More fragments of research on social and physical accumulation, decay, ruins and remnants...
After London...
When dereliction is better - Hugh Pearman on the Paddington redevelopment in London:
There's a lot to be said for poignant dereliction. I love it: the old, now silent, factories and wharfs, the rusting railway sidings, the buddleia sprouting from the walls and the birches shouldering through the pavements. For me, London's Docklands were at their best in the hiatus between the ships leaving in the 1970s and the real-estate developers arriving in the 1980s. Briefly, they were a magical, forgotten domain. Now I have to face up to the removal of another rich patch of dereliction. This time, it's Paddington.
After Rome...
Charles Dickens, Pictures From Italy, 1846:
Now, we tracked a piece of the old road, above the ground; now traced it, underneath a grassy covering, as if that were its grave; but all the way was ruin. In the distance, ruined aqueducts went stalking on their giant course along the plain; and every breath of wind that swept towards us, stirred early flowers and grasses, springing up, spontaneously, on miles of ruin. [...] I almost feel (as I had felt when I first saw it, at that hour) as if the sun would never rise again, but looked its last, that night, upon a ruined world. [quoted in Woodward's In Ruins, 36]
After Chernobyl...
The truth of the woman-solo-on-motorbike story of Ghost town - my rides through chernobyl area (and here) has recently been questioned, but the pictures are still very interesting, and look like those in Robert Polidori's Zones of Exclusion - Pripyat and Chernobyl, and these here.
After Londinium...
"The Anglo-Saxons stood in awe and dread and shunned 'the work of giants', as they called the Roman buildings, now standing derelict." [Londinium in The London Encyclopedia, 1481]
After New York...
Mark Kostabi in the year 3000, after New York:
I hired two art historians [...] to write art history/science fiction, looking back on Kostabi's early years from the year 3000. These two pseudo-yet-real art historians came up with the specific idea of archeological excavations in the destroyed New York. I'm now working on an even bigger book.
After civilisation...
Planning for future ruins: US designed a 10k year danger communication project for a radioactive waste-disposal site
US Government project to protect a radioactive waste-disposal site for 10,000 years by marking the site to deter inadvertent human interference.
Sandia National Laboratories charged a panel of outside experts with the task to design a 10,000-year marking system for the WIPP [Waste Isolation Pilot Plant] site, and estimate the efficacy of the system against various types of intrusionThe question becomes: how do we communicate across a large cultural space/time. (More on WIPP: factsheets, their underground mountain repository layout.) The report's goals were similar to one Thomas Sebeok submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the early 1980s. His view is that spoken and written languages were likely to decay to the point of incomprehensibility over a long period of time. Ultimately, the solution he endorsed was to form a self-perpetuating "atomic priesthood" (viz Beneath the Planet of the Apes) that could pass down the knowledge from generation to generation.
Related:The Long Now organisation, Communication across space and time: SETI radio message beamed into space, Benford's: Deep Time: How humanity communicates across millennia, and messages placed on Voyager 1 in late 1970s.
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