landscape | reclamation by dustin valen
waste planning urban parks modernity 9/11
fresh perspectives on foul a brief history of fresh kills landfill The mountain was here, unconcealed, but no one saw it or thought about it, no one knew it existed except the engineers and teamsters and local residents, a unique cultural deposit, fifty million tons by the time they top it off, carved and modelled, and no one talked about it but the men and women who tried to manage it... they would build hanging gardens here, make a park one day out of every kind of used and lost and eroded object of desire - Don DeLillo, Underworld
and the mythical prowess of nature to alleviate all our urban ills. Add to this the emergence of landscape as an instrument for the reclamation of worn-out industrial infrastructure and Fresh Kills Park becomes an exemplary case study. By claiming to restore the publicness of ruined sites, contemporary landscape practices occlude the very public circumstances that have coloured the social and political history of these locations. If public space has been coloured green by modern town planners, what risk does re-purposing our built heritage as park space pose to other, historical publics? In light of a century- long struggle to develop the modern city and its institutions, our transformative faith in landscape needs to be reassessed against the role that public participation has played in shaping these contested sites. One of the world’s largest repositories of discarded cultural artefacts and at the crux of social and political debate, Fresh Kills is a part of our public record, coloured brown, grey and black and that runs deep beneath an ostentatiously thin layer of vegetation. * New York’s waste history is both fascinating and raunchy. 2 Home- to-bone boiling industries, slaughterhouses, innumerable livestock and horses (a system of transport that produced some two thousand carcasses each year), nineteenth century New York was about as malodorous and unsightly as one could possibly imagine. With widespread outbreaks of cholera and other plagues pretty much the norm, in the 1850s a ban was placed on bone-boiling inside city limits and a dump site for the city’s animal refuse was established on South Brother Island in the East River. When South Brother Island’s affluent Manhattan neighbours produced an injunction that prevented dumping on the East River islands, waste disposal shifted to Jamaica Bay on Brooklyn’s south shore where Barren Island’s white sand beaches and cedars were exchanged for an acrid industrial landscape of animal refuse and corpses. 3 For decades, New York’s harbour and its islands continued to serve as a convenient outlet for the city’s expansive waste
Imagine 150 million tons of waste piled into four epic mounds. In the late 1980s an army of 680 workers ploughed the trash at Fresh Kills Landfill, burying upwards of 29,000 tons each day. Unbeknownst to nearby residents, and as a result of non-existent environmental regulations at the time of the landfill’s creation, an estimated four million litres of toxic leachate flowed each day from beneath the rising mounds into the adjacent harbour. On hot summer days, sanitation trucks patrolled nearby neighbourhoods emitting a fine mist of pine scent to mask the smell of decaying waste. Garbage-fed raccoons, residents claimed, were as big as dogs. Despite the prominence of Fresh Kills in recent media and design debate (this journal included 1 ), and the universally lauded plans to transform an iconic landfill into a commensurately iconic urban park, there has been remarkably little interest in the turbulent history of this place and its role in shaping modern sensibilities. In their introductory essay to the exhibition Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture (Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2011), Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini note how ‘...in a society like ours, so thoroughly enchanted by the myth of ‘nature,’ it is not surprising to discover the wide-ranging dissemination of green. ...Polluted areas and landfills [are] the object of treatments aimed at purifying land, water and air,[so that, today] green is thought of as a diffuse and continuous salve-like surface application, a new skin of vegetation that replaces or envelops (man-made) surfaces.’ Fresh Kills Park is a fairly recent example of the close relationship between landscape and cities that has evolved since the late nineteenth century. From Garden Cities and their refrain of hygiene and moral rectitude to an Olmstedian remedy for social unrest, reformers have continually championed the reinstatement of nature in cities to improve health and mend social disparities. By claiming the latter as its audience, the effect of these developments has been to enshrine landscape in the rhetoric of publics and make green the predominant colour of public space in cities today – investing in one thin layer a zeal for healthy living, social equity
76
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator