Senses & Society
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Sensing the Ruin
Senses & Society
ABSTRACT After identifying the processes
that have produced an increasingly
sterile urban environment in which only a
restricted range of sensory experience may
be experienced, this article will explore
the the multiple and contrasting sensual
experiences that can be provoked by
moving through an industrial ruin. In derelict
spaces the body is generally liberated
from the usual self-conscious performative
constraints of the city and may move in a
non-linear, improvisatory fashion across
a variety of textures, comport and weave
the body in expressive ways, confront
powerfully unpleasant but also pleasurable
and surprising smells and sounds, and
behold sights which disrupt normative
urban aesthetic conventions. Acquaintance
with the rich and varied affordances of
all sorts of materialities in ruins, where
playful, experimental and unhindered
interaction with objects and matter is not
prohibited, can provoke a realization that
the conventional urban encounter with
materiality is highly ordered and restrictive,
217
Tim Edensor is a
Reader in Cultural
Geography at
Manchester
Metropolitan
University. He has
written widely on
spaces of tourism,
national identities,
mobility, materiality
and industrial ruins.
[email protected]
DOI 10.2752/174589307X203100
Tim Edensor
Tim Edensor
and minimizes sensual contact with the world. It is
therefore proposed that the ruin can highlight the
sensory deprivation inherent in contemporary cities
and act as a space from which a critical perspective
towards much urban planning and design might
stimulate policies which multiply urban sensual
experience and open up the city to multiple
interpretation.
KEYWORDS: Industrial ruins, affordances, desensualized, materiality,
sensation
In this article I want to consider the sensual effects of
marginal urban spaces by depicting the characteristics of
an industrial ruin in Manchester, which, I will argue, offers
a rich sensory experience at variance to the somewhat desensualized
realms of much urban space.
The sensual experience of the city is typically discussed along two
lines. The first is that of the city as productive of sensory overload,
as a realm in which the rapidity of moving bodies and vehicles, the
constant cacophony, insistent visual onslaught and tactile buffetings
produce what Simmel (1995) refers to as neurasthenia, a condition
held at bay by the development of a blasé attitude to shield the
individual from this overwhelming assault. Emerging out of the
evolving conditions of the early modern city, in response to the rural
rhythms that had been the dominant experience of most citizens
only decades before, this awareness of the effects of urban sensory
stimuli has perhaps been dulled by familiarity over time, as most of
us dwell in and move through cities. The second line of argument,
by contrast therefore, avers that cities, along with other spaces,
have become progressively desensualized. Regulatory measures
have been enacted through planning, policing and commodification
of space that have minimized the early modern flux experienced
by Simmel and his contemporaries, and, accordingly, present-day
sensual experience is more typically conditioned by entrenched
forms of urban habitus, a way of being and feeling that ensures that
most of us are inured to the sensory impacts that so shocked these
earlier urbanites. The resulting structure of feeling or sense of place
of urban dwellers is, then, grounded in the predictable routines and
in the material and sensual qualities that are repeatedly confronted in
everyday experience.
Large-scale, customized, themed developments, malls, urban
spectacles, heritage sites, festival markets and gated housing
developments constitute a host of designed realms which seem
to produce familiar sensual experiences. In these spaces, harsh
sensations are kept at bay by the regulation of extraneous sensory
intrusions and the production of moderated soundscapes, tactilities,
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+
219
smellscapes and scenes. Without echoing dystopian accounts
of a postmodern condition which assert that the proliferation of
empty, free-floating signs overwhelms attempts to perceive and
understand the world, claims that the visual dominates urban
apprehension seem apposite, with the proliferation of spectacular,
themed spaces of leisure and shopping (Gottdiener 1997). These
sites are characterized by design-led regeneration, uncluttered
spaces, smooth surfaces and carefully placed artworks, which
shut out “extraneous, chaotic elements” and reduce “visual and
functional forms to a few key images” (Rojek 1995: 62). In such
realms, exemplified by highly regulated tourist spaces (Edensor
2006), sensorial cooperation is suppressed (see Tuan 2005) so that
the tactile, auditory and aromatic qualities of materiality experienced
through vision are effaced and visitors are visually able to “take
possession of objects and environments, often at a distance” (Urry,
2002: 147), while other sensory effects are minimized. It remains the
case that Western modernity continues to valorize the use of scopic
approaches and techniques to understanding and representing the
world (Jay 1992).
Olfactory regulation will only allow “ambient fragrancing” through
which “scents are diffused through ventilation systems in order to
optimize employee performance, subliminally influence consumers’
buying behavior, or effect a kind of mass medication in subways,
schools and prisons” (Drobnick 2005: 274). Incense, coffee smells,
the aroma of fresh bread may waft through shopping areas, but
the everyday smells of sewage, food and industry are minimized,
generating “blandscapes,” those “aseptic places, created by the
modernist drive towards deodorization, that are so empty that they
lead to an alienating sense of placelessness” (Drobnick 2002: 34).
Strong aromas remain associated with poverty, disease, decadence
and decay, the antitheses of high modernity (Bauman 1994), and
continue to transgress “social conventions in regard to enjoyment,
discipline, functionalism, corporeal deportment” (Drobnick 2002:
35), and so they are rigorously policed.
Sound is similarly controlled, so that loud sounds are rarely
permitted to disrupt soundscapes suffused with piped music.
Auditory techniques and technologies serve to “marshal and
discipline sound” and otherwise mediate urban space, “carving
out acoustic order” (Tonkiss 2003: 304). As Tonkiss further notes
(ibid.), responses to urban sounds are typified more by distraction
than attention, an experience that I argue is mobilized through an
attunement to habitual soundscapes. Tactility is also regulated so
that smooth surfaces prevail on walls and floors, clutter and dirt are
eradicated and evident routes are maintained. The seamlessness of
linear movement and the even surfaces of polished floors and paving
underfoot mean that the body remains undisturbed in its progress
and is able to perform unhindered movement towards destinations,
guided by what Boddy (1992) calls a “new urban prosthetics,”
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Tim Edensor
a system of smooth and sealed walkways, escalators, bridges,
people-conveyors and tunnels controlling the direction and partly the
pace of pedestrian movement.
These urban environments seem part of a “machinic episteme”
(Lash 1999), through which an all-encompassing design orders
meaning by placing people and things within a grid-like system, a
spatialization of functional differentiation and single-purpose spaces
in which specialized spaces for play, work and reproduction are
assigned, contributing to “a spatially and socially segmented world
– people here, traffic there; work here, homes there; rich here,
poor there” (Berman 1982: 168). Yet not only do such unsensual
realms emerge out of bureaucratic planning and control but inhere
in dispositions towards space where repetitive, performative
conventions about comportment and noise-making also sustain
normative understandings about urban space. For the internalization
of “good habits” is mobilized by the rationalization of the body through
state education and health regimes whereby “the modernization of
the body and the senses can be described as a process containing
experience, discovery, as well as instruction” (Frykman 1994: 65).
Together with contemporary reflexive projects of self-fashioning
around appropriate nutrition, exercise and the acquisition of
esteemed forms of knowledge and experience, the body is instructed
to become aware of certain stimuli. Through valorizing certain forms
of sensual experience, such instructive regimes create a reflexive
body which “[becomes] the training ground for the double process of
educating the senses and making good use of them” (ibid.: 67).
In another organizing process, planners have partly ordered
space to “clarify” sensory experience. In regulated space, the senses
perceive and enjoy the precision of the environment. For instance, for
Le Corbusier, the provision of plentiful supplies of light, clean air and
space would encourage the rational development of healthy persons
whose eyes, noses and ears would be uncluttered by sensory
rubbish. Clear, linear sight lines would allow purposive progress
and an undistracted mind. These and other values have percolated
into popular social conventions about the acquisition of sensory
capabilities – taking the seaside air, cultivating a nose for perfume,
developing a finely tuned ear for music and a taste for good food
– sustaining strategies for acquiring distinction. Such conventions
exemplify Constance Classen’s assertion that “sensory values not
only frame a culture’s experience, they express its ideals, its hopes
and its fears” (1993: 136), its social relations, its cultural practices
and its forms of practical living. The senses are thus “cumulative and
accomplished, rather than given” (Stewart 1999: 18), they do not
provide an unmediated access to the world as purely “natural” tools,
for as Classen underlines, “we not only think about our senses, we
think through them” (1993: 9).
The sensing of the city is strongly influenced by modes and styles
of movement. Richard Sennett (1994: 15) argues that urban space
221
has largely become “a mere function of motion,” engendering a
“tactile sterility” where the city environment “pacifies the body,”
notably through car travel, in which movement is typified by rapid
transit without arousal. In the case of the car, the physical efforts
– the “micro-movements” – used to negotiate space are minimal,
producing a desensitized effect, so that ease in mobility “has
triumphed over the sensory claims of the space through which the
body moves.” While there is much to dispute in this account - for
instance, it could be maintained that car driving re-sensualizes urban
experience – sensory contact with urban materiality is undoubtedly
reduced, replaced by other, more cocooned sensations. But walking
through (Western) cities may also restrict a more engaged sensory
experience with the aforementioned organization of pedestrian
linearity through uncluttered walkways. As I have written elsewhere
(Edensor 2000), this becomes profoundly apparent when walking
in unfamiliar, non-Western space, such as an Indian bazaar, which
may appear as wildly sensual and disordered. Different modes of
social and spatial organization produce a more variegated space
in which business, domestic, educational, leisure and bureaucratic
activities coincide, allowing a rich stew of smells, sounds, tactilities
and sights. For instance, the “smellscapes” in such spaces may
be rich and varied, jumbling together pungent aromas to produce
intense “olfactory geographies,” and, likewise, the combination of
noises generated by numerous human activities, animals, forms of
transport and performed and recorded music produces a changing
symphony of diverse pitches, volumes and tones. The confrontation
with numerous tactile experiences and the inability to make seamless
progress towards a destination due to the cross-cutting paths of
other moving (animal, vehicular and human) bodies thwart any linear
movement and distanced apprehension.
Such spaces can be sensually enervating as well as upsetting,
for the quest for alternative, more intense sensual experience might
be a response to highly regulated space. The habitual concern with
epistemological and sensory security is simultaneously accompanied
by a desire for its transcendence, a shaking up of the experiential
order that can be partly satisfied by the sensual experience of street
markets, popular music festivals, large carnivals and raves. Yet
rather than comparable to medieval carnival, such spaces typically
permit merely a “controlled decontrol of the emotions,” and are thus
“liminoid,” only pertaining to liminality (Featherstone 1991). A sensual
frisson may be experienced rather than an enveloping of the senses
and emotions. For signs and spectacles of the carnivalesque are
apt to be commodified, reinstating the ordered primacy of visual
representation. Nevertheless, certain festive occasions mix people,
food, music and sights to produce a rich sensory experience markedly
different from that sensed in everyday urban settings. Similarly,
sensory alternatives are sought in “white-knuckle” rides, which
scramble the senses through the foregrounding of rapid movement,
Senses & Society
Sensing the Ruin
Tim Edensor
and in pop music festivals, which combine auditory and haptic stimuli.
For instance, Saldanha (2002) shows how Goan beach raves are a
complex amalgam of music; smells of sweat, kerosene and hashish;
the sight of the moon and coconut trees; the tactilities of moving
bodies, sand and humidity. A similar sensory immersion might be
attributed to raves, in which, according to Reynolds, “the listener is
hurled into a vortex of heightened sensation, abstract emotions and
artificial energies” (1998: xix). In addition to occasional experiences,
sensual order may be confounded in the course of everyday life. An
intensive maintenance must be persistently mobilized to minimize
the impact of strong sensations, but this is insufficient, for the smell
of drains and body odor, car screeches and alarms, lurid clothing
and outmoded artifacts, crumbling pavements and spilling rubbish
can cause us to stop in our tracks. And so, despite the sensory
regulation of Western urban space, as I will show, unbidden sights,
sounds, textures and smells lurk in marginal spaces, waiting to burst
out and infect regulated space and sensory experience as the “old,
earthy environment persistently breaks through the cracks in the
pavement” (Howes 2005: 37).
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Figure 1
I now turn to a sensory depiction of a ruin in Manchester with
which I am familiar. The site of an obscure industrial process,
perhaps connected with automobiles, this ruin lies alongside a canal
in the north of the city in an area that has not yet been subject to
the widespread regeneration that pervades much of the city center
and is extending into the north of the city, The ruin is typical of the
diverse derelict industrial properties that continue to haunt Britain
and other post-industrial nations, and, like many other such sites,
it is supposedly off-limits, designated as useless yet dangerous
space, but is the venue for a host of social activities and colonized
Sensing the Ruin
223
Figure 2
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by non-human forms (Edensor 2005a). Like other abandoned sites,
the ruin continually changes as it decays and falls apart and so it
is continually productive of changing sensual effects. I shall briefly
identify some of the visual, sonic and aromatic qualities of this ruin
before concentrating in greater detail on its production of haptic and
tactile effects.
In contrast to the urban realm of commodities, stable fixtures and
classified things, in the ruin there are numerous objects and forms
of matter that the eye cannot identify, that appear unclassifiable,
partly because of their transformation under conditions of decay
and partly because of (my) unfamiliarity with industrial processes.
Objects wrought out of strange material, off-cuts and residues,
parts never assembled and other enigmatic artifacts litter ruined
scenes. Thus, shards of metal, things twisted into peculiar shapes,
dead animals, matter and fixtures released from their usual confinement contravene the usual visual order and attune the eye to an
emergent aesthetics, one that cannot be fixed through endless
maintenance but is constantly becoming different. Scenes are framed
by collapsing structures and decorations of yesteryear mock the
ongoing production of the visually modish in commercial space. This
alternative visual feast concerns the random mixing and mingling of
artifacts and other kinds of stuff, so that those which were previously
separated merge in new juxtapositions, striking chords through their
unfamiliar accompaniments. Large machines, structural entities and
other objects appear sculptural. Here, divested of a function and
no longer surrounded by spatial order, their aesthetic, shapely and
textural qualities may be apprehended. The jumble of matter thwarts
a distanced gaze because space is not arranged to be visually
apprehended and since dangers surround the moving body, you
have to watch where you are going. Rather than as with the carefully
considered color coding which suffuses domestic, commercial and
Tim Edensor
industrial space, layers of color compete with each other as paint
peels, objects decay and plants colonize derelict space.
Smell can justify “essentialist views of inferior or superior places”
(Drobnick 2002: 37), for aroma is a key marker of cultural differences, informed by conventional values which claim to discern the
respectability of place, identifying its (lack of) qualities. Ruins are
typically of those realms in which strong, sometimes repulsive odors
gather, but rather than confirming their official status as dirty and
dangerous spaces of obsolescence, I argue that they can serve to
revitalize an attention to, and sensory awareness of, materiality and
place, can be an “aromatopia” (Drobnick 2005: 270). Famously,
the non-visual senses are somewhat ineffable. For instance, smells
“yield experiences which are inherently discontinuous, fragmentary
and episodic.” In contradistinction to visuality, “intensity, complexity
and affect replace considerations of perspective, scale or distance”
(Drobnick 2002: 33). Moreover, “environmental and immersive” smells
are “inhaled and thus become intimately bound with the body; they
permeate the atmosphere and are thus inescapable” (ibid.). Powerful
aromatic sensations in ruined spaces testify to the deodorization
of the urban world, the banishment of strong botanical, industrial
and decaying smells. Inhaling the scent of crumbling masonry and
plaster, rotting wood and paper conjures up a rich sensation of
forgotten memories, unidentifiable and obscure yet redolent of
earlier experiences. The often overpowering aroma of certain plants,
notably the buddleia which frequently colonizes derelict space, is
pleasant but may be swiftly succeeded by the acrid stench of burnt
wood, stagnant oil, petrol and carrion.
In the ruin there are two notable effects that contrast with the
normative sonic experience of the city. Firstly, the qualities of silence
are amplified, because to walk through large abandoned chambers,
often clothed in vegetation, foregrounds awareness of relative urban
silence. As Tonkiss claims,
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stumbling across silence in the city . . . can be like uncovering a
secret . . . Empty space that doesn’t talk back is as evocative as
the hush that falls over the crowd, the telephone that doesn’t
ring, the dog that doesn’t bark. (2003: 308)
The rhythms of home, work and leisure, a sense of place are constituted by soundscapes (Smith 1994) in which church bells or muezzins
impose regular sonic effects and are auditory markers of space
(see Corbin 2003), radios and television babble, traffic continually
throbs and factories like this one, before they are abandoned, whir
and chug day and night. Passage through regular sonic realms
consolidates a sense of being in place and accompanies habitual
routines. In the ruin, the background pulse of the city is quieter, less
discernible, and the quiescence generates thoughts of a vanished,
working soundscape. The second sonic effect is the existence of a
Sensing the Ruin
delicate soundscape which becomes discernible once you adjust
to the uncanny quiet. Discrete sounds emerge and contribute to a
sparser sonic backdrop in contradistinction to the thick racket of
most urban noise; it becomes possible to isolate sounds and trace
their source. Contributing elements include doors creaking in the
wind, bushes swaying, flurries of pigeons who have taken up home
in the decaying roof, and a thrush singing,
Since, as Feld notes, “place is sensed and senses are placed”
(2005), the sensual and practical engagement with familiar space
depends upon materialities, not merely the cultural understandings
that emerge out of broader discursive and representational epistemologies. It is therefore essential to reinstate the affordances
of place and space, those qualities which are spatial potentialities,
constraining and enabling a range of actions. For space is “a concrete
and sensuous concatenation of material forces” (Wylie 2002: 251)
which possesses an agency to impact upon the sensibilities of those
who dwell and move within. The surfaces, textures, temperatures,
atmospheres, contours, gradients and pathways of places encourage
humans to follow particular courses of action, producing an everyday
practical orientation dependent upon a multisensory apprehension
of place and space. And, as Seremetakis asserts,
the sensory is not only encapsulated within the body as an
internal capacity or power but is also dispersed out there on
the surface of things as the latter’s autonomous characteristics,
which can then invade the body as perceptual experience.
(1994: 6)
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Figure 3
Senses & Society
While such processes of spatial interaction are never merely “natural,”
since all human action and apprehension is enmeshed within learnt
Tim Edensor
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cultural, practical techniques and conventions, particular physical
phenomena impact upon people and influence their spatial practices,
their sensory perception and sensual evaluations. Affordances thus
inform a practical engagement that becomes part of “second nature”
where they are familiar with space. In the ruin, the dissolution of
sensual familiarity and the advent of sensual surprises may be initially
overwhelming, repulsive or arresting, but it also has the potential to
provide a stimulating experience by this distinction from the familiar.
Accordingly, I particularly want to consider the effects of the
texture, structure and condition of material arrangements in the ruin
(see Edensor 2005b) insofar as they impact upon the experience of
tactility, for the confrontation with the peculiar affordances of ruins
produces a sensual experience of materiality greatly at variance
with regular, ordered urban space and contemporary conventions
of comfort which protect the sense of touch (Crowley 2005). It is
through the haptic senses that the urban ruin is apprehended in
most stark contrast to the rest of the city.
The spatial recontextualization and condition of objects in ruins
draws attention to their material qualities, making evident the matter
out of which they are made and foregrounding the sensuous work
that was involved in their manufacture and use. This encounter with
the materiality of things can provoke a sudden awareness of the
ways in which we are affectively and sensually alienated from the
material world. In desensualized urban and domestic realms, the
sheer smoothness of space, the constant maintenance of space
and objects through cleaning, polishing and disposal effectively
restricts and regulates sensory experience, minimizing confrontations
with textures, weight and other material agencies (Howes 2005).
Modes of comporting the body in the city, moving through smooth
space in which the consistent removal of excess matter minimizes
Figure 4
Sensing the Ruin
disruption and facilitates speedy progress, are confounded among
the disorganized materialities of the ruin.
To walk among a clutter of multiple objects and fragments is
to move within a material environment which continually engages
bodies, distracting and repulsing us, attracting us to unfamiliar
textures or peculiar shapes, coercing us to stoop and bend to make
a path around and through stuff. As Gay Hawkins and Stephen
Muecke assert, this sort of “waste,” this rejected and neglected
matter, “can touch the most visceral registers of the self – it can
trigger responses and affects that remind us of the body’s intensities
and multiplicities” (2003: xiv). In the ruin, the transformed materiality
of industrial space, its deregulation, decay and the distribution of
objects and less distinguishable matter, provides a realm in which
sensual experience and performance is cajoled into unfamiliar
enactions that coerce encounters with unfamiliar things and their
affordances. At first somewhat disturbing, this confrontation with
excess matter offers opportunities to engage with the material world
in a more playful, sensual fashion than is usually afforded in much
smoothed-over urban space. To access the ruin, I must pick my
way over a mound of rubble, brick, girders and earth piled high,
and when walking inside the decaying sheds I have to sense the
conditions of flooring and the stability of precarious overhead roofing.
Might it be susceptible to collapse? Might the spreading film of oil be
dangerously slippery? Here, the unfamiliar acquisition of a skilful
apprehension of space is necessary for my own safety.
The ruin feels very different to smoothed over urban space, rebukes
the unsensual erasure of multiple tactilities, smells, sounds and sights.
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Figure 5
Tim Edensor
It is not a world of silken sheen or velvety textures, polished surfaces,
ceaselessly swept flooring or plush carpeting. Instead, it contains
the rough, splintery texture of a wooden workbench or floorboards,
crunchy shards of glass on concrete flooring, the mulch of moldering
paper, moss and saplings, decomposing clothes, corroding steel
and slimy, rotting wood. In their unfamiliarity, such things invite touch.
Unlike the artifacts in a store or museum (see Classen 2005), these
items are available to pick up, to stroke and throw, to smash or
pull apart. This tactile engagement with things usually consigned to
landfill and dumps brings back some of the familiar sensations of
childhood for me, when I dwelt in dens and woods and ostensibly
off-limits derelict houses alone and with friends. The “thingness”
of these objects, their material qualities and their potentialities for
manual apprehension release a flood of neglected sense-making
capacities.
These pleasurable forms of matter, which assert their weight
and texture and invite the body to interact with them, are joined by
matter of which the sensory apprehension is less enjoyable, stuff that
intimates that the body is under threat through its sensory effects.
Rickety stairways and collapsed sections should be avoided, along
with the viscous puddles of grease, upturned nails in boards, piles
of asbestos or concrete pits filled with oil and water. Moreover, even
when not dangerous, matter forces the body on the defensive by
its powerful sensual intrusions: the face may suddenly become
enveloped in a thick veil of cobwebs or dust, the clatter of a swinging
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Figure 6
Sensing the Ruin
light fitment in the wind may cause a sharp fright, and fingers may
gather splinters from a shattered beam. The body recoils or opens
itself out to these sensual stimuli, to the abundant textures, to both
abject and pleasurable matter disposed of in more regulated space.
Acting contingently in these unfamiliar surroundings, the body is
not merely reactive to the effusion of sensory affordances but also
actively engages with the things it beholds. In turn, the ruin is a
space in which things can be engaged with, destroyed and strewn
around expressively in contradistinction to interaction with things
in regulated realms where, typically, vision predominates, objects
are beheld at a distance, and a disposition is required whereby
commodities and other forms of material property are sacrosanct
and may not be meddled with. In the ruin, there is no price to pay for
destroying things that have already been consigned to the category
of waste and belong to nobody. In this ruin, as in most, windows
are smashed, doors ripped off their hinges, piles of debris set alight.
The constraints which delimit action upon the material world are
here irrelevant, but also because a viscerally and sensually exciting
engagement with matter is available. A further taboo, the shielding
of the body from muck, is further confounded in the ruin, where dirt
pervades every corner.
Filth such as this is among those “culturally mandated categories
to exclude and repress,” conceived of as “unassimilably other”
(Cohen 2005: ix). As Hamlin remarks, its power lies in the threat
it poses to the “borders between self and nonself” (Hamlin 2005:
5). Yet, unable to insulate itself against these material intrusions,
the body is rendered porous, open to the impacts of matter, is a
“threshold or passage” characterized by “multiple surfaces open
to other surfaces” through which “strange substances” are able “to
cross the subject’s own boundaries” (Fullagar 2001: 179). Provoking
disquiet and abhorrence, filth is a category which, although it has
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Figure 7
Tim Edensor
revolted has simultaneously fascinated, and here, there remains the
possibility to get pleasurably filthy in a fashion reserved for labourers
and children.
Senses & Society
Conclusion
A sensuous engagement is part of the way in which people make
and inhabit space, but while an apprehension of the environment
continuously emerges in response to its qualities it is constrained
by environmental conditions and performative conventions, for, as
Susan Stewart argues, the senses are “shaped and modified by
experience and the body bears a somatic memory of its encounters
with what is outside it” (1999: 19). Similarly, place thus imprints itself
on the body and is carried by it through time and space (Casey
1987). I have argued that under contemporary urban conditions,
sensual experience tends to be minimized by regulatory procedures,
planning, cultural conventions and values, and spatial divisions. Yet
the unruly effects of sensual stimuli are always liable to break through
the carefully guarded city, and, in addition, more powerful sensations
may be sought in places on the urban margins, in which a low level
of surveillance promotes a rich and varied sensory experience. Such
spaces may be sought precisely because they confound familiar
forms of comfort and mundane sensual experience. Here the body
is a site of “surfaces, affects and desires that perceive and connect
with other planes of existence, energies and affects” (Fullagar
2001: 74) and more reign is given to the potential for multisensory
experiences. The strong sensations experienced in the industrial
ruin are repellent but also delightful, for they provoke unexpected
pleasures, imaginings and desires. These alternative sensual realms
can critically speak back to the urban environment of reduced
sensation, revealing the sensual deficit that reduces the richness of
urban existence and highlighting how, according to Drobnick, “the
poetry of existence” is enhanced by “cultivating diverse sensory
experiences and a heightened sensitivity towards the immediate
physicality of the world” (2005: 273). The sensory revelations of ruins
and those of other interstitial spaces could therefore be exemplars
which inform approaches to urban planning and regeneration that
are more attuned to the pleasures and effects of sensual diversity
in the city. The purified and single purpose spaces that reduce the
meanings and sensualities of design-led spaces, over-emphasizing
the visual at the expense of other senses, could be complemented
by the less orderly intrusion of smells, textures and sounds – as
well as peculiar, enigmatic sights – to multiply the meanings and
experiences of place, open out an awareness of sensory alterity and
banish illusions of essence and fixity.
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