Cities in North America are undergoing an organizational shift as urbanization increasingly expands outward, horizontally and diffusely. Left in the wake of decentralization and urban restructuring are sites of waste. When viewed by a culture obsessed with clean and orderly space these sites are reified as valueless entities and classified as waste landscapes. They are exiled to precincts beyond public perception.
The conventional approaches to waste landscapes in urban design appear ill suited to address these emergent challenges. All too often designers prioritize centralized and technocratic methodologies that continue to reinforce dualistic processes. The designs place culture in opposition to nature, construction in opposition to landscape, and everyday space in opposition to waste landscapes.
This thesis implements a multivalent approach within the domain of landscape. Landscape is no longer subjugated as supporting cultural operations. It is reframed as a constructed ground written by culture. Landscape becomes an author of an unfolding and interwoven process binding ecology and society. The thesis investigates the conditions surrounding Cincinnati’s Mill Creek and how an integrative approach can reintroduce a public realm into waste landscapes and create awareness and incremental change.
The integrative approach is explored at fifteen public sites along the Mill Creek that pass through the proposed Mill Creek Greenway. The parametric design strategy addresses issues of watershed health and management by introducing interventions that prioritize ecological and cultural processes over static form-based design. To foster interventions flexible to local conditions and the inevitability of change the design deploys a batch of programmatic ingredients called the kit of program, a kit of parts to unify the architectural language of the sites, an organizational framework for future interventions, and a representational focus that seeks to decouple the picturesque from landscape.
At the root of the thesis problem is society’s obstructed relationship to waste. To be in an environment without waste is impossible. Despite the best efforts of culture, waste has a way of moving out of the shadows and seeping back into our lives. We are surrounded by waste and the infrastructural systems created to separate us from it.
Waste is not something to be eradicated. This view is too simplistic. We are what we eat and we are what we waste. Not only are we defined by our consumption but also by our wasting. Waste landscapes can be reframed and revalued through design as a constructed ground capable of dislocating the most conventional ways of seeing in society. The approach taken by this thesis seeks to recognize the diversity of forces acting within the contemporary urban landscape in a hope that a new alignment might offer innovative ways seeing, and more importantly, acting in waste landscapes.