below: despite drastic regreening, the Superstack still overwhelms most other traditional (non-mining related) landmarks across the city.
To bring this all full circle, Barbara Misztal ( Theories of Social Remembering ) states “…without memory…we will have no warnings about potential dangers to democratic structures and no opportunity to gain a richer awareness of the repertoire of possible remedies”. 10 The ability to perceive the past is intimately connected to an ability to conceive of the future, only on this basis can a community come to terms with itself, acknowledging both the welcome and the undesirable, the offensive and the satisfying. Landscape can be reframed to dismantle the exclusionary spatial practices of an either/or attitude – either land reclamation or industrial planning – and to liberate the potential of abandoned or derelict landscapes. The serious integration of nature and culture makes landscape an ‘arena of speculation’ without limitations on what it is possible to say, to hear or to do. 11 Changing what can be seen – exposing rather than covering – thus becomes a radical act.
1 Stephen Monet. ‘City Launches ‘Thin Green Line’ Contest Celebrating 25 years of Land Reclamation’. Greater Sudbury , Sep. 15, 2003. 2 William Cronon. Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature . New York: WW Norton, 1995 p52 3 Ibid p25 4 Eric Cazdyn. The Already Dead, the new time of politics, culture and illness . Durham: Duke University Press, 2012 5 David Leadbeater. Mining Town Crisis: Globalization, Labour and Resistance in Sudbury . Halifax: Fernwood, 2008. p 21 6 Neil Smith. ‘Foreword’ in Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw, eds. I n the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism . London: Routledge, 2006 7 Aaron Pickard. ‘Regreening efforts taking root’ Northern Life , Jan 21, 2012. 8 Christopher Wren. Risk Assessment and Environmental Management: A Case Study in Sudbury, Ontario, Canda . Leiden, Netherlands: Maralte, 2012. p16 9 Bill Bradley. ‘Digging through the Sudbury Soils Study’ Northern Life , June 13, 2008 10 Barbara A. Misztal. Theories of Social Remembering . Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open UP, 2003. 11 An arena of speculation is a term from the literature of the transformation of Israeli structures of domination. In the study of the potential application of physical interventions to open up a horizon for ongoing processes of transformation, an arena of speculation is an architectural tool that incorporates varied cultural and political perspectives through the participation of a multiplicity of individuals and organizations. Eyal Weizman, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti have an architectural studio in Bethlehem that employs a range of techniques, using architecture as an arena of speculation to deal with how Israeli settlements and military bases could be reused, recycled and re-inhabited by Palestinians. See: Hilal, Petti and Weizman, ‘The Future Archaeology of Israel’s Colonization’ Roulotte , Aprill 2011
Leanna Lalonde
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beautiful smooth, rounded rock plateau, with mosses and flowers in the cracks, lines of pine. It seemed a primeval landscape, very old, very ground down - this was Sudbury and the Shield, a place of some marvel – something that Matt Neville’s essay points out is an old Canadian narrative in terms of our present national identity. M H: I have always been uneasy with the romanticization and victimization of ‘nature’ prevalent in conversations about the environment. The narrative is predictable and formulaic:
greedy humans exploit and destroy nature, humans must redeem themselves and restore nature to its former beauty; in other words, nature is good, human acts upon nature are evil. Leanna unpacks how such a deterministic, moral view of our relationship to nature is problematic: it limits our imagination. Examples from the regreening of Sudbury illustrate this limited view: the city uses the word ‘green’, and grows green grass over post- industrial sites to create the appearance of a good, healed landscape, whatever lies beneath. I think of 19th century
romantic painters depicting picturesque rural scenery when the industrial revolution was transforming human processes of production, spatially separating the places of production from the places where natural resources are. A nostalgic beautification of nature has become the default reaction to the ‘damage’ wrought by industry. Conversely, I think of think of Edward Burtynsky’s photographs: the subject matter is industrial processes, documented with a wide lens to show something
legible information. Vibrant layers of geology are exposed by processes of resource extraction. The terrain altered by industrial activity appears complex and beautiful. Leanna suggests that if we can change what we see, we can conceive of different futures. Maybe the old adage ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ applies to how we rethink our public, natural systems, and the way forward lies in part in finding beauty in less prescribed ways.
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