Re-presenting transgressive ecologies: post-industrial sites as contested terrains.

In an age where urban agglomerations are shaped by rapid economic and demographic changes, post-industrial sites are interpreted as symbols of the failure of the industrial age and location of essential, sustainable and environmentally just renewal. Both understandings are based on constructions of “culture” and “nature” as dichotomic and normative. This paper proposes an alternative framework that constructs post-industrial sites as locations for the ongoing negotiation of human and non-human processes, as passive ground and active agent in the constant and continuous remaking of place. Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord and the High Line in New York City are highly visible examples that engage and showcase successional ecologies in fundamentally different ways, but both ultimately posit “ecology” as the redemptive agent for emergentpost-postindustrial places. While Duisburg-Nord engages emergent ecologies as an exploratory, open-ended and fluid interaction between human intervention and non-human process, the High Line replaces actual successional ecologies with artificial ones based on picturesque traditions. These representations and aesthetications of ecological processes construe both sites as icon and instrument of deterministic-hegemonial and transgressive-marginal agendas, emphasising their role in postmodern and post-colonial discourses on the nature of urbanity and sustainable urban renewal – discourses central to current ideas of “landscape urbanism” and “ecological urbanism”. The “right to the city”, in contemporary parlance, implicitly comprises a “right to urban nature”. “Aesthetics of (ecological) performance” vs. “(ecological) performance of aesthetics” will serve as a key dialectic in the analysis of the relationship between environmental aesthetics and environmental justice as it is played out on post-industrial sites and attempts to construe versions and visions of “urban nature”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]