Krysta Ryzewski and Laura McAtackney have compiled a dozen essays engaging the dynamic material landscapes of contemporary cities. A product of a 2014 Detroit-based workshop, the volume uses the Motor City as a departure point to explore the urban consequences and aftermath of industrialization and modernity on a global scale. The text brings together a diverse group of scholars from archaeology, anthropology, ethnography, cultural geography and the fine arts. The authors thankfully eschew the laborious and unnecessary task of defining ‘the urban’. Instead, their case studies embrace the heterogeneity of cities, in ‘national, social, institutional, and cultural contexts’ (p. 263). Contemporary urban archaeologists are witnesses (as well as participants) to the moments they study. Their work blurs the traditional boundaries of scholarly practice—they are as much ethnographers as they are archaeologists. The result is an important contribution to the study of cities, and another impactful volume in the corpus of contemporary archaeology studies.
Several notable themes emerge throughout the essays. The first is the materiality and scale of twenty-first-century cities. They are globally connected dynamic organisms which undergo constant and co-existing cycles of decay, erasure and redevelopment. This state of ‘perpetual ruin and repair’ (Upton Reference Upton2008, 20) illustrates the underlying challenge of studying contemporary cities—their temporality—how time relates to space. McAtackney and Ryzewski probe this issue in their conclusion, as it relates to contemporary archaeology's ability to understand the present. More deeply, time as it concerns the urban condition is tied to the idea of the palimpsest—a pillar of wider contemporary archaeology studies (see Harrison Reference Harrison2011). This concept reminds us of the usefulness of abandoning our linear notions of time as it relates to the urban landscape. Olivier's ideas of duration and material memory should be embraced by archaeologists when trying to grapple the complicated and ‘super-imposed’ nature of the urban palimpsest (Olivier Reference Olivier2011). Thus, in this volume, the contemporary archaeologies of the city accentuate the contradictory nature of urban space as ‘transformable, ephemeral, permanent, and contested’ (White & Seidenberg, p. 47).
The book is divided into three sections—creativity, ruination and political action as it relates to the material realities of urban environments. In section I—Creativity—the authors unpack the ways that urban material landscapes are the product of ‘global’ and ‘local’ forces. The authors locate the various elements of artistic expression, in the form of music, museum installations and fine art media, as indexes of a city's changing identities. Carolyn White and Steven Seidenberg's work surveys a set of artist's studios in Berlin. Temporary, informal and in constant flux, these spaces contribute to the German city's post-industrial character as a ‘Creative City’ (pp. 34–5). Ian Alden Russell's work in Istanbul locates the effects of globalization manifested in local events of contestation; he articulates these disjunctions through collaborative curation. Krysta Ryzewski's chapter demonstrates how Detroit's changing music scene is a reflection of the city's changing urban identity. She and her students seek to archive these aural transcripts through a digital story-telling platform.
Section II—Ruination—aims to move beyond the fetishization of ruins, and instead probe their meanings as situated in the present. Rebecca Graff, in her study of building fragments in Chicago, implores the reader not to privilege material's past meanings over those new meanings in the present (p. 107). Shanahan and Shanahan explore the differing treatments of Colonial and Aboriginal pasts in Melbourne's parkscapes. April Beisaw's chapter explores the origins of New York City's water systems. The modern amenity of city water came at the cost of a massive population displacement. She argues that urban water demands ultimately lead to rural ruination (pp. 143–4). In the section's final chapter, Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal proposes a framework for the study of the ‘Ruins of the South’—the surviving residues of the Global South's industrial and modern processes. In Brazil, Ruibal argues that these more recent elements of the historic city are being neglected in favour of preservation of nineteenthth-century edifices. Much like Beisaw's study, he links urban and rural landscapes as an interconnected system with the material consequences of the industrial past and post-industrial present.
Section III is a treatment of the role of contemporary archaeology and political action. Contributors ask readers to question the objectivity and detachment in the relationship among scholars to subjects (p. 19). These studies explore the negative impacts of post-industrialization and modernity on the urban environment. Sefryn Penrose's chapter charts the challenges of post-industrial landscapes in London's Docklands and alerts us to the obscuring tendencies of ruins which conceal wider processes of destruction. In a connected vein of inquiry, Laura McAtackney's analysis of Belfast's ruins, monuments and murals seeks to complicate our notions of Northern Ireland's political climate within the wider frame of de-industrialization and its effects on urban communities. Christian Ernsten brings together six images from Cape Town's Districts One and Six to illustrate the messy, unresolved narratives of the city's past in the face of its ‘renaissance’ as a global capital. Courtney Singleton studies an unresolved present. She seeks to confound our notions of household archaeology in order to consider homelessness more critically as a social and political issue. In the concluding chapter, Paul Mullins evaluates the ‘optimism of absence’ as it relates to urban renewal in Indianapolis, USA, and Oulu, Finland. In each, small markers acknowledge a past now erased; in Indiana's capital, an African-American neighbourhood displaced by a university campus, and in Finland the forgotten landscape of the Seond World War.
McAtackney and Ryzewski's conclusion discusses the ‘emergent’ challenges of the contemporary archaeology of the city and focuses on three key areas—gender, trauma and heritage management practices (pp. 262–3). They call for a wider consideration of gender in contemporary urban archaeologies, stating how it has the ‘potential to destabilize broader issues of power, access, and control’ (p. 264). They argue for the need to recognize and work with trauma, whether in the aftermath of disaster events, or in the effects of urban development. Directly linked to these sentiments, they call for ‘participatory models of heritage’ that engage with a variety of stakeholders in communities.
These latter emergent challenges must be addressed by practitioners. Sustainability—how cities endure—and resilience—how cities ‘bounce back’ from traumatic events—are the greatest challenges facing urban centres in the twenty-first century. More people packed into smaller areas with ageing (or non-existent) infrastructure push sprawling cities to the point of fracture. Widening social and economic inequalities place additional stressors on cities world-wide. Punctuated traumatic environmental events such as hurricanes and floods might last days or weeks, but have rippling effects for decades. These are the realities of twenty-first-century cities that urbanites grapple with every day. Contemporary archaeologists must play a role in these discussions in order to highlight the material histories and consequences of proposed actions.
The natural environment, greatly affected by cultural choices, now looms as one of the most pressing threats to cities (and humanity). Rising sea levels in coastal cities like Miami, Charleston and Venice, frequent and more extreme river flooding in places like Paris and water crises like the most recent events in Cape Town, all point to the natural environment as playing a major role in city life in the twenty-first century. Contemporary archaeologists of the city must contribute to the growing need to safeguard urban landscapes from environmental threats in both pragmatic and conceptual ways. As vulnerable cities are subjected to rising sea levels, increased tropical activity and chaotic swings in temperature—all hallmarks of global climate change—urban archaeologists will be called into action to mitigate threatened heritage sites. Still, too, contemporary archaeologists must be incorporated into teams of urban planners, architects, and community stakeholders to make informed and difficult decisions related to urban heritage that is under threat.
With regards to heritage management challenges, the volume embraces an interdisciplinary approach to the material remains of the contemporary city and endeavours to move beyond traditional academic silos. But noticeably absent is an engagement with the field of historic preservation. The contributors regularly broach issues such as gentrification, stakeholder inclusion, social justice and traumatic memory in the urban environment; these themes are foundational to historic preservation practice. Contemporary archaeologists should begin to reach out to their preservation colleagues to enrich further their understandings of urban life.
McAtackney and Ryzewski ultimately offer a timely contribution to the study of urban landscapes by contemporary archaeologists. As living environments, this is without doubt the first of many dynamic compilations on the contemporary city by a growing number of practitioners.
