The ruin, taken as a broad spatial typology that offers itself readily as forensic evidence useful in the investigation of contemporary configurations of power, is the starting point for Bryan Finoki’s reflections on architecture’s implication in the manipulation of space for political ends. From Ground Zero in NYC to what remains of Saddam Hussein’s luxurious compounds in Baghdad, the ruin is the battlefield not just in the War on Crime, or the War on Poverty, on Drugs, Illegal Immigration, or on Terrorism, but what he sees as an all-out War on Space itself.

The contemporary ruin—in all its various incarnations across the spectrum (from the abandoned auto factories in Michigan to the World Trade Center’s footprint in NYC, from Saddam Hussein’s elegant compounds in Baghdad—that have since been converted into temporary barracks for the U.S. military—to the vacant half-built towers in Dubai or the one billion squatters around the world who inhabit recycled ruins, just to name a few) hints at spatial configurations of power that, in one way or another, offer a kind of forensic evidence not only of neoliberalization’s false claim of flattening the playing field of economic opportunity around the world, but also of the ongoing failures in our social and political institutions themselves which have adopted a strategy of secrecy and deception in order to wage not just a War on Crime, or a War on Poverty, on Drugs, on Illegal Immigration,or Terrorism, but what I see as a War on Space itself—what I see as ruin on a brand new and unprecedented scale.

If you consider the number of ways in which architecture is of essential value to humanity as a medium through which democracy can be spatially organized and practiced—primarily as a platform for the drafting of utopic visions of what the city could be as a space for everyone, through cooperative models of ‘community design’ and spaces for ecologies of self-organization to resist the hierarchies of corporate consumerism (even if on the smallest of scales) — what appears to be gaining momentum in the urban environment today is a landscape that aggressively stands affront to the most basic tenets of our ability to publicly participate in the production and utilization of space.

But, whereas once the public realm was hailed as the triumph of the ‘democratic city’ that prided itself on diversity and the openness of civic life, our cities now seem to be subject to a process of radical adaptation, mainly in the form of a process of intensive fortification and security makeovers which recast public space as the locus of incubation for conspiracy, hidden threats and violence.

The sacrosanct notion of ‘democratic space’ has fallen out of equilibrium with public space’s own ability to trust—and police—itself.  The irony is that the more the “free world” tries to secure itself from this new threat, the more it transforms itself as an even more attractive target—not to mention the sacrifice of freedom that comes hand in hand with this process.  To try to use, much less create, public space almost seems like a criminal act; it’s as if ‘being public’ is increasingly becoming synonymous with‘being illegal’: just consider how Central Park was put off-limits for protestors during the presidential elections. In my view, we have entered into a new geopolitical era of ‘urban and institutional ruination,’ in which architecture is an agent of civic corrosion instead of civic empowerment.

Despite the mesmerizing visual effects of ruins being swallowed by nature that we are so prone to aestheticize, I’m more curious about the ‘production of ruins’ and new notions of ‘architecture’ and ‘nature’ that might be emerging behind the great façade of what writer Steven High calls the “deindustrial sublime.”  I fear our ongoing romance with “staring into the ruin” might just be creating a greater ‘blind spot’ to another form of urban geopolitical ruin that is in my view for more insidious and worrisome than any other concept of ruin up to this point — one we should be taking serious note of since it’s not simply ‘an object on the landscape left to decay’. Rather, it manifests itself through new and more subtle spatial products and architectural hijackings which directly threaten the powers of public agency.  I’m talking about the cultural, economic, and political commodification of ruins that is creeping up in the shadows of democracy, taking form in things like secret detention camps, ominous landscapes of surveillance, floating prisons, ‘designated protestor zones’, secret spaces of ilk, ubiquitous fortress urbanism.  These covert spaces of erosion of human rights are threatening the definitions of what actually constitutes both ‘democracy’ and ‘architecture.’  Here, we have a new typology of ruin that deploys our fascination with the aesthetics of decay in order to disguise a more quintessentially postmodern “geopolitics of decay” that is seeping into the foundations of society elsewhere, in the periphery, beyond the scopes of public scrutiny.

Anyone can marvel at the texture of a dilapidated factory, fetishize the crumbled walls, have beautiful rust patterns grafted onto the door of your loft, but, what do ruins really mean today, precisely—and what is the larger process at work that is implicit in them?  Do ‘ruins’ carry the same symbolic weight and meaning through out history, or do those that emerge within each era signify something new?  In other words, are ruins truly epic in nature or do they just offer fleeting reflections of their contexts?

To put this in slightly different terms: how have ruins come to represent a deeper political process at work that all of this gawking and staring may only serve to mask?  Perhaps what is ruin today is not so much represented by these objects of obvious architectural demise as they are now by the types of dubious political spaces forming and operating in the lesser visible niches just outside public view.  I would suggest, for example, the proverbial backroom where dirty political deals are done is a critical example of the ruin today.  Not that this space hasn’t always existed in some form or another, but this seems like the kind of precursory space that pre-empts the subsequent, inevitable abandoned factory and the layoffs of thousands of jobs that go with it.  The ruin actually began long before these visual correspondences of broken architecture made themselves apparent to us, by which time it is unfortunately too late.  To inspect the ruins of today is not simply to idle in front of the ‘dead shopping mall,’ but to go back to the root that links the spatial litter of the corporate wasteland with the political machinations that hatched it in the first place.

Perhaps the real ruin is less in what is fading physically from the landscape before our eyes than in what is cropping up and percolating unbeknownst to political transparency well beyond our capacity for scrutiny.  You might only consider Guantanamo Bay to be a ruin in so far as the lush Cuban landscape has begun to overtake some of the camps that are no longer in use.  But I would suggest to you the very existence of Guantanamo Bay itself as it has been constructed through excessive legal verbiage to exist outside the scope of both U.S. and International law constitutes a deep ruination of our environmental and political landscape. This bit of extra-territory wherein no law technically applies illustrates an extreme process of “ideological de-industrialization” precisely because there is no assurance that any sort of human rights violations won’t occur. Guantanamo Bay has also become a locus of attention on the topic of torture;its ongoing existence may only help to draw public attention away from other practices of torture elsewhere.  One should question why it has not yet been shut down even though the Obama administration said that it would be.

To what degree is our obsession with “physical ruination” on the surface suggestive of a deeper denial of the systemic deterioration of our political optimism, a phenomenon which we so dread to face?  Why do we fixate so intensely on the architectural manifestations of ruins, the very textures of disrepair, with myopic lust and incredible attention to detail, but then fail to observe even the most vague and glaring erosion patterns of our culture of fear and consumption, of our discriminatory social practices, our relative morality and the perishibility of our ideals?  Why are we willing to romanticize the beauty of a fallen building but are then desperately make every attempt to turn away from the cracked walls of our government’s integrity?  Is there a connection?

For example, Detroiters are often accused of being in a state of denial about their situation (they are perceived as being victims of nostalgia by longing for what was once a booming city and by operating under the illusion that one day those factories will return operative and a prosperous life will resume.) Yet the media’s predisposition is to reduce the conversation around Detroit to photo ops of abandoned buildings and glossy infographics highlighting the statistical extremities of vacancy achieved by the city.  How hypocritical is this?  Who is perpetuating nostalgia here?

When you read about the shrinking cities of the “Rust Belt” in mainstream media, for the most part they only refer to these places generically, in terms of the uniformity of their abandonment. There is occasionally some brief analysis given to the harsh realities of deindustrialization and the corporate logic of global capitalism that has left places in utter ruin, but rarely is any proper attention given to the history of de-unionization in this country or the exploitative cogs that neoliberal capitalism still depends on – and, so again, the coverage is usually so biased by its romantic affair with the aesthetics of urban decay that it often fails to incorporate any kind of critical analysis of the ethical struggles against runaway capitalism that these de-industrialized monoliths of decay actually memorialize.

Is it really fair to accuse Detroit of being in denial when we are ourselves so desperately stare into the ruins with forlorn fascination and ideological abandonment that we have excluded any kind of deeper insight into the greater forces (and system of corruption) that are hollowing our most important national foundations––like social welfare, equal opportunity, public health care, a right to education, racial equality, environmental justice, foreign diplomacy, fair taxation, immigrant rights, and so forth?  It seems clear to me that our love affair with ruins only serves to perpetuate this visual language for nostalgia that we like to see in others.  Further, it depicts an America that appears completely oblivious to the mass ruining of its own political fabric – so, I ask, are we actually reeling in a state of shock over the impending demise of our own legitimacy?   Or is it just plain ignorance that makes our ‘gaze of the ruin’ so blindingly selective?

The more humanity has obsessed outwardly over the optics of ruins to the point of near cult worship, the more the political landscape has slowly come apart at the seams without proper notice.  From my point of view, it looks as though ‘institutional corruption’—having exhausted most of its usual conduits—is running out of room to hide.  But the irony seems to be: does anyone really care?   The statecraft of western superpower has already shown a blatant willingness to operate unilaterally above international diplomacy and debate in order to preserve its power through brute force. The irony is that in an era that has witnessed the fabrication of a political rationale for invading Iraq, held presidential elections under the highest degrees of duress and uncertainty, waived dozens of environmental laws and abused the right of ‘eminent domain’ to erect a border fence, dangerously revised—and in some cases outright dismissed––laws in order to secretly capture and detain thousands of supposed ‘terrorist suspects’ around the world, the media and the public are obsessed with promoting reruns of Die Hard and taking their families on vacations to New Orleans for a little Disaster Tourism.

Perhaps our preoccupation with places like Detroit and the urge to call it a “Dead City” makes for the perfect distraction to draw attention away from the other locations where late capitalism is still seen as providing substantial benefit, even though these places have also already begun to show signs of the system’s sheer lack of concern for any people or any place manifest in Detroit’s representation in the media.  You don’t need to look any further than the US-Mexico border, which is now riddled with polluted warehouses and toxic industrial sites left to rot from the corporate maquilladoras that were supposed to have liberated the Mexican laborer from indigenous poverty.

Perhaps Detroit, having become the epicenter of our fascination with urban abandonment, is but the ultimate disguise tactic for the same deregulated free-trade policies that are coursing through the capitalist landscape in other regions now (Beijing, Sao Paulo, Cairo, Bangalore), which have no allegiance to any nation anymore per se, and that are perfectly willing to put workers of any nationality (and that includes those within Empire now) on the slab until they can be disposed of for a cheaper ‘cost of labor’ elsewhere, later on.  And this is hardly any secret — this is predictably what corporations do.

Let’s not forget: deindustrialization is not ‘the end of industrialism,’ or just the removal of it.  Deindustrialization is just reindustrialization in the opposite direction.  It was economist Joseph Schumpeter 50 years ago who described capitalism as a “gale of creative destruction.” A force that stalks the planet through “the same process of industrial mutation” he said, “that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”  This is the fact of capitalism, he wrote – that it can never be stationary.  That it must devour in order to persist.

That is to say, there is a whole other side to ruins, and the most significant ones of our times might not be about a process of “de-walling” (or, a natural collapse of outdated industrial buildings) but rather is one of fanatical “re-walling.”  In other words, the grand ruins of the neoliberal era are being constructed as we speak in the form of the world’s largest shopping malls, tallest skyscrapers, the bunkered paradises of the super-luxurious, down to the squatter settlements made of scraps and their disparity with the rise of gated communities. The ruins of today do not need to see “tomorrow” in order to symbolize the corrosion of their own past; they are ruins even before they are ever completed by virtue of their context, which is in itself an assault on the spaces of the global commons from their earliest stages of conception. The paradigm shift comes from observing ruin not just as a departure, or even as a consequence, but witnessing that ruins are in a constant state of reproduction.