces as both physical places and conceptual spaces among Berlin artists focusing on the geographic, ephemeral, and enduring spaces of artist studios. What do project spaces in Berlin look like? How do individual artists create their spaces? How does the physical space reflect artistic practices?

Ruins of the South

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).

Ruined by the Thirst for Urban Prosperity: Contemporary Archaeology of City Water Systems

City residents expect pressurized water to flow from kitchen, bath, and laundry room taps. Access to clean water is a contemporary human necessity, but is it a human right? City water is not free—creating and maintaining urban water systems is a complex engineering process that requires political power; land and labour are necessary to obtain and store water, operate pumping stations, maintain plants for filtration and wastewater treatment, and build out the subsurface pipe network. After initial construction costs have been paid, the efficiency of an entire water system dictates the costs of residential flow. Some cities, like Detroit, have an adjacent freshwater source, in this case the Detroit River, whose water can be pumped, treated, and distributed to residents rather efficiently. Other cities, like New York, have to acquire water from distant sources. Built on an island surrounded by salt water, New York City had to wield significant political power to construct new water sources and transport water from up to 125 miles away. Access to this water allowed the urban development of Manhattan Island while selectively destroying rural communities. New York City began building reservoirs in 1776; today there are nineteen reservoirs and three controlled lakes that hold 550 billion gallons of water. Official statistics on the rural communities sacrificed for this water are only available for the six reservoirs put into service between 1915 and 1955: the Ashokan (1915), Kensico (1915), Schoharie (1926), Roundout (1950), Neversink (1954), and Pepacton (1955) reservoirs. Their construction submerged a total of seventeen villages, and displaced 4,464 living from their land and 8,093 from their graves (BWS 1950: 35, 76). Those whose lands were not taken were left to reconstruct their lives without their long-time neighbours, the fertile valleys they lived in, and the roads, railroads, and unobstructed water ways that once tied communities together and facilitated economic activity. Some residents were unable to adjust and abandoned their lands. A city land acquisition programme is currently purchasing up to an additional 355,000 acres in their watersheds. The goal is to meet pollution control requirements set by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Commemorating Melbourne’s Past: Constructing and Contesting Space, Time, and Public Memory in Contemporary Parkscapes

Melbourne’s urban parkscapes contain a range of memorials, monuments, and features, all of which have a role in the creation, performance, and reiteration of public memory and contemporary identity. These include a collection of sites and objects that originated in Australia’s pre-colonial and colonial past, but which were recontextualized and memorialized in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. Despite the earlier origins of the material and remains incorporated at these sites, their subsequent recontextualization can tell us a great deal about the changing values and identities of the city’s communities over time. Thus, in this chapter we will argue that Melbourne’s urban parks have been used as places for reflection on the foundation stories of the city, and that through this engagement contemporary identities are reinforced, contested, and negotiated. Considerable attention has been paid previously to sites such as the Shrine of Remembrance, which commemorate Australia’s involvement in the World Wars, but in this chapter we will examine the practice and process of memorializing older material (see also Graff, Chapter 4, for examples of long-term memorial practices in Chicago). We are interested in what each site tells us about contemporary Melbourne’s changing relationship with its colonial and pre-colonial past, and the current nature of its post-colonial discourse. The terms ‘memorial’, ‘memorialization’, and ‘monument’ will appear throughout this chapter. We use ‘memorial’ to refer to an object erected or modified to commemorate an individual, organization, or event. This adheres to the literal definition (‘memorial’ 1, OED Online), but is also the way in which the term is used by local park and heritage authorities (City of Melbourne 2003: 1). By extension, ‘memorialization’ refers to the process by which something or someone is memorialized, or, as is more relevant to this chapter, the process through which an object or site becomes a memorial. We use the term ‘monument’ to refer more specifically to architectural or archaeological sites, which are commonly defined by their large or physically imposing presence (see Carver 1996). These may also have amemorial function, but they are not inherently defined by their commemorative value (Cooper et al. 2005: 240; Carman 2002: 46–7).

Encountering Home: A Contemporary Archaeology of Homelessness

On 17 September 2011 people flooded Zuccotti Park inManhattan’s Downtown Financial District to protest multinational corporations and major banking institutions. Protestors left their houses and established encampments in public parks in over a hundred cities across America to live in solidarity as the ‘99%’. The 99% were ready for conflict between citizen and state, public and private institutions, but they did not expect the conflict that erupted within the encampments between protestors and local homeless populations. Despite the fact that protestors were living ‘homeless’ for symbolic and political purposes, they had not anticipated how to handle the homeless communities who they actively displaced and engaged in the service of their politics. As they pitched their tents, strung up tarpaulins, established communal kitchens, and inflated blow-up mattresses the 99% encountered the already-present local homeless population: people who were both known and unfamiliar, but who were meant to remain hidden and invisible. Cities where the Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS) had a strong and quick start had more problems regarding homelessness than cities where the movement started later, but all Occupy protesters realized homelessness was an issue that had to be confronted (Ehrenreich 2011). Austin and Tampa, for example, used homelessness as the central organizing issue, one that could be easily grasped as a human circumstance with universal appeal. This was primarily because these cities were able to anticipate incidents that had arisen in New York, Denver, and Portland (see AP 2011; Nagourney 2011). Conflicts that first occurred in these cities allowed for later responses to be more proactive, and they subsequently positioned homelessness as a universalizing issue that everyone could rally behind (Ehrenreich 2011). In Denver, Portland, Boston, and New York City protestors expressed fear and apprehension towards the homeless, calling them ‘protest imposters’, ‘freeloaders’, and ‘rapists and gropers of females’ (Algar 2011; Huffington Post 2011a, 2011b; Occupy Wall Street 2011). One New York protestor stated that the homeless were ‘mentally ill and out-of-control’ (Algar 2011). The responses of the Occupy protesters at Zuccotti Park were rooted in a belief that there was a fundamental distinction between themselves and the homeless with whom they lived side-by-side and shared the same materials and spaces.

Embers from the House of Blazes: Fragments, Relics, Ruins of Chicago

Fragments imply a former whole, and ruins invoke a material landscape once cared for and conserved, now neglected. What meaning is conveyed when fragments of formerly whole structures—ruined or plundered as ‘relics’—are incorporated into new ones, devoid of prior context? Does an aesthetic appreciation for in situ ruins also relate to interest in their fragments? This tradition of, and fascination with, reusing and recontextualizing fragments of ruined structures spans the broad sweep of time from antiquity to the present day (see also Shanahan and Shanahan, Chapter 5). Rome’s Arch of Constantine (erected 315 CE) incorporated fragments from the arches of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, visually and materially connecting their collective glory to the new reign. Such reuse is found plentifully in indirect gestures, such as the Beaux-Arts municipal buildings of the United States that draw stylistic influences from classical antiquity, as reimagined in the Italian Renaissance and incorporated into the nineteenth-century architectural canon. Still other examples of direct reuse of fragments, such as architectural fragments from New York’s World Trade Center that have been incorporated into myriad 9/11 monuments, are often a way to commemorate the tragic circumstances that created such ruins, reminding us how the materiality of age, added by narrative and even literal labels, provides a space for nostalgic reminiscence or communion with an event that might be personally distant, though emotionally compelling just the same (see White and Seidenberg, Chapter 1, for discussion of a similar phenomenon in Berlin). Inspired by the increasing impact of contemporary archaeology on considerations of materiality, temporality, and erasure within archaeologically produced ‘present pasts’ (see Harrison et al. 2014), this essay focuses on two cases of creative reuse of fragmentary architectural and building materials in Chicago, one still extant, and the other no longer even a ruin. The first case, once made of ‘ruins’, has been demolished and, more significantly, erased: the Relic House, built in 1872 from ‘leavings’ of the 1871 Chicago Fire. Serving as a saloon, salon, and speakeasy until its demolition in 1929, the Relic House drew guests who wished to commune with the ‘ruins’ of the tragic fire in a space mediated by recreational consumption and novelty. One of these uses included a venue for the bohemian Dill Pickle Club, whose founder renamed the structure the ‘House of Blazes’, evoking its fabrication from Fire debris.