Tags: reclamation

The Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Science recently released a report finding that polluted and damaged ecosystems have the potential to recover within a lifetime (average of 46 years), or even as little as a decade. Researchers studied 240 sites affected by both natural and human-induced disturbances and concluded that, with adequate restoration and cleanup work, even a heavily polluted ecosystem can revitalize itself.

The 30-acre Bethlehem Steel Mill on Lake Erie was in operation for almost 80 years and was closed in the mid-1970s.  Contaminated with steel slag and industrial waste, the site was idle for 30 years.  In May 2002, the EPA awarded the City of Lackawanna a $200,000 grant to investigate the site’s potential for reuse. 

A nice little segment about Freshkills Park has been posted on the NBC Nightly News site.

Cattails, those wetland mainstays, are a becoming a popular tool for use in phytoremediation, the use of plants to remove and control environmental pollutants.  Arsenic, pharmaceuticals, even chemicals from explosives–cattails have been used in absorbing all of them.  This sounds promising to us. 

We’re often asked whether there are other landfills in the world that have been turned into parks and natural areas.  There are, in fact, a lot of them, including many hundreds to thousands of unofficial dump sites and historic landfills whose operation preceded any type of government regulation (Flushing Meadows, we’re looking at you). 

Dutch architecture firm Arons en Gelauff has won a design competition to adapt a pair of former sewage treatment silos in Amsterdam into a multi-functional cultural complex.  The design tops one of the silos with a splashy, open-rooftop playground and wraps it with a green wall. 

Interdisciplinary environmental arts organization Ecoartspace has opened a physical space in Soho.  Current featured exhibit is “habitat”, an artist studio shed built of reclaimed materials.  The space will also host discussions, screenings, panels, readings and performances centering around art that concerns itself with environmental issues.

This awesome 200-hectare public park in Duisburg Nord, Germany was transformed from a coal-fired steel production plant into a giant industrial playground. Latz + Partner’s design emphasized the value of memory: the goal was to create a space former mill workers could explore with their grandchildren and still be able to identify the form and function of the old machinery. 

In the early 1980s, Cairo was experiencing the developmental crunch of growing population and limited civic resources.  A 1984 study found the green space per capita in Cairo to be roughly equivalent to a human footprint.  In the mid ’90s, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture began construction on Al-Azhar Park on the derelict Darassa site, a 500-year-old, 74-acre mound of rubble located in the heart of the city.