In this essay, Christoph Lindner explores various kinds of spectral living in an era of postindustrial ruin – from London’s abandoned mansions to Mumbai’s ghost skyscrapers. 

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Ruins have re-emerged as a source of cultural fascination. In the Gothic, Romantic, and Modernist movements in art and culture, ruins frequently featured as sites of interiority, memory, and haunting. Since the 1980s, however, this fascination with ruins has been renewed by the growing fetishisation of postindustrial decay. As the standard explanation goes, the rise of post-Fordist capitalism in the late twentieth century created a set of economic and social conditions that led to the rapid and systematic gutting of many urban-industrial communities.

The post-Fordist transformation of industrial sites of production into dead zones– that is, spaces of inactivity and lifelessness – not only created ruins out of modern industrial architecture but also generated a desire to see and experience these spaces. This has been done in a variety of ways. 

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Figure 1: St. Peter’s Seminary near Cardross, Scotland
Figure 1: St. Peter’s Seminary near Cardross, Scotland - At one extreme, these spaces are deliberately preserved as ruins. An example is St. Peter’s Seminar outside Glasgow, where the cultural value of the site resides precisely in its state of ruination. The community activism around the building is focused on maintaining, rather than reversing, the conditions of material disrepair and spatial otherness.  © Christoph Lindner
Figure 2: View from the High Line, 2015
Figure 2: View from the High Line, 2015 - At the other extreme is the super-gentrification of the ruin where postindustrial sites are ‘rehabilitated’ into sanitised spaces for exclusive living. A particularly conspicuous example of this is the High Line elevated park in New York City. The project not only reclaims a derelict railway by turning it into a highly-manicured space of curated leisure. It also serves as an engine of gentrification, transforming the surrounding neighborhood into a delirious playground for luxury consumption. © Renzo Piano Building Workshop. Photo by Nic Lehoux