Dr Paul Dobraszczyk

Dead Cities: Urban Ruins and the Imagination of Disaster

In recent years, urban ruins have become a growing obsession in both academic and popular culture, whether the all-to-real ruins of contemporary warfare or those imagined in post-apocalyptic cinema and computer games. As the distinctions between real and imagined ruination are becoming increasingly blurred, how might we negotiate the (fine) lines between fantasies of urban destruction and the latter’s manifestation in daily reality? In other words, how might the possible ruin of our cities be imagined in a way that helps us adequately face that very possibility?

This research addresses these questions by focusing on the relationship between realist and imaginary ways of representing urban ruins in the post-War period, encompassing: the literary and cinematic imagination of London’s destruction; the ruins of post-industrial Manchester; disaster tourism and Chernobyl; urban exploration and Varosha; art that engages with the ruins of Detroit; and unfinished urban environments across the world. Relating an experiential awareness of urban ruins to fictional counterparts, the research interrogates the relationship between the real and the imagined in terms of how large-scale ruins are perceived, whether by those who were directly affected by such ruination or others who seek to re-appropriate these ruins in other contexts. In addressing these questions, the research opens up an emancipatory space that accepts the inevitability of ruin in order to break its grasp and thus to suggest liberating alternatives. The result will be a re-imagining of the relationship between construction and destruction, and regeneration and ruin in architecture and urban space.

The research will further the goals of the ISRF by employing a new methodological approach to this subject area, developing interdisciplinary scholarship, and realising innovative modes of academic and public engagement that take new approaches to applying the research to real world social problems.