A Reality of Rurality

Since the 1950s, the rur­al pop­u­la­tion in Den­mark are aban­don­ing their home vil­lages and mov­ing into the cities. This is part of a glob­al ten­den­cy, in Den­mark caused by a decline in food pro­duc­tion and the attached indus­tries. As a con­se­quence, the social imbal­ance between urban and rur­al is grow­ing and reflect­ed in the mar­ket val­ue of prop­er­ty. Espe­cial­ly the rur­al built envi­ron­ment of every­day life suf­fers, as the homes of the remain­ing rur­al pop­u­la­tion increas­ing­ly become unsaleable and lat­er aban­doned. There­fore, aban­doned build­ings in var­i­ous states of repair have become a com­mon sight in the Dan­ish rur­al vil­lages. Ruins have in oth­er word become an inevitable con­di­tion of Dan­ish rur­al.
The ques­tion is whether cur­rent large-scale strate­gic demo­li­tion projects, ini­ti­at­ed by the gov­ern­ment to counter the ruinous vil­lages, are the best pos­si­ble way to react to the grow­ing num­bers of rur­al ruins and if not, what is the alternative?
This was explored through a series of preser­va­tion exper­i­ments, under­tak­en as research by design, of which two: ​“The con­trolled ruin” and ​“The con­fec­tionary” are out­lined and elab­o­rat­ed on in the fol­low­ing2. These two Exper­i­ments have a tem­po­rary approach to preser­va­tion in com­mon, in which the pre­served object, here the aban­doned build­ing, under­goes con­tin­u­ous alter­ations sub­se­quent to the ini­ti­at­ing trans­for­ma­tive inter­ven­tion. They also share the pre­con­di­tions of being based on sub­trac­tive archi­tec­tur­al inter­ven­tions not unlike mech­a­nisms in decay, engage­ment of the local com­mu­ni­ty, and final­ly the con­cept of form­ing a cat­a­lyst, linked to a spe­cif­ic place, for exchange of local place mem­o­ry3. Despite their sim­i­lar­i­ties, the exper­i­ments dif­fer in their times­pan. Hence, ​“The con­trolled ruin” was ini­ti­at­ed in 2014 as a long-term preser­va­tion strat­e­gy and is still active. Con­verse­ly, the ​“The con­fec­tionary”, ini­ti­at­ed in 2016, explored an event-based short-term preser­va­tion strat­e­gy and was delib­er­ate­ly demol­ished com­plete­ly after a two-month period.
The fol­low­ing out­lines how these exper­i­men­tal inter­ven­tions were imple­ment­ed and describes the respons­es and atti­tudes they gave rise to with­in the local com­mu­ni­ties. Fur­ther, notions of and atti­tudes towards ruins through­out his­to­ry, in the­o­ry and prac­tice, frame the two inter­ven­tions enabling a dis­cus­sion on pos­si­ble new direc­tions in (rad­i­cal) preser­va­tion of the rur­al built environment.