Retail Ruins, Revisited

While retail helped define consumer culture around the world in the twentieth century, today's built retail spaces are in a state of disarray, marked by widespread shop closures, long-term vacancies, dead shopping malls, and other scenes of disruption and crisis in the built environment. This chapter builds on my recent argument that this is a new form of ruin and ruination that deserves our urgent attention. Even as vacant spaces have expanded as so many voids in the landscape, new tactics and strategies have emerged to combat their growth. Recent scholarship on ruins and ruination has raised serious questions about the ontological status of spaces, objects, and subjectivities that are enrolled in these new trends in urban development, such as ‘adaptive reuse’ of old buildings and ‘community-led’ approaches. This chapter reviews some recent examples that have appeared in towns and cities around the world that counter the persistence of ruination in the retail environment. By adopting a hauntological approach to these recent trends, this chapter is also attuned to how retail ruins create the conditions of possibility for de-commodification and post-capitalist futures.