Zoo Renewal: White Flight and the Animal Ghetto by Lisa Uddin (review)

Abstract

than a vision of never-ending reconstruction and newness. In charting these responses to obsolescence, Abramson provides an architectural history of one more approach, too: the strategy today known as sustainability. Indeed, one of Obsolescence’s great contributions is to give sustainability a history. Here, Abramson ties the idea inextricably to the obsolescence paradigm. Obsolescence insisted on the replacement of resources at regular intervals. Sustainability, by contrast, insists on their conservation. Yet in chapter 6 Abramson warns against a simplistic view of their relationship as one of succession, with sustainability replacing obsolescence as a more enlightened theory. To the contrary, he insists on a connection “as much filial as agonistic” (138), with obsolescence persisting as a force in the built environment and sustainability exhibiting many similar attributes and contradictions. Most significant among these is the continued power of capitalism at the core of sustainability. As Abramson explains, sustainability aims to use fewer resources but has nevertheless become a selling point for real estate developers and is often “a privilege of the wealthy” (152). Paradoxically, it has also provided ready justification for new claims of obsolescence, with state-of-the-art sustainable buildings replacing older obsolete ones. Here, Abramson returns to the book’s guiding premise of understanding what the built environment can teach history more broadly. Ultimately, Abramson argues, his story suggests the limitations of “creative destruction” as the explanatory logic of capitalism. Instead, the architectural history of obsolescence shows us “capitalism’s capacity to manage the contradictions of its own development” (137), meaning that demolition and reconstruction of still-young buildings could be very profitable, but so too could the adaptive reuse of postindustrial environments for new purposes, or historic preservation, or new, sustainable design approaches. In other words, he writes, this history shows “the flexibility of capitalism, its capacity . . . to exploit the built environment one way and then the other” (138). In the course of demonstrating that the history of architecture has new insights to offer to the history of capitalism, Abramson crafts an alternative history of the built environment in the twentieth century. By centering obsolescence in that history, he joins discourses that are otherwise easily separated, including those of the vernacular and the avant-garde, the modern and the postmodern, the visionary and the pragmatic, and the aloof and the socially embedded. Across these decades and geographic boundaries, Obsolescence shows that architects, planners, and developers alike were joined in a common pursuit: the need to acknowledge and grapple with the dominant idea that buildings, as soon as they were completed, were already destined to fail. Yet as Abramson explains here, their responses rarely answered that challenge in the same way.