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Focusing on a planned scheme of resettlement undertaken in Ghana in the wake of independence in 1957, this essay explores how midcentury plans for modernization exist in disjunctive relation to unrealized material infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic research in resettlement townships, the account describes the contemporary afterlives of the plan, tracing how its promised futures shadow present understandings of contemporary and future life. The essay examines the distinctive form that ruination takes not as once-functional, now-decaying infrastructure, but as the ongoing effects of an unrealized plan. Here, experiences of ruination are associated with a set of spatial and temporal dynamics that emerge as the felt negation of linear time and Cartesian space. Insofar as the recent scholarly turn to ruins assumes the existence of modernization, it in fact eclipses what is conceptually at stake in situations where modernization exists only as a promise.

In Italy, the current geography of abandonment is defined by the classification of the National Strategy of Inner Areas (NSIA). The support measures envisaged by the NSIA could contribute to reducing the marginality of inner areas and promote the protection, conservation, and enhancement of historic centres. In this perspective, actions on historical buildings should be selected based on a cognitive process aimed at specifying the phenomena that have led to the progressive abandonment of historical centres and a process aimed at identifying the values and dis-values. This research proposes a ruination model aimed at highlighting the risks that the built heritage of the inner areas are exposed to. This model was implemented for the case of the historic neighbourhood of Granfonte in Leonforte. The model was developed based on a qualitative–quantitative approach aimed at detecting the preservation state and built heritage use; analysing the building fabric development; identifying the ruination drivers; building a building units database; defining a ruination pattern of the building units based on a multivariate regression model; and analysing the predicted ruination scenario. The model can support decision-making processes aimed at the selection of actions to protect and preserve heritage built in marginal areas.

In this article, I look at “imperial formations” rather than at empire per se to register the ongoing quality of processes of decimation, displacement, and reclamation. Imperial formations are relations of force, harboring political forms that endure beyond the formal exclusions that legislate against equal opportunity, commensurate dignities, and equal rights. Working with the concept of imperial formation, rather than empire per se, the emphasis shifts from fixed forms of sovereignty and its denials to gradated forms of sovereignty and what has long marked the technologies of imperial rule—sliding and contested scales of differential rights. Imperial formations are defined by racialized relations of allocations and appropriations. Unlike empires, they are processes of becoming, not fixed things. Not least they are states of deferral that mete out promissory notes that are not exceptions to their operation but constitutive of them: imperial guardianship, trusteeships, delayed autonomy, temporary intervention, conditional tutelage, military takeover in the name of humanitarian works, violent intervention in the name of human rights, and security measures in the name of peace.

The multiple environmental crises our planet is experiencing forces us to change the ways we engage with it, especially the ones developed by scientific disciplines such as toxicology. In particular, widespread degradation should lead us to develop scientific practices that take environmental ruination as a framework condition, not only as an object of analysis. In doing so, we should take into account the practice of science at laboratories located in the peripheries of global science, institutions that have coexisted with extensive environmental and material decay from their very onset. Contributing to this task, this paper analyzes the case of Centro Nacional del Medio Ambiente (CENMA), an environmental chemistry laboratory located in Santiago, Chile. Established in mid-1990s, decades of continual budget cuts left it in a state of almost terminal ruin. In its struggle to remain relevant, CENMA developed an alternative kind of scientific practice, ruination science. Although always precarious, ruination science also tends to be well adapted to engage with impurity, resilient but fragile, and ethically entangled, prioritizing attachment and compromises over the application of certain standard recipes or procedures. Beyond its particularities, CENMA’s ruination science provides us with several valuable keys to better deal with worlds facing multiple kinds of anthropogenic degradation.

This article explores the aftermath of quinine in India. Derived from cinchona, the fever tree, quinine was once malaria’s only remedy—and, as such, vital to colonial power. But it has left grave uncertainty in its wake. Today, little market exists for Indian quinine, but government cinchona plantations established by the British remain in Darjeeling. What will become of these dilapidated plantations and their 50,000 inhabitants is unclear. Crumbling quinine factories and overgrown cinchona may evoke ruination, but these remains are not dead. They have instead become the site of urgent efforts—and a periodically charged politics—to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. This essay develops an analytics of becoming-after to ask not only, how do empires and human beings become-with world-historical substances like quinine but also, what do we make of life after they run their course?

Before the 1915 Genocide of Ottoman Armenians, the region of Van, in contemporary southeastern Turkey, held hundreds of active Armenian churches and monasteries. After the destruction of the Armenian community, these ruined structures took on new afterlives as they became part of the evolving environments and communities around them. These ruined spaces play a role in the everyday lives of the people who live among them and shape their historical understandings and relationships with the local history and geography. I interrogate the afterlives of one abandoned monastery and examine how local Kurds imagine, narrate, and enact the politics of the past and the present through that space of material ruin. I demonstrate how the history of the Armenian Genocide and ongoing state violence against the Kurdish community are intricately linked, highlight the continuation of violence over the past century, and deconstruct notions of ahistorical victims and perpetrators. This article builds on a critical approach to ruins as it traces how histories of destruction and spaces of material ruin are revisited and reinterpreted by those whose lives continue to be shaped by processes of ruination. It demonstrates how ruins created through violent histories become spaces for articulating alternative senses of history and crafting possible futures.

In the spring of 2006 wild flamingos returned to Florida, though not to the places their kind had inhabited 100 years and more ago at the southern edge of the Everglades and the Florida Keys. Instead this group of flamingos alighted 80 miles northward in Palm Beach County’s Stormwater Treatment Area 2 (STA-2), a human-made facility for filtering anthropogenic pollutants from storm runoff. This paper takes the return of wild flamingos to Florida as a case for thinking through haunting, ruination and encounters in what I call ‘the ordinary Anthropocene’: the ongoing, everyday more-than-human relationships, actions and less-than-planetary assemblages through which the Anthropocene is sensed and lived. After setting out a case for thinking with haunting, ruination and encounter as a way of making sense in the ordinary Anthropocene, I trace three interwoven narrative threads that unspool from the encounter with the STA-2 flamingos: First, I trace the transfiguration of living wild flamingos into idealised symbols of tropical dreamworlds over the 20th century. This leads me sideways to the present-absence of flamingos in the mid-century writings of Rachel Carson and through her backwards to John J. Audubon and the genocidal ruinations of the 19th century as they flicker in the margins of his ornithological writings. I end by returning to the present, to the encounter with STA-2 flamingos in the ongoing moment of living with others in the late capitalist ecologies of south Florida. The conclusion considers what might be taken forward, into the uncertain future, from this telling.

The interactions between climate information producers and local decision‐makers have remained largely underexplored. The processes of building a local climate research agenda and informing adaptation policies are still unknown in many Global South countries. In this context, we discuss from a Human Geography and Environmental Social Studies of Science and Technology (STS) perspective how the climate knowledge geographical divide operates and encounters ruination politics that serve to keep climate impacts unknown and adaptation policies missing. Through the empirical case of national climate scenarios making in Mexico and its political consequences, this paper advances the literature on climate knowledge infrastructures. From interviews with scientists and former public servants, this paper argues that underfunding science, unbuilding climate institutions and keeping knowledge under a commissioned model are slow ruination processes that result in strategic environmental ignorance. These conditions have shaped the scientific climate and political agenda in Mexico. Through a multiscalar analysis, we explore the production processes of the national climate scenarios for the National Communications on Climate Change. Thus, we discuss the power of climate funds influencing the country's climate research agenda and the national institutional designs constraining the development of usable climate information. Short This paper discusses the unexplored interface between climate science and policy in Mexico. Through interview analysis with scientists and former policy‐makers, it expands the literature on climate knowledge‐making in the Global South and environmental ignorance production.

Places juxtaposing normative and heterodox orders have long been a terrain for geographic research. This paper focuses on derelict architectonical structures understood as disordered places outside the norm. Despite the variety of research directions, there is still a lack of a uniform terminology and definition of these places. Following the academic literature, but also the public perception, we term those places as ‘lost places’. Based on an intensive literature research and a four-year empirical fieldwork, we present main trajectories and driving agents on the origin of lost places. We identify the key elements of the origin of lost places in the loss of functionality of architectonical structures and their re-contextualization through different appropriation processes. Both elements portray these architectonical structures as multitemporal and multimodal palimpsests. Finally, we propose a transition concept that offers the epistemological basis for studying lost places. Orte, die einer normativen und regulierten Ordnung widersprechen, sind seit langem ein geographisches Forschungsfeld. Dieser Beitrag befasst sich mit verlassenen architektonischen Strukturen, die als Orte außerhalb des Normativen verstanden werden. Trotz der Vielfalt an Forschungsrichtungen ist eine einheitliche Terminologie beziehungsweise eine klare Definition dieser Orte nach wie vor ein Desiderat. In Anlehnung an die wissenschaftliche Literatur, aber auch an die öffentliche Wahrnehmung wollen wir mit diesem Beitrag den Begriff ‚Lost Places‘ für diese Forschungsobjekte implementieren und etablieren. Auf Basis intensiver Literaturrecherche sowie einer vierjährigen empirischen Studie diskutieren wir die wichtigsten Trajektorien und Einflussfaktoren für die Entstehung von Lost Places. Als Schlüsselelemente erweisen sich dabei der Funktionsverlust der architektonischen Struktur sowie deren Re-kontextualisierung durch unterschiedliche Aneignungsprozesse. Lost Places erscheinen unter diesem Gesichtspunkt als multitemporale und multimodale Palimpseste. Schließlich präsentieren wir ein Übergangskonzept das eine epistemologische Grundlage für die Untersuchung von Lost Places bieten kann.

Abstract The political force of infrastructures is often attributed to their functioning as designed, while their political afterlives remain underexplored. In this article, I explore ethnographically the phatic force of ruins of infrastructure, by dwelling on a liminal railroad segment in Romania that remains unrehabilitated many years after its breakdown. Such an open-ended state of suspension allows the isolation of infrastructure's political and affective dimensions. The Giurgiu- Bucharest railroad met its demise in 2005 in the wake of heavy floods, producing an infrastructural gap that impacts local mobility and unravels the postsocialist social contract. State authorities and citizens engage in tactics of remediation that, while unsuccessful in resuming traffic, maintain a sense of phatic connection that kindles nostalgia for the past and frustrates anticipation of the future. These tactics make the railroad a medium for hope and at the same time a symbol for the absolute impossibility of hope.