Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics, and Materiality.

Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics, and Materiality. New York: Berg, 2005. $28.95 papercover.

Tim Edensor believes that most of us see industrial ruins as places which have outlived their usefulness and become dangerous eyesores. He sees them in a far more positive light. They are not only a useful commentary on the failure of the promises of capitalism, but also a source of many unexpected benefits. Ruins offer shelter to homeless humans, sanctuary to animals whose natural habitat is being destroyed, stage sets for post-apocalypse movies, and playgrounds for adventurous children and adults. They are salutary counterpoints to the homogeneity, predictability, and control that the rest of the built environment imposes upon us. They embody the memories of past struggles, accomplishments, and defeats of the people who once moved within these spaces. For the student of social welfare, industrial ruins catalogue many deficiencies and needs in modern society. If they didn't exist, we would either have to invent them or alter the system that uses them as safety valves.

Ruins also offer opportunities for adaptive reuse and historic preservation. On this, however, Edensor is ambivalent. He says it is "cranky" to nurture decay, but gentrification serves parasitic developers; and preservation, because it is selective, falsifies history. Too often, the "heritage industry" promotes "memory drenched in masculinsed ideologies." "Expert" interpretations brush aside diverse individual memories that may well conflict but still provide a truer account of these places. Edensor overlooks the fact that these folk rememberings are often the sources of the masculinsed ideologies in the first place. He might take a look as the folk vs. expert accounts of the Alamo or Culloden Moor.

There are certain contradictions in the argument. Ruins may indeed offer a critique of the "capitalist myth of endless prosperity," but are they critiques of capitalism? If capitalism did not provide ruins, Edensor would not be able to write this worthy celebration of their manifold contributions to our quality of life. One might argue from the evidence of this book that capitalism is a fruitful dialectic of order and disorder, monotony and diversity.

If one sees ruins as ugly and dangerous places without use or value, this book will be an eye-opener. If one already has some appreciation for their pleasures and lessons, it will seem twice as long as it needs to be. There are a few too many rants against commodification, laundry lists of artifacts, and rhapsodic descriptions of the sights, textures, smells (and risks) of strolling through ruins. The basic arguments, which are not all that complicated, are repeated several times. The prose makes it seem even longer, strewn with complex sentences, rambling paragraphs, and overwrought words like proformativity, scopic, hideosity, mediatisation, alterity, and affordances. Innocent nouns, verbs and adjectives are tortured into service as other parts of speech. Foreground, used as a verb, is a favorite; something is foregrounded almost every third page. Repetitive or not, this book raises important issues and, for some will provide a revolutionary perspective. One needn't read every word to get the point, and the point is well worth getting.

Robert Leighninger, Arizona State University