Contribution short abstract:

The paper examines methodological challenges and opportunities in studying industrial ruins as ruinous postscapes in the city of Zagreb, Croatia. By integrating a multimethodological perspective, the presentation addresses how materiality informs our understanding of ruinous postscapes.

Contribution long abstract:

The paper examines methodological challenges and opportunities in studying industrial ruins as ruinous postscapes in the city of Zagreb, Croatia - spaces where material decay, preservation narratives, everyday experiences, and lifeworlds, along with urban planning and land development, intertwine. By integrating a multimethodological perspective from counter-mapping, walking through, and site-specific ethnography, the presentation addresses how materiality informs our understanding of ruinous postscapes.

The paper focuses on discussing methodologies that engage with sensory and affective dimensions of ruins, such as site-specific ethnography, drawings, photography, and counter-mapping that speak of and for a reimagination of the encountered ruinous postscapes.

Through examples of chosen decommissioned factories and redeveloping industrial sites, this paper highlights how these sites embody contested city-making practices, resilience, and transformation. It points to the importance of developing new conceptual tools to work with the complexity and elusiveness of the postscapes.

Our ethnographic and methodological insights are based on the first year of a research project titled PostCity. They stem from the ethnographic attempt to grasp the meaning of ruinous postscapes, their physical remnants as well as social contexts in which they are intensively reimagined and renegotiated.