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Senses & Society VOLUME 2, ISSUE 2

PP 217–232

Sensing the Ruin

Tim Edensor

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,

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.

T.Edensor@mmu.ac.ukS

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+

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 fi rst 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 commodifi cation

of space that have minimized the early modern fl ux 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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Sensing the Ruin

smellscapes and scenes. Without echoing dystopian accounts

of a postmodern condition which assert that the proliferation of

empty, free-fl oating 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 infl uence 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 typifi ed 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 fl oors, clutter and dirt are

eradicated and evident routes are maintained. The seamlessness of

linear movement and the even surfaces of polished fl oors 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 refl exive

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 fi nely 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 infl uenced by modes and styles

of movement. Richard Sennett (1994: 15) argues that urban space

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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 typifi ed 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 satisfi ed 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 commodifi ed, 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,

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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

artifi cial 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 insuffi cient, 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).

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

Figure 1

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Sensing the Ruin

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 briefl y

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 fi xtures and

classifi ed things, in the ruin there are numerous objects and forms

of matter that the eye cannot identify, that appear unclassifi able,

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 fi xtures released from their usual confi ne-

ment 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

Figure 2

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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 differ-

ences, 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 confi rming their offi cial 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 amplifi ed, because to walk through large abandoned chambers,

often clothed in vegetation, foregrounds awareness of relative urban

silence. As Tonkiss claims,

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 con stit-

uted 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, traffi c 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

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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, fl urries 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 epi-

stemologies. 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 char acteristics,

which can then invade the body as perceptual experience.

(1994: 6)

While such processes of spatial interaction are never merely “natural,”

since all human action and apprehension is enmeshed within learnt

Figure 3

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Tim Edensor

cultural, practical techniques and conventions, particular physical

phenomena impact upon people and infl uence 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

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Sensing the Ruin

Figure 5

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 fi rst 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 fl ooring and the stability of precarious overhead roofi ng.

Might it be susceptible to collapse? Might the spreading fi lm 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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Tim Edensor

It is not a world of silken sheen or velvety textures, polished surfaces,

ceaselessly swept fl ooring or plush carpeting. Instead, it contains

the rough, splintery texture of a wooden workbench or fl oorboards,

crunchy shards of glass on concrete fl ooring, 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

landfi ll 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 fl ood 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 fi lled 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

Figure 6

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Sensing the Ruin

light fi tment in the wind may cause a sharp fright, and fi ngers 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, fi lth is a category which, although it has

Figure 7

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Tim Edensor

revolted has simultaneously fascinated, and here, there remains the

possibility to get pleasurably fi lthy in a fashion reserved for labourers

and children.

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 modifi ed 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 defi cit 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 purifi ed 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 fi xity.

References

Bauman, Zygmunt. 1994. “Desert Spectacular.” In Keith Tester (ed.),

The Flâneur. London: Routledge.

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Berman, Marshall. 1982. All That is Solid Melts into Air. London:

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