Landfill urbanism: Opportunistic ecologies, wasted landscapes

Abstract

“As a child, my father would take my brother and I to the local junkyard. We’d watch, amazed, as the compressor squashed our waste into a dumpster, then scavenge through piles of scrap metal and climb gigantic wheeled Caterpillar earthmovers.” For better or worse, this archetypal junkyard has given way to strictly controlled spaces of waste disposal. When this paper was originally published in 2010, demand for material had been continuously increasing. This, coupled with a culture of disposability, had coincided with heightened policy measures restricting landfill development. And today, we still have a crisis of waste management. Meanwhile, as landfilling has grown from a localized phenomenon into a regional set of distribution networks, neo-industrialization is emerging throughout the Great Lakes megaregion, suggesting new opportunities for re-territorialization of wasted landscapes. This project posits that extraction of existing landfill sites for material and energy is inevitable. Landfill Urbanism suggests that the act of landfill mining, a contentious and stinky proposition, has the capacity to foster a localized, robust industrial ecology, while also recasting the public’s relationship with our waste through tactical deployment of architecture and urban space-making. Directed Robotic Trash Extractors (DRT-E) exhume and cultivate material, as the project’s conveyor-belt infrastructure allows individuals, cooperatives and corporations to safely sort and collect based on their needs: a novel approach to accessing our 21st century resource. By allowing complete engagement with the public, Landfill Urbanism fosters productive interdependent relationships between consumers, as well as offering to its users a series of spectacular didactic, practical, and recreational experiences. Where the public of today consumes, the public of Landfill Urbanism harvests.