Popular conceptions of urban space in the last two decades have accented decay, renewal and re-wilding. In many cosmopolitan districts, an aesthetic that juxtaposes historic preservation and hi-tech hipness gestures to some understanding of the overlapping temporalities of cities. The relatively young subfield of contemporary archaeology makes intuitive sense to many non-archaeologists, although it still encounters stodgy resistance from some practitioners of traditional archaeology. Archaeology in this mode is understood not as a study of the human past, but as a study of human-material relationships regardless of time period. The volume reviewed here emerged from a workshop funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation in which participants were asked to consider their work against the backdrop of their host city, Detroit, a poster child of post-industrialisation that summons the politics of both the process itself and its aestheticisation. The editors (archaeologists who work in Belfast and Detroit, respectively) identify three themes that define the book's sections: creativity, ruination and political action.
Under ‘Creativity’, Ian Russell describes a ‘socially engaged heritage’ project to develop artefact genealogies of objects displayed at the Museum of Innocence, a creation of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. As a curator, Russell's method is a form of art practice. White and Seidenberg make art, or rather artists’ studios, the subject of their study of Berlin, exploring the trajectory of Richard Florida's (Reference Florida2002) observation that artists are the early colonists of gentrification. Similarly, Ryzewski's study focused on art spaces—the performance, recording and residential spaces associated with Detroit's popular music history, up to and beyond Motown. Through innovative teaching, students made 2–3-minute-long videos that were geo-referenced into a “digital storytelling tour” (p. 76).
The ‘Ruination’ section begins with a chapter by Rebecca Graff about two Chicago landmarks. The ‘relic house’ was an eccentric drinking establishment built from the molten remains of the ‘burnt district’ of the 1871 Chicago Fire that quickly accrued some local patina. The other landmark is the Chicago Tribune building, the façade of which embeds fragments pilfered or pick-axed from other monumental structures around the world—from the Great Pyramid to the World Trade Center. One implication is how devastation so quickly gets converted to nostalgia. After writer Maria Tumarkin (Reference Tumarkin2005), the editors reference ‘traumascape’ as one way to understand contemporary cities as places scarred by tragedy. Shanahan and Shanahan's paper on parks and monuments in Melbourne, Australia, evokes the trauma of colonisation. Here ‘ruination’ is more of a political metaphor. They argue that an alternative form of post-colonial heritage is emerging that is collective, not individual. Aboriginal people have been re-sanctifying urban Australian space through efforts such as the reburial of 38 ancestors at a central park. Their heritage practice does not depend on the ‘relic magic’ of tangible connections to famous men and big events. April Beisaw's contribution is more recognisably archaeological in methodology, involving pedestrian survey of the rural landscapes affected by the development of reservoirs and aqueducts to supply thirsty New York City. Archaeologists found that local people claimed to be able to see submerged ruins (of bars and churches). These ghostly images represent a sense of loss that cannot be verified as physical realities. González-Ruibal's paper on the ‘Ruins of the South’ offers a global comparison of the meanings given to ruins in different colonial and capitalist settings. In Brazil, the boom and bust of the rubber period built beautiful ghost towns of Art Nouveau architecture, but there they are not romanticised. They connote failure, foolishness and brutal extraction.
In the final section, ‘Political action’, Sefryn Penrose counters the romanticisation of post-industrial cities. Looking at the development projects of Thatcherism and beyond, she argues compellingly that “speculative landscapes—by their essence—require some kind of ‘hook,’ and in some senses, these landscapes are hooked on an idea of ruined industry” (p. 178). Historic preservation and archaeology itself is thus subtly implicated in neoliberal real estate schemes. Laura McAtackney examines a landscape still relatively neglected by speculative gentrification—Belfast, Northern Ireland. The way in which the loyalist, masculine public imaginary has enshrined the Titanic (built in the city's shipyards) in informal murals and official museums underscores how resistant capitalism is to its own ironic failures, at least in the North. This irony is not lost on contributor Christian Ernsten, who examines the ways in which history has been appropriated to serve hipness in Cape Town, including a café called ‘Truth’ that lies on the ground of an ossuary containing the bones of the dispossessed. Like Penrose, Ernsten alerts us to how heritage can quickly (and crudely) be commoditised, but also shows how political struggles over urban development often involve a means of marking territory with an effect dredged from the past—another crypto-theme that runs through several of the papers. Courtney Singleton's contribution suggests that the political effect of ‘home’ takes on different material embodiments for the homeless (in Indianapolis and elsewhere), and that both archaeologists and policy-makers have been too quick to equate permanent shelter with ‘home’. Paul Mullins stretches another global comparison, looking at ‘effacement’ in the landscapes of Indianapolis (where racism and capitalism intersect) and Oulu, Finland (where war and the Nazis are forgotten). In both cases, oblivion rather than memorialisation is the rule. In these spaces, politics prevents ruins from ever sprouting.
In their conclusion, the editors defend the broad diversity of methodologies used by the authors—photography, archival work, observational description, informal interviews and geography-lite. This reviewer still detected an impressionistic quality to much of the work and a shyness towards empirical evidence. There is no reason why an archaeology of the contemporary cannot integrate rigorous ethnographic methods or archaeological data collection such as artefact descriptions and spatial mapping. I offer this challenge to all those developing this exciting but still undisciplined subfield. Let us make sure that its methods are a grounded match for its theoretical magnetism.
