Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin: The Social Life of Ruins

Workshop 2015/2016 | Fellow Forum

The Social Life of Ruins

09.–10. Juni 2016

Modernity’s urge to build is only matched by its ability to demolish and produce waste. Along with dominant tropes of renewal, construction and development, images of vacancy, abandonment, and devastation loom large in popular and scholarly discourse since 1989. In the past few decades, from rapidly industrializing China to postsocialist Europe and post-industrial US, urban and rural landscapes alike are filled with material ruins and traces of past lives and previous projects. Framing ruins as multi-dimensional social, cultural, intellectual, and ecological problems, this workshop seeks to address the politics and social life of modern ruins. As well, by making the threat of extinction, decay and death visible, this workshop excavates the debris of history buried by the storm of progress. How are ruins made invisible or conversely commodified into presence? How to think of ruins as symbols of disorder and renewal? Why do ruins continue to fascinate the modern imagination? How are ruins made to be socially and culturally significant? Is it really easier to think of the end of the world than the end of capitalism? In spite of the talk about the end of history, have ruins and ruination actually become the norm in the post-1989 world?