Two Thing Tuesday: Waste

I’m taking a bit longer to re-enter my regular routine than usual after a week visiting family in Florida. Yesterday, though, I managed to spend an hour reading a couple of articles on waste.

First, I read another of the little gaggle of previewed articles from a forth coming special issue of the Historical Archaeology on urban archaeology. This article is by Jonathan Gardner and titled, “What Makes a Wasteland? A Contemporary Archaeology of Urban Waste Sites.” Gardner continues his interesting work on the site of the 2012 London Olympics (see also his interesting piece in a JCA forum similarly dedicated to waste: JCA 10.1 [2023])

Gardner’s piece for Historical Archaeology explores two urban wastelands: one became the site for the 2012 London Olympics and the other a coastal site in the city of Edinburgh, Scotland. Both sites witness dumping at various points in their histories which facilitated the reclaiming of ground that was often inundated. Moreover, the Olympic site was home to business, industrial establishments, and neighborhoods. The decision to declare this site as a “wasteland” (or a brownfield in UK terms which means a site that had been developed and was available for future development) underscored the tension between concepts of urban wasteland as underutilized (and therefore possessing wasted potential) and as expired land with little value beyond complete redevelopment. For Gardner, the coastal area of Edinburgh, which also saw large scale dumping of construction debris represents another waste zone. Unlike the London Olympic site that saw large scale redevelopment, the stretch of debris laden beach in Edinburgh saw the potential of waste sites as places of recreation, creative work, and history. His study of the bricks, for example, offered a window in the thriving Scottish brick industry of the early 20th century. The use of construction debris for spontaneous expressions of creativity and temporary recreational installations for bonfires, barbecues, and beachside afternoons. Like the London Olympic site, this site showed the continued potential was not just implicit in waste sites, but emergent through their daily use. Thus waste constantly blinks between its potential and actual role in urban areas and Gardner stresses this aspect as “dissonance and dialectical seeing” present in waste sites.

Leila Papoli-Yazdi and William Hogland’s offer similar perspectives on wastelands and waste in their recent article in the European Journal of Archaeology, “Wreckage Installation: Towards an Archaeology of Southern Sweden’s Heterotopias” EJA 26.2 (2022). In their piece they studied collections of abandoned vehicles, farm equipment, and everyday objects arranged within and around farms on the island of Öland in south-eastern Sweden. Papoli-Yazdi and Hogland argue that these spaces are Foucauldian heterotopias where different functions, “slivers of time,” and spatial arrangements demonstrate the power of heterotopic places as creative as well as mnemonic. In the abandoned, but curated collection of discarded automobiles and farm equipment on Öland the authors found the same tensions that define and describe wastelands in London and Edinburgh.

This work fascinates me in part because I’ve had a long interest in wastelands and under utilized spaces in urban areas. For example, I’ve been mulling over a project that documents surface parking lots in Grand Forks, ND and documents material found in these lots. This material should reveal the diversity of activities taking place in these places which are often suspended between “waste” — especially as understood as wastes of space — and as potential spaces for a wide range of activities from recreation to simple survival.