Molten Wastelands
Written as part of my BA Geography course, this conceptual essay explores ruination, aesthetics, decay, and the role landscape architects play in shaping experiences of urban modernity. It charts the genealogical contours of ‘urban wastelands’ as capitalist modernity’s resources and discards, unpacking and dramatizing the aesthetic politics, tensions, and paradoxes that underpin urbanization and urban as processes. The paradoxes latent in the ‘urban wastelands’ of the post-industrial city set up a problem space in contemporary landscape architecture concerning whether we can transform industrial ruins and ‘wastelands’ into parks in a way that acknowledges their past uses or whether the ruin fetish is inescapable.