Publisher's Synopsis
"This collection of essays expands upon an emerging topic within and beyond the field of communication studies that challenges students and scholars of the built environment to peer beyond the somewhat typical collection of monuments, museums, and memories often found in essays related to space and place, to consider the role of ruins as lenses upon modernity. These locales, which include economic ghost towns, industrial relics, prison sites, and other places associated with so-called dark tourism generally conjure feelings of melancholy, connotations of failure. While their assemblages of moldy floors, waterlogged walls, shattered windows, and sagging roofs do not make for traditional tourist snapshots, ruins possess a potential to inspire awe, an awareness of the tenuous nature of modern confidence, a reverence for the passing of things. In their inquiry and investigation, one may encounter oddly sublime traces and fragments of the co
