Retail Ruins: The Ghosts of Post-industrial Spectacle

From zombie malls to declining high streets, the urban consumption landscape is experiencing a new and emerging kind of post-industrial ruin. While there is a growing body of research on the place of industrial ruins in the post-industrial city, this book explores the urban space familiar to many of us today - the retail ruin. Jacob C. Miller bridges human geography, archaeology and critical urban studies to offer a starting point for conceptualizing retail ruins. Drawing on fieldnotes and photographs, Miller crafts a hauntological approach informed by the theories of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida to more recent thinking on assemblage, spectacle and the politics of urban space.