Politicians, planners and policy-makers have frequently debated the benefits of allowing architecture to decay – neither demolishing nor preserving it, but letting entropy take hold. What makes this approach to ruins equally empowering and horrifying?

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Ruins — by definition — are neglect. Their guts are spilled and their condition deteriorates. Ruins exist because those who built them have been defeated, their inhabitants ‘decanted’ (to use the queasy terminology of British local authorities), or because our collective attention has turned elsewhere. And yet, under the masturbatory incantations of Instagram-fuelled ruin-lust, the empty corpse of the ruin enjoys a zombified digital afterlife, even while the material ‘fact’ of its offline existence is frequently overlooked.

Ruins are wounds, and we treat them accordingly; whether by cutting off the limb or turning our faces away in disgust (as well as peering voyeuristically at them in spooky fascination). As Svetlana Boym has remarked, ruins appear to be “physical embodiments of modern paradoxes reminding us of the blunders of modern teleologies and technologies alike.” And like all paradoxes, we find them distinctly unsettling – and powerfully alluring. The ruin — a wound, and therefore a sad and abject thing — reminds us of the mewling mortality of the physical world. Decay is only death, spilling out into the living world. And nobody likes to be reminded of death.

But what of ruins that are intentionally left to rot – of those whose decay will not be resisted or ignored, but actively encouraged?

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