(Marc Augé, Le Temps en Ruines)
This paper-dialogue approaches Bradford and Athens as examples that complicate widespread understandings of what constitutes Europe’s centre and margins.
Bradford was the capital of the world’s wool trade during the industrial revolution, but is today best known for the 1996 and 2001 riots, seen by the media as results of general urban deprivation and racial tensions. A large section of the downtown area was demolished in 2006 to make way for a new Westfield shopping mall, set to open in 2008. Construction, however, was never commenced. Today the site is a crater surrounded by hoardings, with only one small section in use, transformed into a temporary 'urban garden' by way of some lawns and benches. Bradford has thus hosted a derelict plot for over seven years, causing considerable economic damage for an already troubled landscape. Fading posters on hoardings along the edges of the development site offer a preview of the completed project, and prophecy the city's 'urban energy' and 'café culture'. I consider the performances of this site in terms of a cultural urban history and narratives of culturally led regeneration; the 'mothballed', frozen building project, and the largely unused city centre surrounding it, serves as a stark image of the most recent boom and bust cycle, and of a particular set of relationships between local and national government and international business. I discuss the site as host for narratives about cultural regeneration, but also as the sterile site for a protest by the far-right group the English Defence League during their 2010 visit to the city.
After 2004, the abandoned and derelict venues in Athens discredited the ‘legacy of the Games’ hegemony, exposing the ruins of the failing post-Olympics urban planning. Nonetheless, the city’s historic centre – at the foot of the Acropolis – remained ostensibly vibrant, maintaining the country’s European façade of affluence, until the December 2008 riots exposed its deep cracks, marking a turning point. Today, amid xenophobia in a post-IMF bailout and EU mediation milieu, Athens has transformed from a tourist attraction into a site of struggle. Here, I map performances in landmark locations, stages of unrest: the Exarheia square, the Syntagma square and the gradually deserted streets between the two squares, to propose that Athens’ historic centre is a gaping hole in the Europeanization and modernization narratives that dominated post-1974 Greek politics.
In dialogue, we are asking questions about the built, the unbuilt and the ruined environment, where contemporary European identities are staged, while negotiating what figures as ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ Europe against such a backdrop. We consider how our respective hometowns offer an arena of spectacular failure of urban regeneration, cultural development and most significantly, of such cornerstones of post-Enlightenment European utopias as freedom and tolerance. In doing so, our paper attempts a methodology for mediating urban performances in an intercultural framework, in the present context of Europe in crisis and in ruins.
