Industrial Ruins and What Psychogeography DOES

I've been reading Tim Edensor's 'Industrial Ruins' and taking my daily-government-allowed-walk past this, the site (apparently) of a new private hospital next to the River Stour and the Stourbridge canal. Straight away, I liked the positioning (or is it the juxtapositioning?) of the old glassworks with the new hospital. Here's a closer look at the new hospital:

And the old glassworks:

Edensor says this: 'The objects happened across in ruins are in some ways comparable to the artefacts which Walter Benjamin was attracted to in the fading arcades of pre-war Paris. Mingling with each other promiscuously, for Benjamin these evoked the desolation of the leftover commodity, now stranded from the recent, but seemingly far-distant past, discarded and outdated. Such was the speed of product innovation and the rapid changing of notions about what was deemed fashionable in that era, the no longer modish seemed suddenly archaic, surpassed by the latest new thing. Such objects drew attention to the unprecedented material destruction resulting from an advancing modern capitalism, which produced an accumulating pile of debris that relentlessly built up as manufacturers sought for ever-new technologies of production, and produced an endless stream of new items. In Benjamin’s night-marish vision, traces of the past are successively wiped out or consigned to a massive pile of the irrelevant, as part of a morbid cycle of ‘repetition, novelty and death.’ (Buck-Morss, 1991: 97). P100-1 and I was struck by the relevance here. The hospital has taken around six months - probably less than that - to get this far in the build. In the process, there has been some cleaning up of the River Stour using hay bales, which are visible in the picture of the hospital, and which must, surely be some method of flood prevention. The glassworks, on the other hand, is crumbling but is protected as a Grade II listed building. Look at the design of the hospital, surely an example of what is 'deemed fashionable' now. I should add that the hospital is a private one, and destruction of the land that was there could feasibly be considered 'advancing modern capitalism'. The 'accumulating pile of debris' speaks for itself.

Benjamin's 'nightmarish vision' might not be quite the picture here though, since the glassworks remain, protected by the legalities of being a listed building, but Edensor says this: 'The placement of objects into a montage ‘interrupts the context into which it has been inserted’, counteracting the illusion of ordered normality (Buck-Morss, 1989: 67). The assemblages forged in the window display, the museum cabinet, the interior design and the advertisement are part of a ‘conscious principle of construction’, through which utopian wish-images about the reordering of the world are converted into the fetishisation of objects through commodificiation (ibid.:74). These artful montages disguise difference ‘by fusing the elements so artfully that all evidence of incompatibility and contradiction, indeed, all evidence of artifice, is eliminated’ from the display (ibid.)'. P77 And I wonder if this was the planners' idea - to fuse together this brand new private hospital building on the grounds of this albeit old, ruined building which, at any rate, acts as an emblem, or a motif of the Black Country itself. Is it possible that the continued existence of such 'ruins' confirms the identity of the Black Country itself? Edensor refers to Seamon (1979:58-9) who said that there are such behaviours as 'place ballets' engendered by a 'sense of dwelling' (Edensor p80). My question to myself is, if I'm looking at psychogeography in the Black Country and how this might materialise in writing from the region (wherever that 'region' is) should I be actually asking, what is it that psychogeography DOES? According to Edensor, 'Being still and moving through ruins foregrounds an awareness of our embodied relationship with space.' (p92) This is because the industrial ruin is an example of 'The over-regulated character of contemporary urban space. The ruin represents a space outside the Apollonian processes of disciplinary ordering, in which people are surveilled to ensure they enact ‘appropriate’ practices, conventions of performance which are also embodied in habitual behaviour. The sterile stages of the urban, commodified, single-purpose, aesthetically managed urban environments that disguise the excess of meaning and curtail the range of possible activities are in marked contrast to the ruin, barely framed as a functional space and replete with disorder. Whereas the factory was formerly stitched into an ordering network within which it assigned things, people and functions to specific realms and thus ensured the sustenance of spatial demarcations, the continual efforts required to uphold this order are now conspicuous by their absence.' (p95)

I like that: 'conspicuous by their absence' because the disappearance of industrial works (notice I'm not saying 'deindustrialisation' because I think that's something else) is perhaps a vital part of what psychogeography DOES in the Black Country, and the question of whether psychogeography itself is an essential part of what the Black Country IS might be an area I need to examine further