REHABILITATIONS / CASE STUDIES

Today there are no remaining areas left to waste disposal, still the environment requires a global planning of the waste disposal management, which should connect the different features of the land in order to lead to the right location of the landfill as public space. So the waste disposal turns to be a means of building new public spaces.
The planning act of the disposal plants management and building should involve a sort of landscape design of integration in the urban areas (areas of public interest and use) and must not be the result of a situation of emergency.
The planning act should moreover focus on gaining consent at the time the decisive options are selected; in particular, it should be aimed at restoring a series of appropriate functions to the area. Generally speaking, when adopting a final solution for a landfill site, a study of the morphological trend and layout of the finished site implies an important choice of relationship that the recovered area will produce on its natural and cultural surroundings, thus determining the type of future relations to be established. Accordingly, the structure of the environment, its history, continuities, and the presence of features of interest on the territory should be re-evaluated specifically, defining the means of inclusion of the volume into the surrounding area, the functions to be carried out and the vegetation to be used in covering the area, using the waste mass as a flexible element in the reconstruction of a coherent and regenerated landscape.
The above concepts have been successfully applied in numerous projects realized throughout the world. A selection of cases of requalification of old landfills of particular relevance from a landscaping, architectural and functional viewpoint is listed below:

→ Garraf Waste Landfill / Vall d’en Joan, Barcelona, Spain / Batlle i Roig Architects / 2001 – in progress
→ Moerenuma Park / Sapporo, Japan / Isamu Noguchi + Architect 5 Partnership / 1998 – 2005
→ Freshkills Park / New York, USA / James Corner Field Operations / 2002 – in progress
→ Valdemingómez / Madrid, Spain / Israel Alba / 1999 – in progress
→ Hiriya Landill and Ariel Sharon Park / Tel Aviv, Israel / Latz+Partner / 2004 – in progress
→ Tramore Valley Park / Cork, Ireland / Brady Shipman Martin / 2012 – in progress
→ Byxbee Park / Palo Alto, California, USA / Hargreaves Associates / 1988 – 2003
→ Chambers Gully / Adelaide, Australia / opened in 1997
→ The Sea Forest – Umi-no-Mori / Tokyo, Japan / Tadao Ando Architect and Associates / 2007 – in progress
→ Jordan Valley Ecology Park / Hong Kong, China / Andrew Lee King Fun & Associates Architects Ltd / opened in 2012
→ Balloon Park / Albuquerque, USA