Post Industrial Landscapes

     According to Oxford Languages, the word 'post industrial' can be defined as a place relating to or denoting an economy which no longer relies on heavy industry, or it is somewhere consisting of or incorporating material generated during a manufacturing process (Oxford Languages). Post industrial places may be looked at as a site where service takes place, but in fact it is the opposite; Post industrial sites are the result of industrial economies to which the manufacturing has become outsourced, resulting in abandoned buildings that used to be factories, companies, assisted living residences, etc. (Robinson, 2016). Ruins of an industrial area indicate that there was a failure of industrial production there, and it can tell a historical story about the societal and physical processes that took place (WG & Potter, 2011). Moreover, these buildings become overlooked by the community, and they are usually blocked off from the public; This makes them tricky to access. 

     However, urban explorers have taken the risk to explore and document the history and decay of these ruins. Urban explorers explain that they take this risk because “when you are at risk you are present in a total way. So, risk, then, is a method of living in the ever elusive moment” (WG & Potter, 2011). Urban exploration is a term that was coined in 1996 by a man named Jeff Chapman, or otherwise known as ‘Ninjalicious.” He explains that “urban explorers should follow the naturalist maxim of taking nothing but pictures and leaving nothing but footprints” to discover and recover important historical spaces forgotten by city officials and residents (Fassi, 2010). Urban explorers demonstrate that industrial ruins play a complicated aesthetic and ideological role in the larger picture of deindustrialization (Fassi, 2010). The following images, and stories function as a public unofficial archive of the post industrial ruins of The Cataract Electric Company, St Thomas Psychiatric Hospital, as well as McCormicks Biscuit and Candy factory.