Terrain vague: place and landscape
In an article in the Guardian on 8 December 2007, Robert Macfarlane described a walk around the perimeter of London’s Olympic Games site with Iain Sinclair. The walk was to be in Sinclair’s words, “…a complex transitional ecology of CGI imagery, doomed allotments and virtual arcadias.” Light industrial spaces, car-wreckers yards, abandoned beer cans, graffiti and floral excess typified the walk. The idea that urban landscapes such as this have any value - cultural, historical, aesthetic, ecological (anything other than monetary) - is not central to most regeneration practice in the UK.
Stephen Gill’s photographs of the Lower Lea Valley published in October 2007 under the title “Archaeology in Reverse” capture the infinite variety and richness of the area. They are a record of the area prior to its clearance and new life as London’s Olympic Park. They are also an inspiration for planners, urban designers and landscape architects who can see value in transitional and spontaneous landscapes. The sanitised images of the Olympic proposals seem dumb and one-dimensional in comparison.
The connections between the imagery of Gill, landscape urbanism movement and the writings of James Corner and others are obvious. The idea of terrain vague – a concept denoting vacant land which is not always even physically vacant as an unused resource within the city – has been around for some time. The concept contains both the lack of something as well as possibilities and openness to something new. Celebrating the culture of the city and valuing the terrain vague of post-industrial transitional areas have been keynotes of the inspirational regeneration of the Emscher Park in Germany’s Ruhrgebeit. Among a great deal of environmentally-sensitive new development (much of it of very high quality) this former heartland of coal and steel has found new uses for industrial buildings, consolidated others as romantic ruins and landscape features, and treated its spontaneous landscapes as valuable urban woodlands and wildlife havens.
Many of these principles and approaches to post-industrial landscapes will be embedded in our forthcoming report on Sheffield which will be completed in early 2008. See this link for further details.
Dec 30th 2007
This ‘terrain vague’ is a real minority sport. I love it! But Drosscape still seems a better, more robust description than a phrase that’s slightly cheesey St Germain or the title of a remaindered album. If in the U.K. we did not protect our countryside, what would these unused middle kingdoms on the periphery of towns and cities be like?
Dec 30th 2007
Yes it is a minority sport - just like haikyo. I think drosscape has more negative (and American) connotations than terrain vague and it probably couldn’t be the title of a Jean Luc Ponty album. For me the issue is that many people involved in changing towns, cities and countryside in the UK don’t seem to be able to accept that environments of different ages, characters and habitats can co-exist - everything has to be simplified and cleaned up to make way for new development. You won’t find volume housebuilders so interested in haikyo, drosscape or terrain vague - or even spontaneous environments. The Duisburg developments show an alternative approach.
Feb 13th 2008
sorry, i never picked up your reply. your right. but our obsession with cleanliness and tidiness now seems to pervade. just look at the food we eat and what’s acceptable or not. although everyone laughed at the arrival of minimalist art a long time ago - remember those bricks at the Tate? - for some reason minimalism seems to pervade everything just now. and it doesn’t tend to come cheap!