This paper argues for a geography of deindustrialising places as spaces of inhabitation and
endurance, rather than one based on narratives of progress, decline and ruination. Ruins have long
been a concern for geographers, and the material remains of modernity’s grand schemes feed easily
into ways of seeing and knowing deindustrialised ...
This paper argues for a geography of deindustrialising places as spaces of inhabitation and
endurance, rather than one based on narratives of progress, decline and ruination. Ruins have long
been a concern for geographers, and the material remains of modernity’s grand schemes feed easily
into ways of seeing and knowing deindustrialised spaces which can efface the practices through
which lives and worlds are made in the present. Drawing on fieldwork in the former Soviet
Atomgrad of Visaginas, Lithuania, the paper both acknowledges and pulls back from the draw of the
ruin. Moving away from the ruin-temporalities of progress and decline, it offers an account of
ongoing practices and modes of habitation in spaces defined by ruination.
A reflexive acknowledgement of our contaminated role in making sense of such spaces allows us to
be enchanted by grand narratives of hubris and decline and to see other stories –stories of living on,
of endurance and of making lives in places circumscribed as futureless by political and economic
regimes. As such, the paper argues for a geography of makeshift practices, aesthetic projects, and
modes of care, devotion and commitment that their inhabitants bring to places that are
“decommissioned” from above.
Engaging this approach through a series of small stories based on ethnographic and collaborative
fieldwork alongside two photographers in Visaginas, I posit that the material and subjective remains
of the dreams of the first nuclear age give rise to emergent forms of life that stand in excess to
narratives of progress and decline. The ruins of Soviet nuclear modernity here operate as containers
for practices of endurance and living on through changing relations of power and capital, rather
than objects of melancholic loss, and as raw materials through which to forge ways of living in
spaces characterised as surplus to requirement.
