In recent years, many have turned their attention to ruins. This is not surprising considering the ruinous times we live in (Tsing, 2015) and the general sense of dread, outrage, anxiety and many other feelings that come with widespread precarity and ongoing crises. There must be a reason for the popularity of ruins in media culture. As Hell and Schönle (2010: 1) put it: ‘in the era of global media coverage and round-the-clock exposure to visual data, ruins have become ubiquitous’. ‘New ruins’, moreover, are being produced all the time as the result of chaotic and always-accelerating capitalist production, as well as due to the impacts of climate change, war or other ‘unrest’. Recent scholarship views these not as isolated and self-contained sites – somewhere you might visit while on holiday – but instead as complex processes linked with their surroundings, including human and non-human interactions (Stoler, 2013; DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013; Millington, 2013; Cairns and Jacobs, 2014; Göbel, 2014; Dawney, 2020; Pohl, 2022). As such, ruins are ideal for thinking through some recent terms in social theory, for example, ‘new materialism’, ‘affect’ and ‘hauntology’. Contemporary archaeology, as well, opens new approaches to studying these as socio-spatial phenomena (Hill, 2015). Rather than dead spaces of some distant past, ruins are today alive, pulsing through our contemporary worlds in ways that deserve our attention.

This book is about a new kind of ruin, one we are all familiar with: the retail ruin, manifest in ‘dead’ or ‘zombie’ shopping malls, sputtering high streets, vanishing department stores and other scenes of vacancy, abandonment, dereliction and disarray. As shopping landscapes have gained such great importance in contemporary consumer culture, surely the decline and deaths of these spaces qualifies them as ruins of some kind. While Edensor (2005b: 829) positions industrial ruins (factories, warehouses and so on) as an ‘antidote’ to a more commodified and sanitized landscape of the ordered city, retail ruins illuminate in a troubling way how even that landscape, the landscape of spectacle, can fall into ruin (Wark, 2013). The retail ruin stands out for its socio-cultural location.