Chapter 8
Making good again
Back in 1989, a prominent campaigner against the motor car wrote a letter to the professional magazine then read by most British landscape architects and students. His purpose was to complain about landscape architects working on road proposals, but he smeared the whole discipline when he described landscape architecture as ‘the Nightsoil Profession’ and said that it specialized in clearing up the messes made by others, rather than preventing them from being created in the first place. Living and working for most of my life in the north-east of England, never far from the coaly river Tyne, I have seen a lot of the mess that industry can make, but I think the task of clearing it away is a noble one. When the environmental artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles (1939–) began her long spell as artist-in-residence with the New York City Sanitation Department, one of her first public acts was to shake the hand of every refuse collector and thank them for the vital work they did for society. This sort of work is often invisible and poorly remunerated. Ukeles was suggesting it should be re-evaluated. Landscape architects and reclamation engineers deserve similar thanks. When the writer J. B. Priestley visited the north-east of England in 1933, which was then in the depths of an economic depression, he wrote ‘I never saw a bit of country that was in more urgent need of tidying up.’ A visitor today would have difficulty in spotting a single coal tip, while large stretches of the banks of the once industrial Tyne are verdant with grass and trees. Landscape architects have played an important, though often unsung, role in this transformation, but this is not a merely local phenomenon; they are doing the same for post-industrial landscapes all around the world.
What’s in a metaphor?
Land reclamation is virtuous work, and many landscape architects of my acquaintance say that it is this aspect of their occupation that has given them the most satisfaction, but this does not exempt it from criticism. One line of attack is to say that it is merely a cosmetic exercise, like sweeping dirt under the carpet. This has some force, because when dealing with dirty sites one of the problems is the disposal of toxins. If soil is contaminated, it makes little sense to take it elsewhere; it needs to be dealt with on the site. If nothing can be done to reduce toxicity, the remedy is to push it to a remote part of the site, to encase it in an impermeable clay covering, then to spread soil and sow grass over the top. This does, indeed, resemble a poor housekeeping practice and it often means that the part of the site which becomes the ‘hot spot’ can never be built over or dug into. Nevertheless, it was often the best available solution, given the technologies that were available. It may be that developments in phytoremediation (the use of plants to neutralize toxins) and nanotechnology can provide effective and permanent ways of dealing with site contamination. Ironically, Geoffrey Jellicoe’s dismissal of ‘seemliness’ as a sufficient objective (contained in his speech to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1961, which perhaps accounts for its thrust) was made at just about the time that the major programmes of land reclamation got into their stride. The decline of heavy industry and manufacturing in many Western countries has ensured a steady stream of commissions. In times of economic turmoil, derelict sites are often created more quickly than they can be reclaimed. This work is necessary and it seems injudicious to denigrate it as mere tidying up or the pursuit of meagre seemliness. Contemporary landscape architecture is, in many ways, opposed to the merely scenographic. Other metaphors might be used. It is commonplace now to talk about ‘recycling’ derelict (brownfield) land, linking the practice to good environmental management. The re-use of brownfield sites, for housing for example, can provide alternatives to development on farmland which contributes to urban sprawl. Or we could employ the language of healing, with the landscape architects and engineers cast as the surgical team called in to treat the wounds and scars inflicted on the landscape by industry. We might also invoke the image of the fine art restorer, repairing the damage done over years to an old masterpiece. This is certainly one way of seeing the applied science of restoration ecology, which is often brought into reclamation projects, the aim being to recreate the sorts of habitats that would have existed prior to disruption by industry.
Boxes 3, 4, and 5 provide examples of this kind of work.
Box 3 Turning the tide: the Durham coast, UK (1997–2003)
For 150 years coal waste was dumped on the beaches of the Durham coast. At its zenith the coal industry tipped 2.5 million tonnes of waste each year, amounting to 40 million tonnes of waste over its period of operation. The county’s infamous black beaches provided bleak backdrops for the films Get Carter and Alien 3, but when the pit at Easington closed in 1993 it marked the end of a grimy era and the way was at last clear to tackle the appalling environmental damage that mining had caused.
In 1997 the £10 million Turning the Tide project, a partnership of 14 organizations, began to grapple with what must have seemed a Herculean task. Two large spoil heaps at Easington and Horden were removed, to prevent the material they contained from being washed out by the tides to become a pollution hazard on the nearby beaches. The mechanical apparatus and concrete towers were also demolished. Coastal footpaths were improved, cycle paths created, and new limestone grassland established on cliff tops and headlands. The aim was to recreate the sort of landscape character that would have existed prior to the industrialization of the coast. In this the project was so successful that it was recognized as UK Landscape of the Year in November 2010 and runner up in the Council of Europe Landscape Award 2011.
Box 4 Bundesgardenshauen, garden festivals, and expos
There is a category of events which recognizes that the reclamation of derelict land is a cause for celebration. Germany led the way in this by reviving the tradition of the national garden show in 1951. The Bundesgartenshau was held every two years in a different city and this became a mechanism for treating war-damaged sites. After a Bundesgartenshau, the exhibition landscape would be converted into a permanent piece of public parkland. The first of these events was held in Hannover and, at the time of writing, the programme is set to continue with shows in the Havel region in 2015, the old Tempelhof Airfield in Berlin in 2017, and in Heilbronn in 2019.
The British government experimented with a version of the Bundesgartenshau between 1984 and 1992; the first National Garden Festival was created on a former dockland site in Liverpool, and others followed at two-year intervals in Stoke-on-Trent, Glasgow, and Gateshead, with the last taking place on the site of a former steelworks in Ebbw Vale in Wales in 1992. The aim was not just to create parkland but to attract inward investment. The landscape design was often compromised by political interference and confusion about objectives, but the festivals attracted millions of visitors and accelerated the pace of land reclamation, if not always economic regeneration, in places which needed a boost. A similar pattern is found at Expos and other major international events. For example, the site of Expo 2010 Shanghai was held on both banks of the Huangpu River and included a 14 hectare site previously occupied by a steelworks and a shipyard. The design went beyond a mere clean-up. By incorporating a constructed wetland and ecological flood control measures, the designers from the Chinese office Turenscape were able to use plants to absorb pollutants from river water and this water was then used throughout the Expo for non-potable purposes.
Box 5 Crissy Field, San Francisco, USA (1997–2001)
This is different from the sites mentioned so far, in that its former use was military rather than industrial. It had been an airfield constructed upon a tidal marshland on the northern waterfront of San Francisco’s Presidio, a 647 hectare military complex abandoned in 1994. Its soils and groundwater were seriously contaminated by aviation fuels, pesticides, and solvents used for cleaning aircraft.
The initial clean-up, undertaken by the army, involved the excavation of severely contaminated soils which were incinerated off site and replaced with native soils from elsewhere in the Presidio. Less contaminated soils were heated in a mobile kiln in a process called ‘low temperature thermal desorbtion’, which extracted organic contaminants and left the resulting dust clean enough to be interred on site.
Landscape architects Hargreaves Associates were commissioned by the National Parks Service to provide a plan which responded to the natural and cultural history of the place. Sculptural landforms which mimic and amplify the effects of wind and wave action were created on an otherwise flat site. The design included the restoration of tidal wetlands where birdwatchers have subsequently sighted 135 species. There is a beach, which is popular with windsurfers, and the site provides stunning views of Golden Gate Bridge.
Manufactured sites
Professor Niall Kirkwood of Harvard Graduate School of Design used the term ‘manufactured sites’ as the title for a book about approaches to land reclamation. The title was a kind of pun; not only were the sort of sites he described found in older manufacturing districts, but the sites themselves had been manufactured as accidental by-products of industrial activity. They owed their present character to this history. What is more, to turn them into something of benefit to society, they had to be remade. In some cases the very materials used to do this, for example clean soils, would have to be manufactured on the site. Reclamation is typically the field in which two different sorts of expert must work together. On one side are the site designers (landscape architects, planners, urban designers) while on the other are the civil and environmental engineers. We might expand this second group to include environmental scientists and ecologists. No single specialist can solve all the problems involved in bringing a contaminated brownfield site back into beneficial use. Landscape architects have often demonstrated that as generalists and synthesizers they are the most effective orchestrators of this collaborative enterprise.
The problems encountered on such sites can be daunting. Toxicity is the most troubling but may be the least obvious. Contaminants such as heavy metals, oils, and chemical residues can be invisible to the naked eye. Workers on the most seriously contaminated sites must wear protective clothing to prevent skin contact with toxic substances. Sometimes there is value in the materials found on the site; for example a technique known as coal-washing can be used to recover saleable coal from mine wastes, often contributing significantly towards the costs of the clean-up. Mechanical ways of dealing with contaminated soils are being supplemented by biological techniques. Some plants, referred to as phreatophytes, take up large quantities of water and have been found useful in treating groundwater pollution. A study at a former gasoline transfer terminal at Ogden, Utah, for example, showed that poplar trees could inhibit the flow of groundwater and enhance petroleum degradation, effectively preventing contaminants from leaving the site. Plants known as hyperaccumulators (Indian mustard and sunflowers are examples from the United States) have been used to absorb heavy metal pollution from toxic sites. It is sometimes even possible to harvest the plants and reclaim the minerals. Phytoremediation would seem to be one of the most promising techniques for reclaiming land, and, at face value, it seems gentle and environmentally friendly, but much research remains to be done. For example, if the contaminants are not harvested, what are the ecological consequences of the contaminated plants entering the food chain? These matters are complex and require multi-disciplinary investigation.
Completed landfills are a category of site which often requires the attention of a landscape architect. Landfills are the places where society entombs its refuse, often encasing it in an impermeable casing of clay or plastic. Landfills which include organic matter produce the greenhouse gasses carbon dioxide and methane, and the latter is highly flammable. Housing development is not usually permitted on gas-producing landfills, not simply because of the risk of fire from the methane but because of the risk of subsidence from the settlement of materials within the dump. As a result, many landfills are recycled as public open space, but they bring with them particular problems. It used to be thought, for example, that tree planting over clay-capped landfills was a problem because tree roots might penetrate the seal, although more recent research suggests that this is not such an issue. Leaking methane gas can, however, impede the growth of trees.
Despite these obstacles, there is a tradition of landfills being turned into parks. The first in the United States was the ironically named Mount Trashmore in Virginia Beach, VA (opened 1973), a 68 foot (20.7 metre) artificial hill, constructed by sandwiching layers of clean rubbish between layers of soil, producing a place which is still popular with families and kite-flyers. Byxbee Park, created in the late 1980s on a small section of the Palo Alto city dump in California, is another celebrated example. Landscape architects Hargreaves Associates collaborated with the artists Peter Oppenheimer and Peter Richards to create a landscape which, in subtle ways, acknowledges the 60 feet of refuse upon which it is built. The windy, coastal park, not far from the city airport, has no trees because of the anxiety over root penetration. The flare which burns off excess methane from the tip was incorporated into the design, which also includes a forest of half buried telegraph poles. These were planted straight, but over time they will tilt as the garbage settles beneath them. A chevron earthwork is a sort of visual joke. On an aeronautical map chevrons mean ‘don’t land here’—and aeroplanes don’t, but in winter large numbers of geese settle briefly on their way to southern warmth.
Keeping the heritage
Critics of land reclamation sometimes point out that it can destroy local heritage. Writing about the erasure of traces of coal mining from the Dearne Valley in South Yorkshire, the ecologist and priest John Rodwell wrote that in the case of a human individual we would ‘regard memory-loss as a pathology worthy of concern’. People can be uprooted, even if they do not move. If the rapid industrialization of land is regarded as a trauma, and the sudden closure of industries that may have sustained communities for generations is another, then perhaps hasty reclamation is yet another. It does not have to be, however. A project in the 1970s by American landscape architect Richard Haag (1923–) pioneered a different approach. He convinced the city of Seattle, which was setting about the reclamation of a former gasworks on the north shore of Lake Union that the rusting relics of the old gasification plant did not have to be removed. Instead these imposing pieces of industrial history were retained as a central feature of what became Gas Works Park. His example was not much copied until the German Latz + Partner began a similar practice in the post-industrial landscapes of Saarbrucken and the Ruhr Valley. Their best known work is the former steelworks now known as Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord, where the gently corroding furnaces have been kept, gardens have been planted in old ore bunkers and a diving club makes use of a disused gasometer, where an artificial reef and a wrecked motor yacht now add interest to the underwater landscape (Figure 9).
9. In the 1990s the German landscape architecture office Latz + Partner turned a former steelworks in the Ruhr valley into the much celebrated Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord
In Germany, this recycling of sites has almost become the mainstream approach and there are numerous examples of landscape architects conserving rather than erasing industrial heritage. Planergruppe Oberhausen, another landscape architecture practice active in the Ruhr-Emscher region, has been working on the Zollverein coal mine and coking plant. The mine, with buildings designed by Modern Movement architects, was known as ‘the most beautiful colliery in the world’. After closure in 1986, it was threatened with demolition, but a campaign led to its listing as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2001, and 50 million Euros of public money were committed to its transformation. The eminent Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas was engaged to masterplan the site and to convert the former coal-washing building into the Ruhrland Museum. Agence Ter, a French landscape practice, was also involved in developing the open space design. Landscape architects, working in collaboration with other designers and artists, and in a participatory way with local schoolchildren, have focused upon the park, designed the paths and cycle-ways in the park around existing features including the harp-shaped system of railway sidings. The gigantic industrial complex remains, but it is softened by the groves of birches and willows that have colonized the spaces between the buildings. The designers have developed a promenade around the former industrial buildings with solar-powered accent lighting to enliven the scene in the evenings and the artist Ulrich Rückriem, celebrated for his monumental granite pieces, has established a sculpture park within the post-industrial forest.