Ruins of an industrial area indicate that there was a “failure of industrial production in an area” (WG & Potter, 2011) which can tell a story about the societal processes that took place there and failed.
Urban exploration is the practice of discovering, “infiltrating, and documenting little-seen parts of the built environment” and “the term was coined in 1996 in the urban explorer fanzine” (Fassi, 2010). Ruins of an industrial area indicate that there was a “failure of industrial production in an area” (WG & Potter, 2011) which can tell a story about the societal processes that took place there and failed. Industrial ruins provide urban explorers with “a revealed secret story of what is happening now” (WG & Potter, 2011) which is a subtext of urban exploration. Writer of a journal article, Anthony J. Fassi suggests that “[e]xpressions of the technological sublime are phenomena that have both ‘awed the public” and “attracted maximum national attention”” (Fassi, 2010). For example, I had visited an abandoned home where I had found toys (Figure 2), clothes, pictures, broken records (Figure 3), canned food, etc.
The house was essentially intact until it was burned down by youth around 2017 (Figure 4). This raised the question why did they leave? Well, they probably had to leave because “the [families] demanded a higher standard of living,” and this was called “neoliberalism [which] allowed industry to simply ‘up sticks’ and go somewhere else,” (WG & Potter, 2011) and the people within the community must follow.
In contrast, this home and other industrial ruins are “overlooked spaces that history threatens to forget” (Fassi, 2010). Urban and rural exploration is important because the explorers document the imagery and historical processes of industrial ruins and decay to unveil the importance of the pieces and places that are forgotten which is evident at most exploration sites.