Post-industrial Landscape Research Articles

An Alternative Approach to Post-industrial Rejuvenation in Westport Waterfront, Baltimore

In order to prevent the loss of residents, provide job opportunities, attract people of all economic backgrounds, and make efficient use of land resources, this paper explores how to use alternative methods to create an equitable, sustainable and productive communities that contributes to the well-being of the existing communities by reusing the post-industrial property. Furthermore, this article examines how post-industrial landscapes might be designed to link residents and reanimate communities.

Developing a legal framework for energy storage technologies in the U.S: The case of pumped underground storage hydro

The Energy Act of 2020 authorizes $1 billion over five years from 2021 to 2025 to support energy storage development in the United States. In addition, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Orders 841 and 2222 opened the wholesale energy markets for distributed energy resources, including energy storage. The statute and orders pave the way for novel energy storage technologies to participate in electricity markets as the qualifying facilities, thereby expanding opportunities for energy storage development. However, the existing policy, legal, and regulatory regime, including these much-welcomed newcomers, fails to recognize and support the entire spectrum of benefits that some forms of energy storage create. In this paper, we focus on Pumped Underground Storage Hydro (PUSH), a variant of pumped hydro storage (PHS), which currently provides over 90% of the world's energy storage capacity. PUSH operates with the same principle as PHS; however, it is an entirely underground variant of PHS. In addition to becoming competitive in the wholesale electricity market, PUSH facilities can be developed as community infrastructure in the postindustrial landscape, particularly in abandoned underground mines. Given federal energy law and policy development, this paper identifies how communities with abandoned mines, technically feasible for PUSH facilities and operating as municipal-owned utilities or cooperatives, can participate and take advantage of federal legislation. We further look into the implications through the lens of technical, economic, and social aspects of energy justice. We consider energy justice as a conceptual framework that seeks to explain the occurrence of injustice within energy system decisions and outcomes and how policymakers can respond to these injustices. We use it as a conceptual tool for understanding policy formulation and detailing the energy system's missing ethical and justice dimension. We argue that as a technically mature technology, PUSH facilities can act as a potential means to speed up the energy transition in the United States. The federal and state law along with utility market structures are vital in shaping the potential opportunities and barriers for energy storage facilities like PUSH. We show that although it supports PUSH development, there are gaps in the current market structure, specifically in the regulatory framework, when seen through the lens of justice and valuation of just energy services. These gaps limit the realization of utility-scale energy storage technology's potential to fully contribute to a decarbonized energy system that is more resilient and more just than the incumbent system.

Ecological Design Strategies and Theory for Urban Parks in Seoul, 1990s–Present

This study explores the characteristics of and changes in Korean landscape architects’ attitudes toward ecological design strategies and theories over the last three decades. Methodologically, this study includes a literature review and incorporates data from case studies and site visits. It discusses Seoul-specific contexts regarding environmental conditions, urban morphology, administrative agency, and design theory and practice. It redefines ecological parks, expanding their scope using physical and non-physical ecological processes. Considering this redefinition, this study categorizes the five main attitudes of contemporary Korean landscape architects towards ecological design: providing wildlife habitat, constructing aesthetic experiences, the phasing strategy, developing environmental learning programs, and designers’ metaphoric expression. Through these attitudes, this study chronologically explores gradual and constant changes in design strategies and the discourse on ecological design. Specifically, in the 1990s, landscape architects emphasized the representation of ecosystems by constructing wildlife habitats. In the early 2000s, ecological parks were artistically designed as urban parks by reusing post-industrial landscapes. Around the 2010s, landscape architects developed resilient and adaptive design strategies to flexibly respond to uncertain changes in natural and urban ecological circumstances. Since the 2010s, landscape architects have continually expanded the scope of ecology to cover physical, non-physical, urban, and social infrastructures, including public transportation, as well as political, social, and cultural structures and virtual and augmented landscapes. This study can contribute to the field literature while adding a valuable overview of the understudied Korean context.

The Miedzianka Mountain Ore Deposit (Świętokrzyskie Mountains, Poland) as a Site of Historical Mining and Geological Heritage: A Case Study of the Teresa Adit

There are numerous traces of mining activity in the Miedzianka Mountain (Świętokrzyskie Mountains, Poland), because copper and silver ores have been mined in this region since at least the 13th century. The history of scientific research on the Miedzianka Mountain ore deposit spans almost 200 years. Almost 40 minerals have been found: ore minerals of Cu and Fe, and also secondary minerals, including carbonates, sulphates and even very rare arsenates, phosphates and vanadates. Three new minerals have been found, staszicite, lubeckite and miedziankite, but their chemical composition has not been precisely determined and therefore their names have not been approved by the International Mineralogical Association (IMA). The Miedzianka Mountain deposit is an important area on the map of educational activities. It is included in the “Świętokrzyskie Archaeological and Geological Trail” as a site of historical (mining and metallurgy) and natural (geological sciences) heritage. Despite the large potential, none of the underground workings (adits and shafts) are currently available to the public. Our research and exploration of the Teresa adit, which is one of the historical underground complexes of the Miedzianka Mountain, show that this adit displays a wide spectrum of topics in the field of mineralogy, geology and mining history. The Teresa adit, which is a 523 m system of underground corridors, contains 270 m of natural karst caves altered by mining works and is constituted of Upper Devonian limestones, locally cut by cherry shales. In several sites of the adit unique features can be observed, such as: (1) old mining works—galleries carved in the rock back in the 19th century; (2) interesting vein mineralization with secondary-colored copper carbonates and multi-colored calcite veins; (3) mineralization with azurite domination; and (4) karst phenomena (coatings, flowstone, dripstones and stalactites) in a cave part of the adit. The sites with unique features suggest that the Teresa adit is highly suitable to be presented to tourists. That is why we propose seven sites on the underground route that could be the basis for further projects to create a “geotouristic trail” in the Teresa adit. The proposal to make the Teresa adit available to tourists is in line with the tendency to protect the post-industrial landscape associated with former mining activities.

The Future of Post-Industrial Landscapes in East Lisbon: The Braço de Prata Neighbourhood

East Lisbon is being exposed to large-scale urban regeneration processes, where luxury residential projects and mixed-use spatial developments are already underway. Thus, it is a living laboratory for “smart”, “creative” and “green” projects, as well as related urban public space interventions. Braço de Prata is an urban space overlooked by developers, being surrounded by obsolete industrial buildings. Concerning the recent interest in international investments in brownfield regeneration and greenfield developments, it represents an attractive urban terrain as a post-industrial working-class neighbourhood, where “smart” and “green” suggest transforming space so that both new and old residents can live and work together and share public space regardless of analysis on their environmental recognitions. The aim of this paper is to present an empirical evaluation model that examines the possible impacts of environmental negligence through the reorganisation of the physical and social fabric. The analyses focus on dwellers’ moral understanding of their changing environment as site-specific domains to address the unique conditions that affect transiently defined presumptions about the collective needs. Taking an evaluative approach in the Braço de Prata case, this paper demonstrates the specific socio-ecological implications of urban inequality in post-industrial neighbourhoods that could be threatened by new decisions, both through urban planning approaches and instruments.

Preface to special series: Postindustrial landscapes, communities, and heritage

In this final instalment of our special series, we introduce two articles that explore how historical archaeologists co-construct and expand discourse around post-industrial places. Zada Komara’s r...

When We Say Post-Industrial – We Mean Ruins

ABSTRACT This paper examines new-ruins in a post-industrial urban landscape on the example of Łódź, Poland. It analyses which ruins are depicted (industrial vs. domestic) and how they are framed (within the wider urban context or on their own) and interpreted (social and political critiques, local history, and aesthetics). It argues that contrary to the suggestions in the academic literature, these sites are not seen as symbols of failing capitalism but are sites and sources of meditative reflection, akin to the role played by medieval ruins during the nineteenth century. Furthermore, heritage is virtually absent from these discussions because modern ruins are not understood to be part of the industrial heritage by the actors in the post-industrial city.

Materials and Nothingness. Structures and patterns in a post-industrial landscape

Materials and Nothingness. Structures and patterns in a post-industrial landscape

Edgelands of practice: post-industrial landscapes and the conditions of informal spatial appropriation

ABSTRACT Do-It-Yourself urbanism has often been attributed with the capacity to revitalise urban environments in the absence of formal planning activity. However, there is still limited understanding of the ways in which such practices emerge and establish agency within their respective environments. We bring a relational lens to the debate, presenting a framework for identifying how the socio-spatial conditions within the urban landscape enable and constrain citizen-led spatial appropriation. Using a visually oriented, multi-modal approach, the framework is applied to five sites in Glasgow, Scotland, which we conceptualise as Edgelands in a post-industrial city. Findings reveal that informal citizen practices adaptively come into being through a process of negotiation with their social and material context. The paper concludes with policy recommendations for fostering citizen agency in revitalising the post-industrial city and other urban settings that include wastescapes.

Evaluation of the influence of brown coal operation on the landscape shaping and the environment protection

The article concerns the assessment of the new landscape and spatial effects of brown coal mining areas transformation of in the region of the Lower Lusatia in eastern Germany, in the context of the region’s changes taking place after Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA) Fürst-Pückler-Land 2000-2010. IBA Fürst-Pückler-Land functioned in 2000-2010 as the institution responsible for determining the direction of the transformation of Lower Lusatia. A region dominated by the brown coal mining industry, with a declining population and an unimaginably degraded landscape. The assessment, from the perspective of 20 years from the commenced process, raises research questions: in what part the assumed strategic goals were met, one of which was a development towards industrial heritage tourism and is the process initiated earlier perhaps still ongoing? The research method involved the use of planning tools such as: graphic interpretation of the resources of Geoportal.de and Google Earth Pro, analysis of data provided by: Lausitzer and Mitteldeutsche Bergbau-Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH (LMBV) and research trips in the years 2006-2019. Conclusions from the research are formulated through the prism of the European Landscape Convention [1], in which the postulate of treating landscape as an integrated term, consisting not only of natural and cultural elements but also human, is important. This approach provides the basis for establishing the rightness of transformations of post-industrial landscapes in the “pro-tourist” directions ensuring the connectivity of all elements using initiatives in the field of “industrial heritage tourism”. In situ studies have shown that the transformation process has not been completed and is still ongoing, and the assumed effects are still far from expected. Tourism of industrial heritage may be an interesting “combination” of industrial areas in the European service economy. However, given the scale of the impact of the energy industry and its importance for the development of the whole country, its impact on regional restructuring may be limited. At present, care for the environment and its repair are more important in the context of improving living conditions along with the implementation of the postulates of using alternative energy sources. And modern use of the industrial heritage for other economic activities than just tourism can be an important alternative for the development of the region.

Domesticating Detroit: Art Houses, Blight, and the Image of Care

AbstractPublic circulations of politicized visualizations and definitions of blight serve not only to define and police an idealized image of care, but also bolster the state’s valorization of creative interventions that appear to “domesticate” the postindustrial landscape. An image of care of single‐family homes presents an invented morality—one which sets itself as distinct from another manufactured idiom: blight. This duality allows for processes of domestication to be defined, defended, policed, and politicized. Creative interventions on Detroit’s built environment that appear to “domesticate” the postindustrial landscape become valorized by the state and its neoliberal partners (corporate business leaders, philanthropic foundations, and public‐private partnerships), despite artists’ intentions to subvert the power of such interests. So long as blight is conceived of and imagined as the absence of care, instead of being the end result of decisions made, laws passed, and policies enacted, the racial and economic segregation of the 20th century will continue to shape our urban spaces. So long as artistic and creative interventions are conscripted into this image of care as a domestication of blight, social and aesthetic innovators will be instrumentalized in market‐driven regimes of value.

Plant diversity increases in an urban wildland after four decades of unaided vegetation development in a post-industrial site

Abstract Spontaneous plant communities found in abandoned post-industrial landscapes develop in unique conditions which can create novel community assemblages. We examined changes in plant community composition and its relation to soil properties in an urban brownfield more than 40 years following site abandonment to better understand the community’s long-term trajectory. A former railyard and industrial area built on fill material, the study site includes four primary habitat types: grasslands, perennial forb assemblages, shrubland, and early successional forest. Plant species cover was measured in permanent plots in 2008 and 2016/17. In 2008, soil samples were collected and analyzed for a suite of properties. Species richness and Shannon diversity increased across the site from 2008 to 2016 (40 and 48 years post-abandonment) though increases in these parameters were highest in plots with lower metal concentrations. Evenness changed little in this time period. Percent cover of woody species increased in grassland and forb plots while percent cover of vines increased across all habitat types. Forb species tended to be associated with higher nutrient concentrations while woody species distribution was correlated with higher concentrations of heavy metals. The mitigation of soil stress, limitations in propagule availability, and loss of tree canopy cover following disturbances may have all played a role in influencing increases in diversity in this time period. Considering difficulties in comparing post-industrial abandoned landscapes to other anthropogenic and natural habitats, long-term study is needed to refine our understanding of community assembly in urban brownfields and better guide management practices.

İşlevini yitirmiş endüstriyel peyzajların yeniden işlevlendirilmesi: Sümerbank Kayseri Bez Fabrikası örneği

Son yıllarda, kent içerisinde ömrünü yitirmiş endüstriyel peyzaj alanları kentsel dönüşüm projeleri kapsamında çeşitli ölçeklerde rekreasyon, ekolojik ve ekonomik amaçları kapsayan sürdürülebilir plan kararlarıyla yeniden işlevlendirilmektedir. Yeniden işlevlendirme, kent içi çöküntü alanların korunması ve kültürel sürekliliğinin sağlanmasındaki temel taşı oluşturmaktadır. Doğru yeniden işlevlendirme çalışmaları ile endüstriyel peyzaj alanları gelecek nesillere aktarılabilir. Bu çalışmada, Cumhuriyet Dönemi’nin öncü sanayi kuruluşlarından biri olan Sümerbank Kayseri Bez Fabrikası’nın, yeniden işlevlendirme kapsamında dönüştürüldüğü Abdullah Gül Üniversitesi Sümer Kampüsü, sanayi sonrası peyzajların yeniden işlevlendirilmesinde kullanılan tasarım ilkeleri ve stratejileri çerçevesinde yapılan gözlemler sonucu analiz edilmiş, bir öneri çizelgesi oluşturulmuştur.

Современные тенденции реабилитации антропогенных территорий

В настоящее время в мире формируется тенденция к ре­абилитации антропогенных ландшафтов в городской среде. Это связано с постоянным развитием городов, изменением производственных технологий в различных сферах, задачами по улучшению качества жизни населения в городах. Процессы индустриализации и урбанизации ландшафта, происходившие в XX веке и продолжающиеся в настоящее время, привели не только к отрицательным экологическим, экономическим и социальным последствиям для большинства городских территорий, но и к отчуждению урбанизированного простран­ства от жителей. Переориентация экономического развития городов, сопровождаемая тенденцией закрытия или вывода индустриальных производств за границы города, определяет необходимость поиска новых направлений использования этих территорий. Статья посвящена актуальной теме реабили­тации и реконструкции антропогенного ландшафта городской среды с точки зрения устойчивого развития и повышения его рекреационной привлекательности. Особое внимание уделе­но современным подходам в мировой практике для осущест­вления экологической реконструкции постиндустриальных ландшафтов в городе. Распространяясь на общественные и коллективные пространства улиц, дворов, скверов, площадей, формируя культурный ландшафт нового качества на месте бывшего промышленного производства, ландшафтные преоб­разования позволяют решить важнейшую задачу реновации городской среды. Пассивные промышленные территории занимают значительную часть наиболее привлекательных с инвестиционной точки зрения районов города. Такие зоны являются потенциалом для градостроительного развития. В статье также сформулированы основные принципы реа­билитации и реновации бывших промышленных территорий, основной целью которых является устойчивое развитие и формирование комфортной городской среды.

Preface to special series: postindustrial landscapes, communities, and heritage: special series introduction

Archaeologists and heritage scholars increasingly find themselves addressing postindustrial contexts, where ongoing processes of depopulation, ruination, decay, social conflict, environmental damag...

Heritage making through community archaeology and the spatial humanities

ABSTRACTThe archaeology of postindustrial landscapes is still relatively undeveloped. The impact of economic, social, and urban development efforts on both tangible and intangible heritage complicate our attempts to understand these places. Despite this, integrating heritage practice and promotion into the regeneration of a postindustrial landscape continues to grow in popularity. Within this context, genuine public-expert collaboration is the most effective means towards developing a sustainable compromise between protecting community heritage values and fostering economic development and regeneration. In this paper, we suggest three broad categories of challenges for studying and promoting heritage in postindustrial regions – physical, social, and political – and propose a digital data-focused geospatial approach to how community archaeologists and heritage specialists may overcome these challenges. We argue that coupling this data and technology with a robust research agenda and public programming can serve as a crucial two-way link, enabling long-term sustainable heritage-promotion and protection in post-industrial communities.

The landscaping of Upper Silesia after 1989

The paper offers a critical analysis of the representations of post-industrial landscapes in Upper Silesia. It takes a look at the products of visual culture after 1989: feature films set in the region and photographs by Wojciech Wilczyk, trying to detect their embedded ideological mechanism and explain its dynamics. Drawing on the concepts advanced by Tim Edensor and W.J.T. Mitchell, the paper demonstrates that that mechanism consists in using aestheticization tools and sight cropping, following which a comprehensive view is feigned. As a result, Upper Silesia appears to be a degenerate space affected by permanent stagnation. In closing, the requirements that representations of landscape should meet are enumerated in order to provide insights into the diversity of a region, as well as offering a point of departure for reflection on its place in the national imagination. Ultimately, these considerations enable the expression of Upper Silesian identity from a position other than that of inferiority and subordination.

Transforming post-industrial landscapes into urban parks: Design strategies and theory in Seoul, 1998–present

• Since 1998, many post-industrial sites in Seoul have been transformed into urban parks. • Such parks have been seen as aesthetic objects and repositories of memory. • They have also been recognized for ecological, cultural, and educational value. • Design strategies have changed to reflect Western theory and local circumstances. • Korean landscape architecture needs to better consider Korean specificity.

‘There is a work in the interpretation of the work’

ABSTRACTThis paper provides brief context and a critical overview of the video presented as an integral part of this publication. In one hour the video documents excerpts from over five hours of an interdisciplinary seminar at Summerhall in Edinburgh, Scotland on 1 October 2016. The group assembled to consider a cluster of three post-industrial shale oil bings: as an artwork, as a form with positive and negative aesthetic value, as a living landscape and an ecosystem, and as a national heritage site. We wanted to talk about the bings in the context of mining and waste pile recovery schemes from the point of view of art and its ability to reveal divergent public interests. Furthermore we wanted to consider the bings as a unique living ecological habitat. By embracing an interdisciplinary network approach to the conflicted meanings of one specific post-industrial landscape, we intended to explore positive and negative aesthetics, ethics and moral philosophy to better understand how competing meanings reveal, complement or overshadow historic judgements, current perceptions and future values.

Photomontage in the Present Perfect Continuous

In its first instance as art practice among the historical avant-garde, photomontage was considered indispensable for its claim to intervene in perceptual processes, stimulating a critical mode of apprehension that would redirect the viewer away from conventions of aesthetic experience and towards a lived reception of art with pronounced relevance to the sociopolitical landscape. The effect was understood as structural, that is, activated not so much by direct political content, but by the stark and shocking effects of juxtaposition. By this measure, one challenge to contemporary photomontage is clear: in a postindustrial and postdigital visual landscape dominated by the structural fragmentation of the attention economy, the ‘simultaneity of the radically disparate’ (as Peter Bürger put it) might no longer present as heterodoxy but rather threaten to sink into invisibility. Yet with the migration off-screen of the effects of electronic media, a new urgency around moving photomontage structures into physical, public space is rising in contemporary practices. Shannon Ebner’s multi-part project A Hudson Yard (2014–15) is emblematic of the new ways in which artists are manipulating photomontage as a form of fully sensory experience that gives the medium room to play critically in both virtual and material space. By constructing subtle interruptions of naturalised commercial space, A Hudson Yard activates a détournement of instrumentalised language, using structures of juxtaposition to divert the discursive surfaces of public space away from consumption and towards what could be called a public poesis.