Decommissioned places: Ruins, endurance and care at the end of the first nuclear age

Abstract

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.