ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to think critically about attempts to remodel and recast city spaces with the type of widescale public–private initiative which has become a characteristic feature of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century urban redevelopment. In Liverpool this initiative is hinged around the assumption of the city’s role as European City of Culture in 2008. The perspective I adopt has been informed by a consideration of one of those anomalous spaces, those derelict and abandoned, or semi-abandoned, sites which have come to be seen as modern “ruins” and which seem to “blight the landscape” of the contemporary city. The particular “ruin” which has caught my attention, Liverpool’s Rialto, does not even exist in any palpable form anymore; however, it continues to form a tenuous and strangely ambiguous presence in the landscape. Built in 1927 and destroyed by fire in the Toxteth riots of 1981 the lingering presence of this disappeared space speaks of the past in ways which are both complex and disturbing. This remembered ruin certainly calls into question some of the more bullish and simplistic notions about the city’s possible remodeled future.
