Abstract

Much like prisons, cemeteries, psychiatric facilities and sanatoriums, urban waste disposal and treatment ‘institutions’ have been traditionally pushed outside the city’s boundaries, in an effort to retain the health of the social and urban fabric at its optimum state.

The highly urban system of storing, managing and processing solid waste, wastewater, and toxic waste has successfully occupied the periphery and the rural, far from the general public’s eyes and consciousness; any scrutiny, or understanding even of the socio-environmental ramifications relevant to the superfluous and reckless culture of consumption, can be buried under a pile of its residues.

Forgotten somewhere in the hinterlands, waste disposal and treatment facilities, although seemingly mundane, have been posing highly concerning questions regarding public health, technology, aesthetic and visual impacts, and the quality of urban life at large. Today, well within the anthropocene, and with the world’s population increasing at a frenetic rate, a new, resilient waste management prototype is indispensable: one that moves beyond an outdated system of infrastructures that have already been crumbling into bits and pieces.

Through three case studies – Freshkills Park, Garraf Waste Landfill and Hiriya Landfill Rehabilitation – that have shifted the narrative of waste processing from a dystopian wasteland to a multipurpose infrastructure with a pleiad of benefits for urban inhabitants, this research will seek to discuss the latest design practices in international projects that are initiating change.

Simultaneously, the paper will aim to uncover the potential of waste sites as instigators of wider urban regeneration processes, with waste management incorporated in the design process of a healthy city. The aim is to highlight the derelict spaces of waste facilities as essential actors of the healthy city, and as grounds of opportunity for new, inclusive, accessible public spaces.