IN-PERSON ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

This paper examines the ‘Bizarre Building’ in Shenzhen, China, as a case of un-heritagised ruination: a solitary abandoned dwelling that has stood for decades within an urban demolition zone, excluded from official narratives of heritage, urban development, and cultural memory. Due to its unusually complex construction and spatial configuration, the building has remained neither demolished nor reused; instead, it occupies a suspended position between stalled urban planning and unrealised personal aspiration, offering a material record of interrupted futures within China’s accelerated urbanisation. Drawing on site-based investigation, sensory autoethnography, and visual documentation, the study demonstrates how embodied experience enables a speculative reading of the building as an archive of unformed futures. It highlights how heat, humidity, texture, darkness, and sound – encountered through urban exploration – activate alternative modes of understanding architectural remains beyond their historical or utilitarian value. These affective records reveal how abandoned structures capture the tensions between state planning, local imaginaries, and the urban politics of memory and forgetting. By positioning urban exploration as a method of urban inquiry, the study argues that such neglected ruins offer critical insight into how cities remember, erase, or defer their own futures. The Bizarre Building exemplifies how un-heritagised sites can function as speculative infrastructures, through which disrupted geopolitical, social, and temporal orders are not only registered but become newly legible as contested spatial narratives.