Petrified ruin: Chernobyl, Pripyat and the death of the city

Abstract

This paper offers a reading of urban ruin through a personal experience: a visit I made to the Chernobyl site in October 2007—first to the destroyed reactor and then to the ruined buildings of Pripyat, using my own photographs as documents. The paper situates this experience in the context of wider representations of technological ruin and the city. Pripyat may not be a city, let alone a metropolis, but its scale as a ruin is unique in the post‐war period. In the West, the ruined city usually only presents itself in fictive representations: that is, in literature and film and not in the flesh, so to speak. Experiencing the ruins of Pripyat may invite thoughts about the value, or otherwise, of industrial ruin; its unprecedented scale invites an altogether different meditation on the ruin of the city as a whole and perhaps, too, of civilisation itself.

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