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Paper Short Abstract:

The paper explores how the ruined urban infrastructure of Mariupol is used by various groups of locals and Russians to construct new political futures while integrating the recent past of the city in a coherent temporal order of personal histories.

Paper Abstract:

In the spring of 2022, ninety percent of Mariupol’s built environment was destroyed by the Russian armed forces. Since then, the ruined urban infrastructure of the city has become a powerful tool in the hands of different actors to pursue their political agenda and tell their own story of the war. Ukrainian narratives repeatedly evoke images of destruction to remind the world to the extent of war crimes and human rights abuses committed by Russia. In Russian narratives, the ruins become a device of much more diverse and twisted agendas: a destination for urbex photographers, catastrophe tourists and adventurers with fantasies of a new Russian settler colonialism; a lucrative business opportunity for real estate developers in the “seaside capital of the Donbas People’s Republic”; and most importantly, the ground zero for propagandists to demonstrate the success of “Russian rebuilding”. In the meantime, people living in the occupied city express varying sentiments on social media regarding the destroyed urban spaces, ranging from desperation to manic enthusiasm about the reconstruction. Following these debates on the ruins of Mariupol, my paper will explore how material remnants of wartime destitution become a fundamental element in reordering temporal horizons after a war. While Russia is using the rebuilding process to construct an alternative political future in the occupied city through building materials and propaganda images, local residents turn to the ruins in order to reintegrate their lived experience of war and the following period of occupation in a coherent temporal framework.