Maintenance and repair are essential for the reproduction of lived space in order to ensure consistency and reliability, besides perpetrating illusions of endurance and disguising the vitality of matter. In this presentation, Dr Edensor will explore the multiple practices through which things, buildings and places are reordered, highlight changing approaches to maintenance, and foreground how particular procedures change and shift their focus towards different objects. It will conclude by underlining how such practices reproduced notions of value, about what is worth preserving and what can be left to decay.
Tim Edensor teaches cultural geography at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of Tourists at the Taj (198), National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2002) and Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (2005), as well as the editor of Geographies of Rhythm (2010) and co-editor of Spaces of Vernacular Creativity (2009). Tim has written extensively on national identity, tourism, industrial ruins, mobilities of driving, darkness and light, cycling and walking, and urban materiality. Minnesota University Press will publish his forthcoming book, Light and Dark, in 2017.