ABSTRACT
“Ruin porn” is the term everyone has heard, and the one that calls to mind well-known colossal wrecks like the abandoned Packard plant in Detroit. But the many functions of ruin porn suggest a broader array of topics — virtue porn, poverty porn and decay porn — that encompass the relationship between perceptions of urban decay and the public reporting of poverty and its related issues. These are primarily questions of licensing: how power and privilege delegate themselves to speak on behalf of poverty — in particular, the public imagination of the city as the agentless Other. The rebirth of a long-derelict landmark rail station may be celebrated with a parade of luminaries on the front page, but the fate of the bus station is fought out on the inside pages; virtue porn, like ruin porn, raises questions of who acts and who is allowed to act in the name of the helpless referent object.
