Modernity is rarely associated with ruins. In our everyday comprehension ruins rather bring to mind ancient and enchanted monumental structures; an archaeological dream world featuring celebrities such as Machu Picchu, Pompeii and Angkor Wat. Yet never have so many ruins been produced; so many things been victimized and made redundant, so many sites been abandoned. Closed shopping malls, abandoned military sites, industrial wastelands, derelict mining towns, empty apartment houses, withering capitalist and communist monuments. A ghostly world of decaying modern debris mostly left out of academic concerns and conventional histories - and also considered too recent, too grim and repulsive to be embraced as heritage. Though the situation of neglect may be claimed to have changed, as reflected in the growing field of the archaeology of the contemporary past, in the broader popular, artistic and scholarly interest in decay and ruination, and lately even in heritage discourses, modern ruins still play a very marginal role in the political economy of both the past and the present.
I've written in the past about the aesthetics of the an ideal British landscape (as embodied in the anthem Jerusalem). The British ideal was to tame nature; the Canadians on the other hand, embraced the wildness of the natural landscape. Those difference normative views of landscape helped to shape national identity and inform land use decision-making processes.
Tags: UK, landscape, culture, Canada, land use.