Brownfields as Landscapes

Abstract

To consider and actually treat brownfields as territorial infrastructures it is necessary to overcome the established dichotomy between intensive and extensive models, respectively those focusing on real-estate development and ecological recultivation. A possible way is to assume an holistic landscape perspective capable of conceptually and operatively incorporating these sites into a wider spatial and territorial framework. To this aim, structuralist and systemic approaches to brownfield transformation are reviewed and analyzed through pioneering experiences and relevant thinking patterns within the fields of landscape urbanism, landscape architecture and urban planning and design.

The planning perspective of Alpine brownfields as a territorial infrastructure, emerged in the previous chapter, is essentially based on the mutual association—physical and functional, even before than conceptual—between the former industrial site and the cultural landscape to which it belongs. Out of the specific Alpine context, in those old-established and heavily industrialised regions of Europe where the redevelopment of brownfield sites is representing a key challenge since decades, this particular association is everything but new. In these contexts, the progressive yet nonlinear convergence between spatial and ecological interpretations of derelict industrial land has fostered a cultural re-shaping of the ‘nature’ of urban brownfields, from discarded fragments of previous cultural landscapes to key infrastructural elements of emerging eco-cultural landscapes (Höfer and Vicenzotti 2014; Braae 2015). Driven by design- and planning-afferent disciplinary fields, while being also strongly influenced by socio-cultural studies¹ and environmental sciences², this cultural breakthrough in the interpretation of brownfield sites has produced an ever-expanding set of conceptual models and operative tools that can be ideally transferred, though carefully adapted, to very different contexts and situations. Although it is very difficult to talk about a specific and widely recognised landscape-oriented understanding of brownfields—as the concept of landscape itself is highly interpretable—, it is actually possible to identify which aspects of ‘landscape’ are influencing brownfield transformation as a complex socio-economic and spatial process. In doing so, this chapter moves temporarily away from the Alpine context, reaching out to the wider European and North American contexts as cultural breeding grounds for approaching brownfields as landscapes. In describing how this factual association took place and developed, the chapter puts a major emphasis on the structural and systemic paradigms emerged in the practice of brownfield redevelopment. These two paradigms, as epitomes of the inherent transformative qualities of landscape, constitute indeed the theoretical base for further developing a context-based landscape approach for Alpine brownfields, that is, the aim of this research.

1 Intensive/extensive

The many experiences of brownfield redevelopment so far completed reveal that there is no single way to deal with industrial remnants. Given the strong multidisciplinary character of the brownfield challenge (Genske and Hauser 2003; Ferber et al. 2006), what seems to be determinant for the physical and programmatic outcome of transformation is not the scale nor the purpose of it, but rather the intensity of transformative actions and their temporal horizon (Braae 2015). Accordingly, the multitude of redevelopment approaches developed and applied up until now can be basically differentiated between intensive and extensive ones, with a variable degree of intermediate steps. The first are those focused on rapid, radical but rather ‘static’ changes, either concerning the form or the function or both, while extensive ones privilege a slower, subtle and progressive change. On a general principle, intensive redevelopment approaches are strongly market-oriented and rendered through traditional architectural production and urban regeneration strategies, while extensive ones are more suitable for low or no market situations and mostly relying on ecologically-driven interpretations (Grimski and Ferber 2001). However, this dualism should not be automatically reduced to a question of conservation and/or authenticity of leftovers: while some conservative transformations (such as the ‘musealisation’ of industrial objects) are radical in the sense that they impose a totally new meaning and function to what exists, other ‘deconstructivist’ transformations (such as the progressive recultivation of industrial fallow lands) integrate change in space and time very discreetly.

The intensive/extensive dichotomy in reading, interpreting and transforming brownfields can be traced back in the avant-garde studies on ‘industrial-archaeological’ landscapes by Franco Borsi (Borsi 1975, 1978). In a time when the conversion of derelict industrial sites was still an emerging—if not a marginal—issue, Borsi proposed two main interpretations of these transitional landscapes and, derived from the latter, four conceptual and programmatic strategies. On the one hand, and from a purely architectural perspective, the derelict industrial landscape can be perceived as a ‘monument’, an historicised cultural in(ter)vention³ encasing precise meanings, memories and identities. Transformation can be aesthetic-driven and temporally-neutral, if addressed to the preservation/restoration of built heritage and even to the pure contemplation of ruins, or technology-driven and temporally-active, if what exists is made intelligible through footnotes interventions—not necessarily implying a total conservation. On the other hand, the transitional industrial landscape can be also interpreted as natura artificialis, a hybrid and man-made status which ideally replaced the previous natura naturalis. In this case, transformation can also act as a temporally neutral intervention, if the removal of environmental alteration is programmed, or as a temporally active one, if a certain form of cultivation of this status is foreseen. The interpretation of disused industrial sites as either monument or altered nature, or even a mix of both, is the theoretical and conceptual breeding ground for the aforementioned intensive and extensive guiding approaches (Hauser 2001; Douet 2012). On a general basis, the ‘monument’ concept is associated to the manipulation of built heritage and building fabric, and thus in the focus of architectural production and urban planning strategies, while the ‘nature’ one brings forward ecological dynamics and human-nature interactions, being therefore mostly addressed by landscape architecture and open space planning strategies.

Intensive ‘built’ transformation approaches on brownfields are widely diffused and rather old in their origin, though subject to continuous evolution. The cultural background of this approach can be traced in the urban regeneration experiences developed in the UK starting from the mid 1970s, and later transposed to Western Europe. Specific policies and programmes, such as the Liverpool Initiative or the Urban Development Corporation established in 1980 to support the regeneration of docklands and inner-city areas, were developed with the aim to attract and involve private investors in the complex process of physical and socio-economic upgrade of run-down urban and industrial centres (Stratton 2000). Parallel to that, the English Heritage Trust introduced the Conservation Area Partnership, a funding scheme addressed to communities undergoing regeneration and aimed to preserve key heritage buildings—among which mostly of industrial origin—and integrate them into the new urban developments. The nonlinear and sometimes difficult alliance of heritage conservationism and urban regeneration programmes has however provided the breeding ground for a wide appreciation of industrial leftovers as ‘new heritage’ (Braae 2015) or even ‘heritage for re-activation’ (Mieg and Oevermann 2015). In many declining industrial cities, from Manchester to Turin, from Bilbao to Tampere, the conservation of industrial built heritage has indeed proved to be “a key to unlocking their potential in both economics and culture” (Stratton 2000: 25). The successful integration of industrial leftovers into wider urban regeneration strategies was accompanied and sustained by a ground-breaking cultural shift in the understanding of heritage (Fairclough 2009), whose meaning exceeded that of ‘monument’ in the narrow sense towards comprising the ordinary, “the environment in the widest sense of the word” (Kolen 2006: 50). In this way, not only historically relevant industrial buildings and architectures could be preserved, but also the multitude of apparently anonymous industrial objects of which post-industrial urban landscapes are mostly made of. This democratic approach to industrial heritage has fostered the development of architectural and planning ‘adaptive reuse’ strategies, in which the conservation of historic, aesthetic and atmospheric characters of formerly industrial spaces coexists with the social, economic and cultural demand for new uses and practices (Baum and Christiaanse 2012; Fragner 2012). Old industrial buildings, in fact, “can accept both programmatic and semantic changes […] With their generous size and open ground plans, the buildings can be used extremely flexibly and can be adapted to whatever needs arise. The architectural structures are interpretable” (Baum and Christiaanse 2012: 8). Adaptive reuse does not apply to single buildings only, but it has successfully also become a planning strategy for large-scale site redevelopments or district regeneration. The careful retaining of both representative and marginal objects, or even of underlying spatial structures, provides the logic of the intervention while producing attractiveness in terms of identity and image (Fig. 4.1). Evidence of that can be found in famous contemporary regeneration cases, such as London’s King Cross, Vienna’s Gasometers, the Aker Brygge in Oslo, the Rotermann Quarter in Tallin, the Île de Nantes project in Nantes and the Escher Wyss-Industriequartier in Zurich, to cite some, but also in much smaller and ordinary transformations.

Fig. 4.1

Heritage-led real estate development in the former industrial district of Battersea, London. In the picture, the iconic Battersea Power Station being renovated, at the centre of the homonymous urban redevelopment project

An alternative yet complementary approach to these intensive models has gradually developed starting from the 1980s, as the increasing complexity and size of the brownfield issue matched with the rise of ecological thinking and especially with the emergence of urban ecology studies⁴. The tidal wave of deindustrialisation which invested Europe at the very end of the century not only did leave behind numerous abandoned buildings and independent sites, but in many cases it caused the emergence of vast and intricate networks of sites and infrastructures (Smets 1990; Hauser 2001). A prominent case of the latter was represented at that time by the Ruhr basin, once the largest heavy industry region in Germany and Europe as well, which turned into a crisis area after being severely hit by the decline of the local coal and steelmaking industry⁵. Between 1989 and 1999, however, the Ruhr district became the set of a pioneering experience of regional restructuring within the framework of the International Building Exhibition (Internationale Bauausstellung, IBA) Emscher Park. Under the lead of Karl Ganser, the challenging transformation of around eight thousand hectares of abandoned and contaminated industrial land was innovatively and ‘extensively’ addressed by means of a hybrid ecological-cultural reinterpretation of the altered post-industrial landscape (Dettmar, Ganser, and Latz 1999; Ganser and Höber 1999; Weilacher 2008). The stagnant economic and market situation in the region—which prevented a real-estate ‘intensive’ redevelopment for all the existing large and small brownfields to take place—as well as the complexity of the restructuring on stake—called to jointly manage serious environmental damage and social and economic deprivation—have contributed to the development of a unique ‘change without growth model’ (Reicher, Dahlheimer, and Uttke 2008), of which the cultivation of the existing industrial topographies became the planning leitmotiv. Central to this new ‘eco-cultural’ approach to brownfield transformation is the acknowledgment and the appreciation of the ‘uncontrolled’ ecological developments occurring on the site—which, together with the industrial built heritage and the underlying infrastructural network, form the basis of an ‘unfinished’ and constantly evolving new cultural landscape (Dettmar, Ganser, and Latz 1999; Weilacher and Dettmar 2003). The overgrown abandoned industrial spaces are mostly retained as such and further enhanced by means of minimal interventions (Fig. 4.2), e.g. to stabilise the new ecosystems or improve the public accessibility. In this way, a positive reconciliation with the industrial legacy (as also environmental alteration) can be gradually achieved, one in which the “fear of historical contamination has given way to a calm acceptance of the structures” (Latz 2001: 151). From here onwards, the ecological, cultural and even aesthetic potential of spontaneous renaturation on brownfields and residual urban spaces in general has been highlighted and similarly interpreted by landscape architects and urban ecologists as ‘industrial nature’ (Dettmar et al. 1999), ‘new wilderness’ (Kowarik 2005) or ‘third landscape’ (Clément 2004). Extremely influential in the European contemporary planning debate on sustainable urbanisation, these concepts and the related extensive transformation models have proved to be particularly successful in problematic contexts such as deindustrialising mining regions—notably, the IBA Fürst-Pückler-Land (2000–2010) in Lower Lusatia and various ‘spot’ projects in Pas-de-Calais and Limburg regions—but also in shrinking or porous cities—from the Berlin’s classic Schöneberger Südgelände to the ‘perforation’ strategy implemented in Leipzig.

Fig. 4.2

Ruinous heavy industrial sites reinterpreted as new eco-cultural landscapes, in the Ruhr region. In the picture, the Landscape Park Duisburg Nord by Peter Latz, one of the flagship projects of the IBA Emscher Park

The aforementioned intensive and extensive transformation models are not mutually exclusive, nor they embody perfect solutions. Although possible in theory and highly desirable in practice, their full functional integration has been so far rarely achieved in concrete situations. This is not just because of the difference in scale—intensive models on dense, compact sites and extensive ones on permeable, fragmented networks—but mostly due to the diverging source of commitments as well as the framework conditions. Concerning the former, intensive transformations relying on adaptive reuse and urban development strategies are normally addressed by private investors such as real estate companies or private-public partnerships, while extensive transformations based on the cultivation of altered topographies are often addressed by public planning bodies and regional institutions—which usually already own the land⁶. The contexts are also very different, and determinant for the choice of the approach, as intensive transformations take place in dynamic inner-city areas, particularly fertile to the real estate market, while extensive transformations usually occur in economically weak contexts and in fringe or intermediate urban areas, where the redevelopment pressure is lower or absent.

2 Total Landscape

The original definition of industrial landscape provided by Borsi⁷, in which architectural objects and altered environments are seen as interwoven components of a larger, inclusive and constantly evolving ‘territorial structure’, was somehow downplayed by the intensive-extensive dichotomy emerged in the practice of brownfield transformation. The term ‘landscape’ has been in fact associated to derelict industrial sites mostly in the context of extensive approaches, following the interpretation of hybrid human-nature landforms and processes provided by the disciplinary and professional fields of landscape architecture and urban ecology. Those large and complex brownfields managed through intensive approaches, in which the built prevails over the unbuilt (physically and conceptually), are not equally referred as ‘transformed industrial landscapes’ due to the absence of (visible) natural elements and ecological dynamics. This professionally ‘authorised’ way of defining (and thus approaching) transitional industrial landscapes shows many shortcomings and limitations, and especially it conflicts with the contemporary understanding of landscape as “a holistic, dynamic and hierarchical system” (Antrop 2017: 6), “a man-made system of spaces superimposed on the face of the land, functioning and evolving not according to natural laws but to serve a community […] a composition of man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence” (Jackson 1984: 8). These ambitious and far-reaching statements, which indeed come from two landscape geographers—respectively Marc Antrop (1946-) and John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909–1996)—rather than architects and planners, highlight very precisely the integrative and unifying nature of landscape. The use of the term ‘system’ in association to landscape is particularly striking in this sense, as it evokes a complex, pluralistic and networked spatial entity, whose organisational patterns⁸ are evolving according to historical, economic and ecological dynamics (Antrop 2013). The continuous superimposition of human- and natural-driven processes and the related topographies, their cyclical sedimentation and transformation as source of the landscape itself, are well conveyed by Corboz’s metaphor of palimpsest (Corboz 1983) and Marot’s hypertext/hyper-landscape (Marot 2003), which share indeed a similar ‘historiographic’ view on the ‘already existing’ as supporting structure for design and transformation. On these premises are also based the principles of the European Landscape Convention (ELC), which fully recognises the holistic nature of landscape both in terms of forming process—“an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors” (Council of Europe 2000 [Art. 1])—and spatial wholeness—“[it] covers natural, rural, urban and peri-urban areas […] outstanding as well as everyday or degraded landscapes” (Ibid.).

Considering the multifaceted understanding of the material and territorial legacy of industry so far elaborated, it makes sense to ask how and where do brownfields and especially their transformation locate themselves in this ‘total landscape’. As previously seen, the redevelopment, reuse and recycling of former industrial sites is a complex and highly trans-disciplinary action field—as it is the management of contemporary urbanisation processes, of which disused industrial spaces incorporate many traits and dynamics. To approach brownfield transformation with a holistic landscape approach is a challenge itself, given the many cultural interpretations and disciplinary and professional ways-of-acting. A promising path, worth to be followed, is the one being traced by landscape urbanism, an urban planning theory established in the late twentieth and early twentieth-first centuries as alternative to traditional planning and design—which failed in addressing complex urban transformations in a post-Fordist economy. In conceiving landscape as a conceptual as well as performative medium for contemporary urbanization (Waldheim 2016), landscape urbanism operates a radical transformation in the meaning and use of ‘landscape’. Liberated from its binding aesthetic and pictorial tradition, landscape is thus re-coded as a key urban infrastructure, “a live index and indeterminate interface of hard technological systems and soft biophysical processes” (Bélanger 2016: 38) and capable “to absorb and in some ways mitigate various impacts associate with social, environmental and economic crises” (Waldheim 2016: 4). The boundless horizontal dimension of landscape, and especially of the contemporary urbanised landscape⁹, is recovered in its deep geographical meaning through a work of/on surface, in which the ground plane as palimpsest becomes the real ‘field of action’ (Corner 2006), “an active surface capable of accommodating temporary programmes and on-going changes to promote the diversification that has always represented the meaning of urbanity as well as of landscape” (Marini 2009: 254). As landscape becomes an organising device for space, for the complex and interwoven system of human and natural environments, the design of it is aimed therefore at reconfiguring these systems and their supportive spatial structures. Accordingly, the transformation of run-down industrial sites as ‘landscape reconfiguration’ exceeds the simplistic yet established dichotomy between architectural-intensive and ecological-extensive approaches, thus pushing for their relative principles, methods and tools to merge in a different, unifying perspective.

This ‘infrastructural’ understanding of landscape can be easily detected in many ground-breaking experiences of brownfield transformation, some of which dating back prior to the emergence of landscape urbanism theories. In many of these experiences, the physical and programmatic re-arrangement of derelict industrial sites and discarded landscapes relies, according to the aforementioned holistic approach, on clear structuralist and systemic principles, often borrowed from scientific areas ‘alien’ to the architectural and planning field.

3 Structures

The linkage between structuralism and brownfield transformation is not immediate, nor completely acknowledged. As a design theory and concept, structuralism was introduced in architecture and urban planning from anthropology and linguistics in the 1960s, mainly through the work of Japanese and Dutch architects and planners such as Kenzo Tange, Aldo van Eyck and Herman Herzberger. By shifting the orientation from functional to spatial organisation, from uniformity to flexibility and modularity, structuralism developed as “a complete set of relationships, in which elements change, but in such a way that these remain dependent on the whole and retain their meaning. The whole is independent of its relationships to the elements” (Lüchinger 1981: 16). The particular focus on formal relationships within the underlaying structure of a built space is indeed recognisable in several, later projects dealing with the complex redevelopment of disused industrial sites.

A pioneering experience in this sense can be traced back in the ambitious yet unrealised Potteries Thinkbelt Project (1964–66) by Cedric Price. In his proposal, the vast, derelict and ‘peripheral’ industrial landscape of North Staffordshire had to be transformed into an open and widespread university and innovation campus, following his idea of architecture as social (development) instrument. The radicalness of change in terms of function—from obsolete and polluting clay industries to higher education and knowledge sector—was counterbalanced by an intelligently conservative approach for the existing landscape structures, whose qualities were maintained and enhanced to fulfil the new purposes (Price 1984). The comprehensive approach towards the industrial landscape, perceived by Price as a complex relational system of used and unused spaces, solids and voids, infrastructures and nodes—very close to Borsi’s understanding (see introduction)—was ground-breaking at the time, especially in relation to vast-scale disused industrial land. Adaptive reuse strategies were not just limited to old industrial buildings, but also and especially they embraced the redundant infrastructures as well as the scattered, undefined open spaces (Fig. 4.3). Most striking was the recycling of the extensive industrial railway network as the main infrastructural backbone of the new campus, on which ‘educational railbuses’ consisting of prefabricated modules could be moved around and docked at certain transfer facilities. The recolonisation of empty wastelands, in addition, had to be tactically fulfilled through the development of modular housing units adaptable to the unstable and complex topography. In this way, the flexibility of the structural elements—built, open, linear—composing the industrial landscape was first and clearly highlighted and valued as an outstanding quality of the ‘already there’.

Fig. 4.3

Map of the Potteries Thinkbelt project (1966)

From here onwards, the underlying landscape structure of derelict industrial sites or network of sites has been variously interpreted according to the contextual conditions of transformation—site layout and typology, site conditions at the closure, market pressure, site location within the urban fabric, etc. Based on the transformative intensity applied to the existing structure, three main approaches can be identified: conservative, radical and intermediate.

In handling the transformation of complex industrial sites, the conservative structuralist approach is that which aims to retain as much as possible of the existing structural layout, using it as a ‘porous bed’ for new interpretations and functions. Two are the requirements for the success and viability of such an ‘extreme’ approach: first the site conditions at the beginning of the transformation process, that is, its formal integrity; second, the economic and ownership framework conditions, which have to fully support the feasibility of the operation. One of the best and most complete experiences of conservative structuralism is provided by the already mentioned Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord project by Peter Lazt, part as well as highlight of the wider IBA Emscher Park regeneration program for the Ruhr basin. In the latter framework, the will to turn the 230 hectares disused Thyssen Meiderich steel mill into a public park was concretised first through the acquisition of the site by the regional land development authority and then by launching an international competition in 1990. Awarded with the first prize, Latz’s proposal was based on a wide acceptance of both the industrial heritage—represented by the blast furnaces and related infrastructures—and the dramatically altered environmental conditions as resulting from heavy industry activities and following abandonment. The complex technological and spatial structures of the steel mill are not only entirely preserved (Fig. 4.4 and 4.5), but they are integrated and enriched with new information layers by means of nature-based design (including formal and informal nature reproduction), and thus deeply reinterpreted (Weilacher 2008). Based on acceptance and creativity, such a ‘syntactical design’ approach allows Latz to initiate and address both a material and conceptual metamorphosis of the industrial landscape, in which technological and natural systems, preserved as well as designed, are functionally and aesthetically interwoven to “celebrate the site’s history” while “develop fantastic images of the future” (Latz 2001). Although widely assumed as a most representative case of post-industrial landscape transformation, the Duisburg project actually represents a unicum in its structural integrity. This is evident just by looking at other XL brownfield reconversions still in the Ruhr area, such as the Zollverein complex in Essen—whose heritage-based ‘upgrading’ transformation is prefigured by OMA’s ring masterplan—and the Phoenix-West site in Dortmund-Hörde—whose economy-driven transformation into a business park responds to a different, younger regional development concept than that of IBA. Beyond the Ruhr district, a ‘weak’ reply of the Duisburg project can be found in Ostrava, in Czech Silesia, on the former Dolní Vítkovice steelworks site (Volf, Švácha, and Souček 2013). Despite the initial contextual conditions between the two cases were very similar, though temporally distanced by 20 years, the approach used in Ostrava by the Czech architect Josef Pleskot is largely missing that ‘ground project’¹⁰ which allowed, in Duisburg, a comprehensive recognition and thus reuse of the existing site structure. Deprived of their relational ‘basement’, the overwhelming Vítkovice blast furnaces and the attached Hlubina colliery are therefore fluctuating on a carpet of two-lane boulevards, golf-like lawns and cosy pocket gardens. In favour of such a (ongoing) transformation, it might be said, however, that the site foreseen development as a hybrid heritage-technology park requires an infrastructural upgrade to be able to accommodate, through the time, a wide range of activities, from public events to small business.

Fig. 4.4

Plan of the August Thyssen steelworks in Duisburg-Meiderich (1934)

Fig. 4.5

Structural concept plan of the landscape park proposed by Peter Latz on the same site (1991)

Opposite to conservative approaches stand radical ones, which are basically imposing a complete or almost completely new structure on the site, with the retaining of just a few industrial objects (stand-alone buildings or landmarks) as landscape anchors. The starting conditions, as well as the specific goals of redevelopment, are indeed influencing considerably the use of such a structural radicalness. The transformation of a brownfield site can start ‘too late’, when most of the existing buildings and infrastructures are already gone, and thus it requires a new spatial organisation to be implemented. Or the uncertain framework conditions (economy, investments, etc.) call for high spatial flexibility in the redevelopment process (e.g. progressive occupation of the site, adaptable building footprints, etc.), while the previous industrial layout is too binding for that. The often-unified question of physical and functional reprogramming of vast brownfield sites supports radical or quasi-radical approaches. A leading experience in this sense was the redevelopment proposal for the SMN/Unimetal brownfield in Caen, Normandy, by Dominque Perrault. As result of the closure of the integrated steel complex in 1993 and the following transfer of most of the facilities to China, a 230 hectares wide empty area suddenly appeared on the eastern edge of the city. To cope with such a gigantic terrain vague, with the “excess of ground”, Perrault opted for a prépaysagement (preparatory landscaping) strategy. A 100×100 meter grid, superimposed on the site and temporarily cultivated/planted, allowed at the same time to link the three ‘environments’ around the site—city, riverscape and agricultural fields—and to provide an infrastructural backdrop to future developments, which had to take place within the one-hectare lots (Fig. 4.6 and 4.7). In this way, a new and flexible spatial order was to be found, as well as a sort of reconciliation of the brownfield with its context. Due to the changed conditions years later, namely the absence of enough redevelopment pressure to sustain such a strong concept, the project was never realised. Around half of the site—the most accessible area—has been so far turned into a business and technology park.

Fig. 4.6

Plan of the SMN-Unimetal steelworks in Caen (1925)

Fig. 4.7

The urban recolonisation grid proposed by Dominique Perrault on the same site (1996)

A similar and almost contemporary experience was the long-term transformation proposed by Florian Beigel for the disused Brikettfabrik Witznitz site in Borna, Sachsen, a fragment of the vast post-mining landscape around Leipzig. The ‘re-structuring’ approach is here driven by the spatial indeterminacy of the site on the one hand—as the original topography is only visible in the few leftover buildings—, and the contextual uncertainty on the other hand—due to the missing economic conditions for redevelopment. Conceived as “an architectural landscape of activity fields” (Beigel and Christou 1996), the post-mining, altered topography is recovered through a temporary recultivation in forms of gardens, orchards and ecological zones, whose layouts are designed in a way that they can be quickly and adaptively urbanised in the future. The project was never realised as planned: part of the old industrial buildings has been renovated to host small businesses, while the foreseen housing development has been realised only partially and with a far less ‘structured’ layout than in Beigel’s concept. These two examples—Borna and Caen—are ‘theoretical’ models for the radical structuralist approach, whose overall feasibility is indeed questioned by the missed realization (or mis-realization, leading a different result). More recent examples in continuity with such a trajectory—the Bagnoli steelworks regeneration in Naples (masterplan by Francesco Cellini, 2006) as well as the Uckange blast furnace park (Agence TER, 2014)—are also showing several difficulties in the realization, mostly because of the inherent imbalance between costs/efforts and benefits. Radical structuralist approaches deal with almost completely cleared sites, sort of ‘evolved brownfields’ in which the original structure is missing while being replaced in the meantime with undefined and rewilded surfaces—often hiding severe contamination problems never tackled before. To take advantage from the existing situation, the proposed redevelopment usually introduces a new landscape structure acting as ‘mat of possibilities’, which works fine in principle but miss to align with the contextual economic forces when put in practice.

A further approach, halfway between conservative and radical ones, is that of intermediate structuralism. As a much more pragmatic and thus viable solution than its two extremes, this approach aims to establish a new spatial organisation of the site on the basis of a few, determinant features of the existing structure, such as the infrastructural system and the built/open pattern. The ‘structural identity’ of the site is therefore retained, remodelled and reinterpreted according to both planning and design principles, forming the conceptual as well as concrete basis for the site transformation and future development. The search for a new urban order, a renewed principio insediativo (settlement principle) in Vittorio Gregotti’s view, moves here from the consideration of “industrial topography as a logical grid” (Wünschmann 2016), thus valuing its inherent structural potential. Widely applied in several brownfield conversion projects, this approach has so far resulted particularly successful in addressing the transformation of large scale, autonomous industrial sites (so-called ‘city-within-city’) embedded in well-developed, dense urban contexts. An exemplary case of intermediate structuralist approach is represented by Gregotti’s masterplan for the redevelopment of the former Pirelli tyre factory in Milan (1985), at the time one of the largest and most complex brownfield transformation projects in Europe. The conversion of the 70 hectares industrial area—largely built-up and well-integrated into the surrounding early XX century urban fabric—was approached by Gregotti through a careful reinterpretation of the spatial structure within the ‘factory enclose’¹¹ as a flexible matrix of public spaces, able to accommodate in/on/within it a wide range of incoming urban functions and uses (Fig. 4.4 and 4.9). According to Gregotti, “the new design has to measure itself with the historical and geographical context in its structural aspects and not in stylistic ones. Precisely the discovery of these structural aspects will reveal the unknown which is often the way of being of the permanent”¹² (Gregotti 1990: 5). The underlying structure of the vast industrial site is therefore perceived as a ‘device’ to bring together what exists, the historical tensions within the site, and what will or can be, the outcome of transformation as a new, added layer of permanence. Besides the open space network and the road grid, also several factory buildings and structures (e.g. the cooling tower) are retained as ‘above-ground’ structural anchor points. The complex transformation of the former mono-functional industrial site into a mixed-use urban district—including a new university and research campus, Pirelli’s and other multinationals headquarters, an opera house and housing—has been completed in a span of twenty years, with some minor parts still under development.

Fig. 4.8

Layout plan of Pirelli’s tyre factory in Milan’s neighbour of Bicocca (1985)

Fig. 4.9

The structural of the same site between 1986 and 2002, as outlined in the masterplan by Vittorio Gregotti (1986)

A similar case, also a good example of intermediate structuralism, is the already mentioned Belval megaproject in Esch-sur-Alzette, which concerned the redevelopment of a former 650 hectares wide brownfield into a mixed-use urban and research district for 20000 employees and 5000 residents. Managed by a development agency created in private-public partnership between site owner Arbed/Arcelor Mittal and the State of Luxembourg, the complex transformation was (and still is) guided by the masterplan of Jo Coenen, who won the competition launched in 2002. Structuralist principles are particularly noticeable in the eastern portion of the site, those where the ‘hot side’ of the steel complex was located. Not the system of public spaces nor the infrastructural grid, but “the pattern of the earlier industrial facilities, which was due to the technological processes, determined the development of the new quarter. It is both an inscribed pattern of memory and a structuring element for the new development”¹³ (Wünschmann 2016: 16). The new spatial organisation of the area is in fact centred on and structured around the two giant blast furnaces—survived to the site clearing and preserved as cultural heritage—, whose complex footprint and outstanding elevation are reinterpreted not as mere landmarks, but as a true ‘metric’ for the surrounding emerging urban landscape. Although different in timing, transformation purposes and contextual conditions, the two cases of Milan and Esch-Belval are both configured as a successful urban redevelopment of large-scale, former industrial sites. Intermediate structuralist approaches prove to be extremely pragmatic when it comes to organise decades-long transformations. Two conditions seem to be at the base of these experiences of intermediate structuralism. The first is the strong private-public commitment, expressed through effective partnership schemes and planning cooperation between the site owning companies and key planning authorities. The second condition, very crucial, is the status of the industrial site at the beginning of the transformation process, which is not derelict nor an ‘evolved brownfield’, but rather a closing down machine whose signs and traces are still fully readable, and thus easily ‘transferred’ into the redevelopment project.

4 Systems

Since Geddes’ early definition of the city as a living organism (Geddes 1915), systemic thinking has been increasingly used to understand and define the ‘organised complexity’ of urbanised territories (Lynch 1960; Jacobs 1961). It was not until the mid-late twentieth century, however, that the rise of environmental concerns on the impacts of unsustainable urban growth led to upgrade the ‘organic’ understanding of the urban phenomena in association to ecological and biological processes. In this context, systemic thinking began to be concretely applied to urbanisation in what American engineer Abel Wolman called ‘urban metabolism’ (Wolman 1965), that is, “the sum total of the technical and socio-economic processes that occur in cities, resulting in growth, production of energy, and elimination of waste” (Kennedy, Cuddihy, and Engel-Yan 2007: 1). According to this view, urbanisation has to be seen as a spatially projected system of material flows, i.e. the materialisation of these flows occurring as these intercept a specific physical context in determinate socio-economic conditions. Assumed as biological systems, “cities are not static objects, but active arenas marked by continuous energy flows and transformations of which landscapes and buildings and other hard parts are not permanent structures but transitional manifestations” (Berger 2006b: 239). This transient condition represents therefore the perfect ground for brownfield sites and similar disregarded urban spaces to embody that ‘positive waste’ addressed by Kevin Lynch in his seminal ‘Wasting Away’ (Lynch 1990), that is, “a normal stage in the cycling of material and activity, a stage in itself fascinating and full of potential” (Lynch 1972: 233). As a category of ‘waste landscapes’¹⁴, former industrial sites are at all the effects and purposes a material by-product of complex urban metabolic systems, naturally suitable for recycling and in the best cases even for up-cycling¹⁵.

The specific influence of systemic thinking and urban metabolism on the transformation of industrial landscapes can be roughly traced in landscape urbanism theories and models developed in the context of North American deindustrialising urban territories. The planning question posed by industrial change and the resulting accumulation of disused and often contaminated industrial sites has been intuitively addressed by landscape urbanist Alan Berger through its ground-breaking concept of ‘drosscape’ (Berger 2006a, 2006b). Assuming an investigative approach towards the causal and formal relationships between landscape and urbanisation, Berger identifies as drosscapes those “inevitable waste landscapes” produced by the healthy economic growth of developed urban systems—either as actual brownfields, derived from regressive/shrinking economic trends in older/inner city areas¹⁶, or as extensively ‘dissipated’ landscapes emerging from suburban sprawl. In this view, which assumes “the city as […] a huge ecological envelope of systematically productive and wasteful landscapes” (Berger 2006a: 202), disused industrial sites as a category of drosscape, or waste landscape, are to be ‘resurfaced’ and thus ‘reinscribed’ into productive urban cycles by means of new landscape design practices. These, according to Berger, have to satisfy two basic criteria: one of scale, by “shift a good amount of attention away from small-scale site design in order to consider howe we can improve regional landscape deficiencies of the urban realm” (Berger 2006a: 209), and one of structure, being “capable of adapting to changing circumstances while at the same time avoiding being too open-ended as to succumb to future schemes that are better organised” (Berger 2006a: 209). To this purpose, and to deal with drosscapes ‘productively’, Berger has developed a “systemic design” approach as well as the design-based strategy of “integrative reclamation”. At the base of both methods stands the commitment for contemporary designers to involve the communities that ‘inhabit’ these landscapes in transition, and to guide them through the re-scaping process. Following the concept of “large scale logic in smaller scale proposals”, systemic design proposes itself as a bottom-up procedural model aiming to integrate the existing economic, environmental and programmatic needs at the regional scale with site-based transformations (Berger 2009). To do that, the designer is required to understand first the underlying dynamics in the built environment as the context of transformation, by “conducting fieldwork while collecting and interpreting large-scale trends, data and phenomena” (Berger 2006a: 210), to cluster this information in so-called ‘systemic bundles’ and then to identify which of the identified territorial systemic flows are ‘projecting’ themselves as transformation issues on the site at stake (Fig. 4.10). The transformative design of altered or waste landscapes does not start at the end of this ‘systemic relational’ process, but is the process itself. The understanding of how natural and artificial systems dynamically operate in the landscape, across its regional and local scales, is central in Alan Berger’s approach. Particularly striking in this sense is his work on post-mining landscapes in the US Intermountain West—the mountainous region shared between the States of Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico –, an operative research aimed to outline reclamation as a design strategy for recovering altered landscapes (Berger 2002). Moving from Lynch’s ‘rehabilitation’ as a way to “return entire complex sites to a productive status or at least to an open and ecologically stable condition that permits future development” (Lynch 1972: 234), Berger proposes reclamation as a permanent landscape alteration, a reordering of ecological situations that “autonomously adjust to altered site conditions, thus forming new landscapes that emerge out of the original landscape” (Berger 2002: 181). Through experimental projects dealing with vast post-mining landscapes, such as the French Gulch concept plan in Breckenridge, Colorado, reclamation proved to be an integrative device (Berger 2008): it is capable of integrating through design the ecological, social and economic needs of the site with that of the (regional) community, and, at the same time, to integrate physical entities (materials, ecologies, flows) with non-physical ones (perceptions, histories, values). With this set of arguments, Berger puts forward that in reclaiming, recovering and reusing of brownfields, either as urban drosscapes or post-mining topographies, landscape should be always “treated more as a system than a form and more as an infrastructure than an object” (Berger 2008: 181)—a key principle in landscape urbanism.

Fig. 4.10

Systemic design as interface between site and regional flows, according to Alan Berger (2009)

The processing capacity of landscape in addressing contemporary ‘waste ecologies’—among which discarded industrial sites holds a key position—is particularly evident in the way of thinking and acting of landscape architect James Corner, the founder of Field Operations and co-author of renowned infrastructural conversion projects such as the New York based High Line and especially the Fresh Kills Park. As for Berger, Corner also believes that “the processes of urbanisation […] are much more significant for the shaping of urban relationships than are the spatial forms of urbanism in and of themselves” (Corner 2006: 28), thus calling for the planners and designers involved in the transformation of complex urban landscapes to shift the attention “away from the object qualities of space (whether formal or scenic) to the systems that condition the distribution and density of urban form” (Corner 2006: 28). In his ‘manifesto’ writing Terra Fluxus (Corner 2006), Corner proposes four themes (to be) assumed as central to the contemporary landscape urbanism project: process over time, the staging of surfaces, the operational or working method, and the imaginary. The first two are particularly relevant in connection to the ‘ecological’ understanding of brownfields and of their transformation/remodelling. With their ‘incremental’, ‘cumulative’ and ‘systemic’ nature, ecological processes can be assumed as a realistic reference for describing urbanisation as a type of environment, a man-made one, which constantly evolves through the time adjusting to the actual conditions. The spatial order in the urbanised landscape, central to the modernist architectural and planning tradition and aimed at ‘controlling-through-form’, must be therefore re-envisioned as a “spatio-temporal production”, that is, a dynamic process involving “all forces and agents working in the urban field [in] continuous networks of inter-relationships” (Corner 2006: 30). If ‘process’ explains the temporal dimension of Corner’s approach, ‘surface’ indicates the role of space in it. The surface as the ‘ground plane’, and not just the open, unbuilt space, constitutes the uniforming topography on which systemic flows and interactions take place, or ‘perform’. In this way, the horizontal surface becomes the ‘field of action’ of landscape urbanism, assuming the active role of urban infrastructure, one that “unlike architecture, which consumes the potential of a site in order to project […] sows the seeds of future possibility, staging the ground for both uncertainty and promise” (Corner 2006: 31). The surface as infrastructure has nothing to share with compositional design, but instead it supports and enhance the ‘operational logic’ of urban landscapes. The process and the surface are recurring in the already mentioned Fresh Kills project, the complex reclamation of the world’s largest landfill site on Staten Island, New York, of which Corner was committed after having won the international competition launched in 2003. The former landfill, 930 hectares of suburban wasteland interwoven with damaged fluvial and coastal ecosystems, is reclaimed spatially and temporally by means of a 30-years long phasing plan, whose development stages are rendered on and through an infrastructural matrix of ‘threads’, ‘maths’ and ‘islands’ bounding together biological processes and public usability in the emerging “lifescape” (Fig. 4.11). Though different in scale and scope, similarities can be found between Fresh Kills and the earlier IBA Emscher Park experience, as both (re)conceived the urban-regional landscape as infrastructure, one capable to deal with the current ‘logistics of disassembling’ (Bélanger 2007) through the twofold recovery of discarded sites and compromised ecologies.

Fig. 4.11

The system-based ‘synthetic ecologies’ in the Fresh Kill project by Field Operations (2001)

5 Infrastructure for/of Transformation

Despite their conceptual and sometimes cultural diversity, structuralist and systemic approaches share to all effects the same landscape holistic view on that terra incognita produced by industrial decline. In dealing with brownfields and discarded urban-industrial landscapes, structuralist models bring forward the underlying spatial organisation and rearrange it for future programmes, while systemic approaches address the material flows that intercept the area into new designed ecologies. What both strategies have in common is the willing to remodel, reshape, reclaim, recover these post-industrial landscape scars (Storm 2016), rather than remove them. In other words, they both deal with transformation, with the continuous rearrangement and improvement of what exists, that is, departing from and confronting with the ‘as found’ (Braae 2015). This holds no big surprise, however, as landscape is transformation by itself, no matter if interpreted as a layered sequence of spaces (structuralism) or as ecological processes (systemic design). Brownfield redevelopment as a planning practice incorporates transformation only when the already existing is processed and reprocessed multiple times, by means of a design that incorporates ‘unmeasurable’ landscape features such as indeterminacy and adaptability. In this way, by ‘intercepting time’ and rendering it in space, transformed brownfield sites “are manifesting as intermediate landscapes whose only lasting quality is the permanence of change”¹⁷ (Weilacher and Dettmar 2003: 81). Brownfields as landscapes, therefore, means to grasp the transient character of these spaces and to cultivate their change as an integral part of that ‘total landscape’ to which they belong, belonged and will belong too.

In addition to that, structuralist and systemic approaches have proved how the deep infrastructural significance of landscape is capable, when applied to brownfield redevelopment in particular, of generating many adaptable futures out of one single, given site. Whether considering as infrastructure the elementary networks and the formal relationships (structures) or the performative, functional linkages between the parts (systems), a holistic landscape approach to discarded industrial sites allows them to keep, yet to renew, their original centrality within the urbanised space. Infrastructure supports transformation, as much as transformation requires an infrastructure to take place. If such a space-time exchange worked out properly in the context of complex urban systems, such as metropolitan regions and urban-industrial agglomerations—where brownfield sites are indeed a relevant though not exclusive infrastructure for development –, it can be expected that, in infrastructurally-weak marginal contexts such as mountain areas, the same could be even more successful. The scattered and fragmented settlement pattern, the undefined urban-rural landscape interwoven with complex topographies, and the predominance of vast semi-natural, unbuilt spaces emphasises, in the mountain context, the structural/structuring relevance of brownfields as ‘heavy’, grounded elements. Transformation, therefore, should aim to enhance the future-oriented role of brownfields as systemic ‘anchor points’ of these wider, complex living environments. With its ‘infrastructural’ power and the natural inclination to ‘adaptability’ over time, a holistic landscape-based approach does represent a valid solution to deal with the challenging redevelopment and transformation of Alpine brownfield sites.