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Wasting the City: Guasti, Material Loss, and the Infrastructural Afterlives of Early Modern Destruction
Mon, July 13, 11:00am to 12:30pm, Edinburgh International Conference Centre, Floor: Level 2, Lammermuir 1English Abstract
This paper examines the 1529-30 guasto of Florence-a state-mandated program of demolition that razed over a mile of urban fabric-as a case study in the epistemic and material consequences of loss. While conceived as a military strategy, the guasto functioned as a profound operation of unmaking: monastic complexes were dismantled, artworks displaced, relics scattered, and entire devotional geographies erased. Yet this large-scale act of destruction also generated its own infrastructures of knowledge. The Libro delle Stime, a comprehensive assessment of every building marked for demolition, transformed an episode of disappearance into a granular archive of architectural, social, and material data. This paper argues that the guasto exemplifies how waste can become a mode of documentation, and how destruction can make visible the otherwise invisible systems that sustain urban and religious life. The displaced communities engaged in their own forms of reassembly: salvaging columns, transporting stones across the city, reconstructing familiar porticoes, and translating relics through ritual processions. These acts reveal how absence, ruin, and material redistribution can serve as engines of continuity rather than mere endpoints. By treating demolition as a form of early modern "infrastructural inversion," this paper explores how loss itself becomes a historical source-not only for art and architectural history, but for histories of technoscientific practice concerned with documentation, maintenance, and the politics of what survives. The Florentine guasto, l argue, offers a model for understanding how disappearance, ruin, and displacement generate new forms of knowledge, challenging linear narratives of progress and foregrounding ephemerality as a constitutive feature of historical inquiry.