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"Abandoned buildings."
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Islands of abandonment : life in the post-human landscape
Cal Flyn's book details abandoned places: ghost towns and exclusion zones, no man's lands and fortress islands - and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place. In Chernobyl, following the nuclear disaster, only a handful of people returned to their dangerously irradiated homes. On an uninhabited Scottish island, feral cattle live entirely wild. In Detroit, once America's fourth-largest city, entire streets of houses are falling in on themselves, looters slipping through otherwise silent neighbourhoods. This book explores the extraordinary places where humans no longer live - or survive in tiny, precarious numbers - to give us a possible glimpse of what happens when mankind's impact on nature is forced to stop.
Book
Spatial Liminality as a Framework for Revitalising Dilapidated Abandoned Buildings in Historic Cities: A Case Study
This paper develops the theory of liminality as a guideline for revitalising disused urban fabrics in historic cities. Since Middle Eastern historic cities exist as a transitional phenomenon, spatial liminality is identified as an epistemological tool for their investigation. This paper sets up a mixed-method approach based on questionnaire surveys and field studies in twelve urban blocks in historic Yazd and Kashan. Using an interpretive historical study, it is verified that, during the premodern eras, spatial liminality has been synonymous with the formation of sense of place/citizenship, mainly generated as a result of the existence of in-between spaces in historic cities, which, in turn, could have facilitated the rites of passage for residents. In a quantitative layer, the correlation between dilapidated abandoned buildings (DABs) (i.e., disused urban fabrics) and sense of place/citizenship is investigated in case studies, which unfolds associations that lack of sense of place amongst local communities could convey to the meaning of spatial liminality. The analysis demonstrates DABs are associated with lack of spatial liminality, contributing to the breakdown of sense of community identification/place. Therefore, DABs need to be reutilized while maintaining their heritage values. The discourse identifies in-between spaces that once facilitated spatial liminality and demonstrates a guideline for revitalising historic cities. This study put forward a theoretical contribution that enables the use of spatial liminality to guide the understanding and management of historic cities.
Journal Article
Dark city
'Dark city' is a natural sequel to Lynn Saville's colour photographs in Night/Shift (Monacelli, 2009). Her work in that book made her, in the words of Arthur C. Danto, \"the Atget of vanishing New York, prowling her city at the other end of the day, picking up pieces of the past in the present, just before it is swallowed in shadows.\" This book is a further exploration of the urban landscape at dusk and dawn, with a new focus on the effects of the recent economic turmoil on New York and other American cities. Shuttered stores and empty lots in city centers and fringe areas alike reveal a haunting and disquieting beauty. Occasionally, a person or the artist herself is visible as a ghosted image or shadow. Photographs in 'Dark city' also counter-balance signs of loss with a more optimistic message. They reveal a natural cycle of decay and rebirth in urban ecology, as objects such as ladders and brooms signal that the work of renewal is under way. 'Dark city' is ultimately a dynamic and ongoing dialogue between defined place and empty space that will fascinate general readers and urban specialists alike.
Book
The Empty House Next Door
Renowned city planner and housing advocate Alan Mallach presents effective strategiesfor community leaders, local officials, and nonprofits contending with vacant propertiesin the United States. Examples illustrate creative ways to reduce the harm caused byvacant properties, jump-start housing markets in struggling neighborhoods, create thepotential for future revival, and transform vacant properties into community assets.
eBook
Indispensable eyesores
Collapsing concrete colossuses, run-down overgrown skeletons, immutable architectural misfits: the outcasts from our built environment, which we are dying to dispose of — and yet cannot do without — have inspired many ghost stories, crime novels and urban legends. Such narratives reveal the significance of architectural eyesores for the people who live or work in or near them. After exploring various approaches to building lives and deaths, the author presents a rich variety of undesired edifices in Germany, Hungary, Austria and Bosnia-Herzegovina and investigates the different methods used to dispose of them: eliminating, damaging, transforming or ‘reframing’ them, abandoning them to progressive dilapidation or virtually rejecting them. Discarding an edifice, however, need not bring its social life to an end. This analysis continues with a reflection on the afterlife of unwanted buildings, and concludes with a discussion on the life expectancy of buildings, their multi-sensory materiality and ‘thingly’ agency.
eBook
A fantastic state of ruin : the painted towns of Rajasthan
This book tells the story of the painted towns of Shekhawati in rural Rajasthan, India. For centuries, the painted buildings served the towns as trading houses, pleasure palaces, temples, caravansaries, and private homes. Following independence, the descendants of the merchant families left Shekhawati for India's burgeoning cities, abandoning their opulent structures. Some were left in the charge of caretakers; squatters took up residence in many; most simply remain vacant. The buildings have slowly deteriorated over time, ravaged by climate and neglect, and now lie scattered among the desert settlements as an elegiac collection of beautiful living ruins--a crumbling open-air gallery set amid the ordinary affairs of small town life. This book portrays the fascinating ruinous beauty of the painted towns, and, along the way, provides an intimate look at life and landscape on the arid fringes of Rajasthan. This world, too, is fading, and so the book's photographs, in the end, are a visual study of both place and society at the edge of time.
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