Capital Ruins : An Anthropology of Post-Crash Urban Regeneration Sites

Since the banking crisis of 2008, thousands of development sites associated with regeneration projects and construction booms in cities and towns across Europe and the Americas remain either partially inhabited or entirely abandoned, or have been ’revived’ and used for purposes for which they were not originally intended. Drawing on in depth ethnographic and archaeological research undertaken at a number of development sites in Edinburgh, Scotland, Capital Ruins examines how people live and engage with these sites today. It explores the ways in which they understand and experience these sites as visual and material embodiments of economic collapse, the ’project oriented’ nature of contemporary life, the relation of these sites to regeneration practices more generally, and how they are being appropriated at a time when cultural and global economic futures remain fragile. Highlighting the manner in which an emphasis on sensual engagement within archaeological and ethnographic research can be used to illuminate the spheres of meaning in which these cultural forms are entangled, this book also sheds new light on their representation within current political and sociocultural discourses. As such, it will appeal to social scientists and scholars of architecture with interests in cities and urban spaces, archaeological and anthropological methods, heritage and regeneration.

Since the banking crisis of 2008, thousands of development sites associated with regeneration projects and construction booms in cities and towns across Europe and the Americas remain either partially inhabited or entirely abandoned, or have been ’revived’ and used for purposes for which they were not originally intended. Drawing on in depth ethnographic and archaeological research undertaken at a number of development sites in Edinburgh, Scotland, Capital Ruins examines how people live and engage with these sites today. It explores the ways in which they understand and experience these sites as visual and material embodiments of economic collapse, the ’project oriented’ nature of contemporary life, the relation of these sites to regeneration practices more generally, and how they are being appropriated at a time when cultural and global economic futures remain fragile. Highlighting the manner in which an emphasis on sensual engagement within archaeological and ethnographic research can be used to illuminate the spheres of meaning in which these cultural forms are entangled, this book also sheds new light on their representation within current political and sociocultural discourses. As such, it will appeal to social scientists and scholars of architecture with interests in cities and urban spaces, archaeological and anthropological methods, heritage and regeneration.