From Ruins to Commons: Following Dirty Metabolisms in the Transitioning City

Doctoral Research by Kristina Shatokhina

In the wake of the Capitalocene, our planetary systems are continuously altered by industrial extraction, exhaustion, and creative destruction. Amid sustainability discourse oscillating between technocratic utopias and apocalyptic collapse, ruin finds itself, inevitably, at the centre of architectural enquiry. This doctoral thesis intervenes in critical heritage studies, feminist urban theory, and post-industrial regeneration with its focus on ruins not as failures, but as generative sites of knowledge.

The project is rooted in Esch-sur-Alzette — long branded Luxembourg’s dirty south, a post-industrial mining town. While Luxembourg’s planning imaginary celebrates transition and innovation, thinking with Esch exposes the frictions beneath: contaminated soils that resist closure, uneven geographies of industrial decline and new investment, and the symbolic weight of a city historically cast as excessive, foreign, or morally suspect.

In this context, dirt becomes a material and conceptual guide, revealing how the urban body absorbs, expels, and negotiates its excesses, and how boundaries between care and neglect, health and contamination, are continually negotiated. While post-industrial regeneration in Luxembourg is widely studied through planning and economic restructuring, far less attention is given to the affective and material politics of contamination, waste, and decay — the very registers where dirt operates.

Seen through this lens, the fate of ruins in Esch follows at a divergence. Vast ARBED sites such as Belval, Metzeschmelz and Terres Rouges are channelled into sanitised, largely demolished, investor-driven innovation districts — scraped clean, contained, arrested for futurity. Yet at smaller scales, scattered fragments — slaughterhouses, workshops, minor industrial leftovers — taken up since the 1980s by artists and collectives (e.g. Kulturfabrik), have leaked into cultural life, and allowed to ferment into alternative infrastructures. These sites do not illustrate difference in programme so much as difference in material metabolism; where some ruins are purified, others are allowed to “rot productively”.

Through archival research, fieldwork, and material-discursive analysis, the project examines how regeneration disciplines the city’s unruly flesh. In response, it aims to develop a ruin-attentive architectural ethic: embracing breakdown, valuing impurity, and cultivating multi-species cohabitation that grows from the damp, the corroded, the unresolved.

Doctoral Student: Kristina Shatokhina
Thesis Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Markus Miessen
Supervision Committee: Dr. Marija Maric and Prof. Hélène Frichot