Reykjavík’s abandoned building sites: Heritage of an economic collapse?

The above quote by Nietzsche suggesting a link between strength and parsimony seems utterly out of place now, almost one and a half centuries later. Today it is the societies at the height of their strength that seem the most wasteful. That is certainly true of Iceland: when global credit became readily available at the turn of the millennium, real estate speculators were let loose to recreate Reykjavík in the image of a generic, hypermodern market city. The effects on the Icelandic construction industry were highly visible. A building boom effected rapid change in Reykjavík’s cityscape, where office towers and high-end apartment buildings dominated the programme of urban regeneration. One is reminded of James Joyce’s quote - that ‘a good puzzle would be [to] cross Dublin without passing a pub’ (Joyce 2000: 69); a traveller would have been similarly troubled in trying to traverse Reykjavík during the mid 2000s without passing a building site. But as the bubble burst, most of the housing projects under construction were abandoned. Much like the structures torn down to make room for new development, the luxury high rises had become out of place for a society now on the brink of bankruptcy where many struggled to keep their homes, much less to move into expensive apartment blocks.