“Refusing the false securities of a stable and linear past, such an approach celebrates heterogeneous sensations and surprising associations, random connections, the ongoing construction of meaning and also admits into its orbit the mysterious agency of artifacts, space and non-humans from the past.”
― Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality, 2005

Maintenance and repair are essential for the reproduction of lived space in order to ensure consistency and reliability. In the presentation below from 2016, Dr Edensor explores the multiple practices through which things, buildings and places are reordered, highlight changing approaches to maintenance, and foreground how particular procedures change and shift their focus towards different objects. Edensor concludes by underlining how such practices generate attention to and agreement on what is worth preserving and what can be left to decay.

Tim Edensor teaches cultural geography at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (2005), as well as the editor of Geographies of Rhythm (2010). Tim has written extensively on national identity, tourism, industrial ruins, darkness and light, cycling and walking, and urban materiality.