Over the last decade, ruins have exploded as a source of fascination to the point where terms such as “ruin spectacle,” “ruin lust,” and “ruin porn” have become commonplace across many popular and academic discourses dealing with contemporary culture. Driving much of this rediscovery of the ruin (after all, this is only the latest in a long series of ruin crazes since the Renaissance) is the blighted city of Detroit. Popularized as a “ruined city” in the visual imagination by high-profile photography projects such as Yves Marchand's and Romain Meffre's The Ruins of Detroit (2005–10), and much maligned in the media as a bankrupt, dysfunctional, depopulated mess of a municipality, Detroit has emerged as the poster child for a range of social, economic, and urban ills facing postindustrial America.

It is against this backdrop of ruin mania and Detroit bashing that Dora Apel has published Beautiful Terrible Ruins, a far-reaching study of the complex interrelations between decline, capitalism, and aesthetics in the era of globalization. At the heart of this book is a desire to understand why ruins can be simultaneously so enthralling and so disturbing, and why we seek out, yet resent, their presence. The book draws on a vast body of art-historical and theoretical work on the history and meaning of ruins, especially in the Romantic and modernist eras, and extends existing thinking by bringing globalization theory and perspectives from twenty-first-century media culture to bear on the topic.

The focus on Detroit is neither gratuitous nor sensational, unlike some of the more opportunistic work on urban ruins that has appeared in recent years. Rather, Apel takes a genuine interest in the city's well-being, and her discussion is enriched by deep local knowledge and a sensitivity to the lived realities of Detroit. Delving into the city's social and economic history, as well as its rich visual archive, Apel shows how the production, circulation, and consumption of Detroit's ruin imagery taps into – and ultimately feeds – larger fears about worsening conditions of social injustice, racial inequality, urban poverty, and environmental degradation across the US and beyond.

Apel's overall argument is that the “anxiety of decline” surrounding postindustrial cities like Detroit “may be understood as the dark side of modernity” (5). The claim is that the very existence of urban industrial ruins like Detroit's abandoned factories, ghost skyscrapers, derelict homes, and vacant lots undermines the ideals of progress and rationality that have been driving capitalist modernity since the Enlightenment. Specifically, the ruin speaks to the fragility of capitalist conditions of growth and profit, and signals the perpetual threat of crisis and disaster. In the era of what Naomi Klein has called “disaster capitalism” and what Paul Virilio characterizes as panic urbanism, the global circulation of Detroit's ruin imagery serves a double function.Footnote ¹ It perpetuates larger anxieties about systemic failure; and at the same time ruin imagery contains and displaces those anxieties by reframing that experience in aesthetic terms. Thus, as Apel contends, “we have the paradoxical appeal of ruin imagery: the beauty of ruins helps us to cope with the terror of apocalyptic decline” (5).

One of the many highlights of this perceptive study is the attention Apel pays to the new forms of creative practice and urban intervention that are now emerging in Detroit, challenging the city's label of decline and potentially signaling a longer-term redirection of energy into the arts and, more broadly, the creative industries. While this change is starting to bring its own complications, such as hipsterfication (also known as gentrification), it is also creating conditions that are increasingly attractive for entrepreneurs, artists, and community groups. Where this trend is headed, and whether Detroit can escape the spatial and social divisions that typically follow neoliberal urban renewal, remain open questions and beyond the scope of this book.

What is refreshing about Apel's approach is that her analysis reaches far beyond the spectacle of abandonment and decay to address the forces behind urban decline. In the process, she delivers a powerful critique of the role of corporate disinvestment and neoliberal globalization in ruining cities.