Introduction

If these vacant retail spaces are ruins, what kind of ruins are they? What kind of haunting is taking place? There now exist several excellent reviews of the literature on ruins that help inform this study (see, among others, DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013; Pétursdóttir and Olsen, 2014; Dobraszczyk, 2017; Emery, 2018). Rather than rehashing this work, this chapter plucks from it and holds together different images to suggest resemblances and potential overlaps that help us consider what these spaces are. In introducing the study of ruins, this chapter also engages with archaeology as a way of grounding the meta-theories that are also called upon, namely, theories around the spectacle and retail capital. Treating the spectacle as a socio-spatial formation that falls into ruin like any other, an ‘archaeological imagination’ (Hill, 2015) helps reveal the multiple hauntings that constitute it. This crash course in ruins engages with Walter Benjamin's (1999) The Arcades Project as an early study of retail ruins, specifically the arcades of Paris that helped define the 19th century but were falling out of favour by Benjamin's time. The arcades, of course, did not just vanish without a trace. Instead, their logic morphed into other spatial forms throughout the 20th century in Western cities, culminating in a new postmodern landscape by the 21st century. Today, it is that landscape that is noticeably deteriorating in front of our eyes. One way of building on Benjamin's work is with hauntology, a methodology that sees these ruinous spaces not only as negative, but also as potentially productive for what comes next. Benjamin's thinking, in fact, works with a similar ethos. In other words, the negative has its own force; an absence has its own presence, after all (see, among others, Frers, 2013). The end of the chapter details the methodology of the field study presented in Chapter Two and interjects a question of context, insofar as a hauntological approach implies a particular way of conceptualizing context and what it means for research.

What are ruins?