Introduction: Contemporary Archaeology and the City: Creativity, Ruination, and Political Action

Changes in Detroit’s motor vehicle industries affect counterparts in Tokyo, struggling financial sectors in Athens rattle the economy of Dublin, construction booms in Vancouver stimulate investments by Hong Kong speculators, uprisings by Berlin artists against ‘creative’ redevelopment projects inspire protests by graffiti artists in Mexico City, and inadequate water supplies in greater Los Angeles limit the availability of imported foodstuffs for consumers in Delhi. The contemporary city is essentially an (post-)industrial, modern, and interconnected place where capitalist accumulation, growth, and decline often operate simultaneously, are experienced locally, and resonate globally leaving material traces on urban and associated hinterland landscapes. With the majority of the world’s population now dwelling in cities, historical and future-oriented urban identities face global challenges associated with the logistics and inequalities of deindustrialization. The fast pace of change in cities, as well as the tremendous scale of urban landscapes and the complexities of personal interactions with them, poses an unrivalled challenge to archaeologists whose work begins with contemporary remains. Contemporary Archaeology and the City foregrounds the archaeological study of (post-) industrial and other urban transformations through a diverse, international collection of case studies on present-day cities. The deep historical roots of citizenship in contemporary cities directly affect how communities craft notions of belonging within urban ecologies in the present. For example, the former industrial stronghold of East Belfast has experienced decades-long post-industrial economic decline alongside longstanding sectarian tensions. However, the arrival of new immigrant populations have shifted loyalist narratives in working class neighbor hoods from an identity defined by a self-conceived progressive ethos to one that asserts exclusionary material boundaries around an increasingly inward-looking, defensive community (McAtackney, Chapter 9). Meanwhile, Detroit’s built environment and cultural heritage suffer at the hands of an ongoing, decadeslong social disaster perpetuated by a constellation of political corruption, economic mismanagement, and legacies of racial conflicts. While the media perpetuates inaccurate portrayals of Detroit and other comparable cities as landscapes of abandonment, where people and built environments are increasingly absent, the contributors to this volume adopt a more nuanced approach. They envisage post-industrial cities as variably inhabited places and emergent ecologies—hybrid metropolises that expand and contract over the course of multi-generational life cycles—places that are complicated by conceptual divisions between city and nature, industry and creativity, sustainability and profitability (Millington 2013: 279; Ryzewski 2016; see Ryzewski, Chapter 3).