Waiting for Development: Nature, Ruined Emptiness, and Hope in the Danube Delta

All modernization or development projects produce ruins. The socialist modernization was – because of its utopian core and its brutal discontinuation in the 1990s – particularly prone to creating landscapes littered with ruins. These landscapes have become places of ruined but productive emptiness. Nature seems to be the most accepted inhabitant of ruined emptiness. Most of the nature that has become, especially in the 2000s and later, codified as protected nature is, actually, littered with ruins.