Edge Ecologies

EDGE ECOLOGIES

Speculative futures of wasteland ecologies

Design Exploration: Part 2

“What is special about a place is not some romance of a pre-given collective identity or the eternity of the hills. Rather, what is special about the place is precisely that throwntogetherness, the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now (itself drawing on a history and geography of then and theres); and a negotiation which must take place within and between both human and nonhuman.”

Doreen Massey, For Space

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A GLOSSARY OF WASTELANDS

THE EDGE & THE WASTELAND PERSONIFIED

A theoretical understanding of Glasgow’s urban matrix.

DESIGN INTENTION

Exposing the edge.

DESIGN DISCOVERY

Designing through making.

VISUALIZING EDGE COMBINATIONS

METAL AS MEDIUM

EMBOSSED PRINTS

DESIGN IMPLEMENTATION

Making through unmaking.

TESSELLATIONS: micro- and macro- expandable and replicable modes of deconstruction

DIGITAL UNMAKING: mesh manipulation (through mesh augmentation/omission and model splitting)

PYSICAL UNMAKING: TECTONIC MASSING MODEL

IMPOSING A SYSTEM OF DYNAMIC ENTANGLEMENTS

TESTING INDETERMINATE DESIGN

A wasteland test plot.

WASTELAND TYPOLOGY: Dalbeth Cemetery

DAYS 0 - 24

SPECULATIVE FUTURES

Making the edge.

IN PLAN

TECTONIC MASSING MODEL IN MOTION VIEWSHEDS

REPRESENTING INDETERMINATE DESIGN / CAPTURING THE DYNAMIC EDGE Points, lines, and meshes.

The following glossary provides a frame of reference for the following theoretical text contained within this workbook, partially compiled in semester one of this academic year and further developed throughout the second semester to provide a comprehensive theoretical underpinning of this Edge Ecologies project.

ANTHROPOCENE – A new geologic era, in which human activities are represented in a marked change in the geologic record. In the present-day context, these are represented in hybridized landscapes of human and more-than-human elements (for example, the edge ecologies described in this portfolio).

CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY – A study of the relationship between culture and place, exploring the cultural artifacts of people and their distribution over space, and how these culminate in the creation of place and identity.

DARK ECOLOGY – Philosopher Timothy Morton’s theoretical term for the study of our surroundings with a greater understanding of our impact on them. Specifically, Morton likens the ecological awareness of the Anthropogenic era to a Moebius strip, connected and twisted to a side. Citing the 1992 film Blade Runner, whose protagonist becomes the pursued in competition, Morton challenges our perception of human and more-than-human actors, and their impact on our present-day ecologies.

DROSSCAPE – An urban design framework proposed by MIT professor Alan Berger, who describes all urbanized areas as the waste products of defunct economic and industrial processes.

ECO-EVANGELISM – A stringent, nearly fanatical embrace of popular ecological and biodiversity design principles (for example, only planting native species without considering the ramifications of climate change to a

site’s future conditions).

EDGE EXEMPLAR – A term created for this design-research project, describing the post-industrial sites that feature hybridized anthropogenic landscapes, partially reclaimed by the natural elements or ‘wasteland ecologies.’

EDGE EXPOSED – A term created for this design-research project, describing the future-post-industrial-sites, or sites whose current human purpose will inevitably become obsolete, succumbing to the changing cultural and technological sites, ultimately becoming post-industrial sites. These sites feature interventions of ‘wasteland ecologies,’ inspired by the edge exemplars surveyed during fieldwork.

EDGELAND – A transitional, liminal area of space to be found on the boundaries of country and town as described by Farley & Roberts in their book Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness. Edgelands are thematically linked by the fallen monuments, wastelands, and dumping ground of human activity.

HETEROTOPIA – French philosopher

Paul-Michel Foucault’s conceptual interpretation of socio-cultural spaces that form an amalgamation, or layered, reality of desirable and undesirable—or utopian and dystopian—places which, cumulatively, have a variety of meanings to its dwellers and their perception of the world, not all immediately obvious.

INSURGENT ECOLOGIES – A term created for this design-research project to describe resilient forms of vegetation

that thrive in the post-industrial urban context. These insurgent ecologies, which in contemporary ecological debate are termed as invasive, non-native weeds, spontaneously self-seed to form interstitial wildernesses within the heterotropic realities of post-industrial cities, creating biodiverse urban mosaic habitats. Within the Scottish context, this includes spontaneously growing new hybrid plant species, such as Oxford Ragwort and Sticky Groundsel, as well as non-native garden escapes, such as Michaelmas Daisy. It can also include invasive species such as bracken, bramble, golden ragwort, coltsfoot, fennel, foxglove, fetch, Epilobium, Himalayan balsam, and butterfly bush.

INTERSTITIAL SPACE (specifically, INTERSTITIAL WILDERNESS) – The in-between places that represent a transition in recognizable landscape typology, process, and the human and more-than-human dynamics typically associated with these typologies. Within this school of thought, interstitial wilderness sites do not correspond with a recognized archetype of the natural, and represent the confusion of how we perceive human and natural agency as creating the physical composition of site. Interstitial spaces, or gaps, are deeply linked to the representational space (described below) as gaps between power and vernacular landscape typologies, where human actors are not the primary force shaping the landscape.

replace those typical of the programmatically designed ones. Described by Franck & Stevens in their 2007 book Loose Space, this term encompasses the replacement of these actors with alternative users which, in the context of this project, refers to the wasteland ecologies. These alternative users appropriate the space alongside the recognized, official users. Or, again in the context of this project, are represented by the co-habitation in the heterotropic interventions in the edgelands.

MARXISM - A philosophical system of socioecological analysis in which a material interpretation of historical development is employed to understand social conflict and transformation.

MASSING - an architectural practice of manipulating, configuring, and visualizing the overall configuration of the building.

OBSCENERY – A term developed by Iain Sinclair, Welsh writer and filmmaker, to describe negative transitions in the landscape. Used to chronicle the transition of ‘Beckton Alp,’ a landfill, to a ski slope in London’s East End neighborhood. Relating directly to the psychogeographic of space, and how our perception of place is nuanced, only seeing the possibility through onsite drift analysis. Within the context of this project, obscenery can be linked to the return of future-post-industrial sites to a hybrid, naturalized state where humans and more-than-human wasteland ecologies co-habit successfully for a dynamic and resilient ability of the land to adapt to climate change and human activity.

land, and their dynamic play between the human and more-than-human represented in materiality, a wavering parallel.

PULVERIZATIONS - Coined by Richard Smithson in his 1968 essay “A Sedimentation of the Mind,” describes the processes of decay (such as oxidation, hydration, carbonization, solution) that deconstruct, or ‘de-architecturize,’ the built environment. This design-research project utilizes speculative interventions that portray decay as the final stage of deconstruction.

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY – A school of thought at the intersection of psychology and geography that allows for the interrogation landscapes, and how specifically the forgotten, discarded, or marginalized urban landscapes (for example, edgelands), impact the perception of space. Termed by French theorist Guy Debord in 1955, and inspired by the Situationist International movement, the study of psychogeography relies heavily on the act of “drifting” or embodying the flâneur to experience losing oneself in the city. Will Self, author of Psychogeography (2007), describes this act as a “means of dissolving the mechanized matrix which compresses the space-time continuum” and necessary to understand the complex relationships between history and myth. Within the context of this project, psychogeography, and the interrogation of the scales of space and time, provide the basis for transcending space-time and subverting the post-industrial (edge exemplar) with the future-post-industrial (edge exposed).

interstitial spaces imperfectly formed by the social or cultural fabric of space. These are typically dynamic places of resistance, found in the gaps between landscapes of power or vernacular landscapes that, within the context of this design-research project, are representative pf the insurgent ecologies (wasteland ecologies) utilized in interventions.

REIFICATION - The treatment of something immaterial as a material thing. In Marxist belief systems, the process of reification is defined by the social relations perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them, or attributes of some product of the relation. Wasteland ecologies are both material and immaterial objects as the product of the relationships and systems of defunct development (see drosscape theory).

SYMPATHETIC UNION - Phrase used by Tim Ingold in his essay “Taking a thread for a walk.” Questioning the order and process of creation, ultimately responding to a constant process of construction and destruction, the two states of which are never finalized and neither of which are ever fully realized (example, a ball of yarn is never fully wound). In this way, construction and destruction collide in a symbiotic relationship, materially realized in the wasteland ecologies of Glasgow and speculative futures of Edge Ecologies.

LOOSE SPACE – The area that occurs when the assigned use of a landscape typology ends, allowing new users to

PARALLEL ECOLOGY- a new concept of nature; one where the future of coexistence is based on man’s acknowledgement of an impending environmental collapse. In this case, the future-post-industrial, or sites of edges exposed. Edge ecologies of the waste-

REPRESENTATIONAL SPACE – Henri Lefebvre’s Marxist interpretation of spaces that challenge the capitalist creation of space. Representational spaces transcend space created to facilitate an occupation (capitalistic purpose) by providing ambivalent or

TESSELLATION - A combination of one or more geometric shapes, called tiles, with no overlaps or gaps. Utilized within this project workbook to reference the combined organizational strategies design to deconstruct or order the landscape.

URBAN COMMON – In his 1991 book The Ecology of Urban Habitats, which describes the flora and fauna of cityscapes where the human impact is most greatly felt, O.L. Gil-

bert coined this phrase to describe the human ecology of the contemporary urban wasteland. These are places which serve a variety of multi-faceted purposes for different human actors, whose chosen activities within these interstitial spaces are welcomed by the apparent relaxation of accepted legal and social conventions. This terminology can be linked to the historic notion of “waste land” as common land (that which was not cultivated or used for any specific purpose or occupation) and which was free for foraging, hunting, and other unspecified activities by the community.

THE THIRD LANDSCAPE – Famed landscape architect Gilles Clement’s term for human-disturbed land through which natural processes still occur. These result in the hybridized representational spaces resulting from a mix of human and more-than-human actor agency. The utilization of the third landscape in design practice rejects the ‘eco-evangelism’ described on page 8, and re-envisions interstitial wilderness, and its place within the urban fabric as an alternative to the contemporary, accepted tabula rasa practice of developing edgelands and brownfield sites. Gilles Clement showcases the third landscape in precedence projects Tamed Neglected Land and Garden in Motion.

TRAUMASPACE – A categorization of space that links shared trauma globally. These are places transformed physically and psychologically by suffering. Edge exemplar, post-industrial sites surveyed during fieldwork can be linked by this notion of traumaspace, as areas defunct of occupational purpose in the post-industrial context.

THE EDGE & THE WASTELAND PERSONIFIED

A theoretical understanding of Glasgow’s urban matrix.

“Glasgow made the Clyde and the Clyde made Glasgow.” Inspired by the typologies of boundaries found along the River Clyde, the materiality of which reveals a storied past of industry and urban development as a direct result of a city’s proximity to its water source, I began my line of inquiry by questioning the validity of contemporary ecological credos on what make up healthy ecosystems and our collective perception of derelict land—of the spaces composed of what we call ‘wasteland ecologies.’

This small, brackish water body provided a gateway for Glasgow to the world at large, putting Glasgow on the map, but a subsequent loss of industry resulted in the evolution of the river edge. Today, natural and industrial edges are intermingled to uncover a dynamic cohort of human and non-human actors working in tandem—and at times odds—along the River’s edge.

These edge ecologies represent a cultural landscape that showcases the here-and-now, as well as the thenand-there. The form and materiality of past and future amalgamated within the edge epitomizes the anthropogenic era of the Clyde, Glasgow, its surrounding region, and the world at-large, has been shaped by a combination of human and non-human actors working together and against the global trends

of climate change, industry, and social revolution. These edges are dynamic, malleable, and illusive, and the wasteland ecologies that fill them a direct result of their storied past.

American dockland grasses, for example were brought to Glasgow as a result of the shipping industry and can be interpreted as proxies for those livelihoods and lifestyles long gone, epitomizing the liquid dynamics of the city, highlighting both its ruination and resiliency.

These wasteland ecologies have rebound and filled a void when the human element is removed but the infrastructure remains. This vegetation— typically villainized as non-native invasive species can also be interpreted as critical elements of a biologically rich open mosaic habitat that has the capacity to survive in the novel urban environment.

Simultaneously, wastelands are cultural constructs. Historic analysis of wastelands reveals an alternative perspective—one lost but now resurging in the contemporary theoretical discourse of ‘loose’ and ‘representational space’. Prior to extensive landownership (particularly during the Medieval Era), “waste land” was synonymous with “common land,” or such places where any person could utilize the wil-

derness for their own means, rejecting the specification of landuse for any one occupation.

These representational spaces—places where human actors are not the primary forces shaping the landscape— occur within gaps of human occupancy of the heterotopia, dynamic amalgamations of spaces and places caused by a flux in the landscape or a change of purpose from a landscape of power or a vernacular landscape.

These interstitial spaces, specifically interstitial wildernesses, are home to the insurgent ecologies of wastelands and human actors, alike. These spontaneous places of resistance within the urban fabric form urban commons that inspire a multitude of democratic uses for both human and more-than-human actors who challenge the accepted conventions of the urban fabric.

In short, edges epitomize the urban wastelands, the ecologies of which transcend eco-centric perspectives of the science to incorporate the human element. This notion of edge ecologies prompts us to expand our ecocentric view of ecology to incorporate social and historical frameworks, revealing a physical manifestation of the dynamic relationship of city to water and water to city that has spanned generations.

DESIGN INTENTION

Exposing the edge.

“City and countryside will have to be involved in a new symbiosis, polarised between biotechnical systems in the city and new wilderness in the countryside. City ecology will change from a science which is predominantly for the analysis and protection of the remaining landscape into a discipline which actively develops new forms of urban and cultural landscapes.”

Thomas Sieverts, Cities without Cities

My design intention was to provide a series of speculative futures that reframe the urban context, centering and celebrating wastelands. Highly speculative and deeply destructive, my aim was to challenge contemporary landscape architectural practice that fails to address long-held ecological credes within a changing climate, and the social, political, and economic structures that continuously dismantle space under the guise of progress.

In a world where the discourse of our profession consistently promotes erasure through design with rhetoric that totes the “revitalization” of space, “placemaking,” etc., I seek to highlight the hyper-local—and globalized—processes that have generated these ‘wastelands.’ Centuries of beings have made space through the physical inhabitation of place, and yet contemporary design fails to recognize this. Exploring indeterminate, non-static design through speculative—perhaps dystopian—futures has enabled me to challenge practice and contemporary urban design ethos.

To this end, I selected three future-post-industrial sites, forming a cross-section from the globalized and industrial Glasgow Airport to the local and natural Kilpatrick Hills. The three sites the Tarmac Douglasmuir Sand & Gravel Quarry, Clyde Shopping Centre, and Glasgow Airport, all share a geologic and anthropogenic materiality (gravel mined from the river bedrock), a water table (tributaries of the Clyde), and—most importantly—the inevitability of obsolescence. Through a series of proposed destructive interventions--malleable, replicable, and dynamic in nature—edges are and designed to recreate the wasteland edge ecology.

Edges are the result of making and unmaking. Small fissures in the ground amalgamate to larger in the landscape. Infinite scales with infinite possibili-

ties.—designing the edge is a process of creating granular, multi-scalar beauty. A “sympathetic union” between the process of construction and destruction, both of which are never finished and neither of which ever reach a finalized state. Our environs are always in flux and never entirely one state or the other. This tension between construction and deconstruction is realized in the versatile and dynamic edges of urban wastelands, in the post-industrial and future-post-industrial.

This intervention also allows me to question the validity of contemporary ecological credos on what make up healthy ecosystems and our collective perception of derelict land—of the spaces composed of what we call ‘wasteland ecologies.’

Although highly contentious, increasingly, urban ecologists are calling for a revised vision of the urban ecosystem and a shift from resource intensive practices that attempt to protect or return to a static landscape long gone to strategies that will embrace the dynamic evolution of space and biodiversity, evident, as I am positing, in the edges of human and morethan-human prototypical of wasteland ecologies.

With the understanding that all nature has been impacted by humans, and that there is truly no natural nature anymore, I propose strategically rethinking the human relationship to the interstitial wilderness of edgelands and wastelands, and their place within the urban context. In the post-industrial urban context, what composes our city’s landscapes where cycles of industry and ways of life are disrupted? What is appropriate vegetation to contribute to the multi-faceted ecosystem services provided by greenspace? What makes a space dangerous or derelict? History is riddled with failed land management techniques, why not continue to ques-

tion those in the present.

While eco-evangelistic land management techniques calls for their eradication, I explore their place within the post-industrial urban context, their psychogeographic impact on our collective perception of space, and how a series of speculative interventions to promote their growth across future-post industrial sites could challenge our negative perception of their growth amidst our cities’ streetscape. Robert Smithson states “The city gives the illusion that earth does not exist,” the reciprocal human/nature existence within wasteland ecologies challenges this notion. As previously stated, these edges of the wasteland could be reinterpreted as critical elements of a biologically diverse urban mosaic habitat.

The propagation of these urban wastelands, and the renaissance of post-industrial cities, has necessitated our rethinking of how these spaces are developed. Irresponsible development exacerbates inequities and perpetuates ecological destruction, placing both human and more-than-human at risk. Contemporary discourse on spatial theory and eco-evangelism has perpetuated the synonymity of wasteland ecology and dereliction. Reframing wastelands as a place where humans and more-than-humans co-habit successfully in the urban context will provide a wealth of opportunity for the future resiliency of urban space.

Drawing inspiration from Marxist and feminist geographer, Doreen Massey, who poignantly describes this amalgamation of space within the cultural landscape, provides a basis for rejecting static, or determinate design of public space, or the urban commons, and provides a basis for generating a series of landscapes made malleable by the designer, for the user (see model making work).

Utilizing the notion of “edges exposed” that I developed in semester one, I’d like to utilize various pulverizations, or modes of destruction for the formation of micro-edges that can be compiled into a macro-edge, developing a symbiosis of biotechnical systems of wilderness and urban ecologies to create the urban wilderness, or wasteland, described in my semester one project, forming a new cultural and urban landscape that perpetuates and subverts the cycle of post- and future-post-industrialization. Pulverizations can also be thought of as ecological anthropogenic interventions.

Supported by the notion of psychogeography, which prioritizes an introspective analysis of the intersection of psychology and geography, revealing forgotten and overlooked aspects of the lost city that subconsciously impacts our perception of where we dwell.

Another conceptual underpinning of this installation is the urban design framework of drosscape by urban designer Alan Berger of MIT, which perceives all urbanity as the waste products of defunct economic and industrial processes that require adaptive reuse projects, calling for the “creative destruction of the obsolete.” Each intervention seeks to repurpose industrialized landscapes by subverting the notion of time, recreating the interstitial wilderness, or Third Landscape.

Interventions will showcase the heterotopia of space in an effort to challenge perceptions of waste land, and the acceptance of forms of spontaneous, insurgent ecologies that compose interstitial wilderness sites that are viewed as wastelands.

neous development of the wild within the urban context, the solidification of freedom or flexibility for human thought and action, and the enmeshment of the human/nature relationship over time.

Through notions of the inevitability of decay (drosscape theory) and landscape urbanism (prioritizing landscape as the primary—not secondary—element within the fabric of the urban matrix), can a flux of constructive deconstruction aid in the evolution of our urban matrix? Can destruction pave—or depave—the way for a revitalization and restructuring of the urban matrix and our society at large?

Together, these heterotopias can create rich communities of reciprocal human/ nature relationships that work in tandem, finding acceptance in the relationship of these two actors in the urban context and accepting the resulting landscapes as rich, interstitial wildernesses that form biodiverse urban mosaic habitats for humans and morethan-humans alike.

chantment of wastelands and the power of these urban commons will also challenge determinate design prevalent within the practice of landscape architecture, and provide insight into our specie’s future, intertwined relationship with more-than-human ecologies, and how this sympathetic union shapes the landscape around us.

Benefits to re-envisioning these forms of insurgent wilderness sites, or wasteland ecologies, is the ability to accommodate—and let flourish—the sponta-

Through decomposition, are we revealing the layers of time? An organized dismantling of site, constructing through deconstructing, provides a novel means of destruction that subverts the post-industrial and the future-post-industrial. Could processes of decay, or pulverizations, facilitate the final stage of this construction? Thereby subverting the perception of decay and wastelands at large, what they contribute to our urban matrices, and capitalizing on our fascination of the sublime nature of ruination? Could the organizational layers of decomposition proposed reveal layers of our history and the notion of deep time, at large (again, subverting our perception of wasteland ecologies and dereliction by harnessing the power of the sublime nature of decay)?

Focusing a design project on the en-

“Be humble in recognizing ignorance. Be better agents in deciphering what is happening.”

John Darbyshire, in conversation

DESIGN DISCOVERY

Designing through making.

VISUALIZING EDGE COMBINATIONS

The edge combiner model developed in semester one of this academic year is here used for process work to imagine a series of combined microand macro-edges, augmenting the multiplicity and ‘throwntogetherness’ of the wasteland.

Each typology was surveyed across different site visits to Glasgow.

Model Citation: Morrone, G., 2021. Edge Ecologies (Semester 1). [Art] (University of Edinburgh).

METAL AS MEDIUM

Metal work has provided an alternative form of fieldwork this year, allowing for a creative connection to Glasgow’s steel industry whose boom-and-bust was so instrumental in the formation of Glasgow’s hyper-local wasteland ecologies. The use of waste metal from ECA’s metal workshop allowed for the generation of unique pieces that can be implemented on the landscape and utilized to create malleable design.

Representing landscape through waste materials of the built environment and industry is theoretically informed

through notions of the inevitability of decay (drosscapsim).

By nature of varying timelines of material transformation between different types of steel utilized to create tessellation interventions and the relative period of decay juxtaposed with the natural, the use of metal also showcases the temporal complexity of the edge— an amalgamation of actors across time—and the dynamic entanglements of process developed in pursuit of subverting the post-industrial with the future-post-industrial

Furthermore, steel displays the patina of the wasteland, and through its imposition on the landscape generates an immediate material erosion and decay, utilizing the materiality of the post-industrial on the future-postindustrial.

To organize this mess of corrosion into patterns, grids and subdivisions is an aesthetic process that has scarcely been touched.

In the technological mind rust evokes a fear of disuse, inactivity, entropy and ruin. Why steel is valued over rust is a technological value, not an artistic one.

The break-up or fragmentation of matter makes on aware of the sub-strata of the Earth before it is overly refined by industry into sheet metal, extruded I-Beams, aluminum channels, tubes, wire, pipe, cold-rolled steel, iron bars, etc..

The state of the Earth is a jumbled museum. Embedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order, and social structures which confine art. In order to read the rocks we must become conscious of geoloic time, and of the layers of prehistoric material that is entombed in the Earth’s crust. When one scans the ruined sites of prehistory one sees a heap of wrecked maps that upsets our present and historic limits. A rubble of logic confronts the viewer as he looks into the levels of the sedimentations. The abstract grids containing the raw matter are observed as something incomplete, broken, shattered.

Robert Smithson, A Sedimentation of the Mind

The division of nature and culture is obsolete. Nature is us, and everythig that surrounds us. Nature does and becomes, nature is subject and material at the same time. Nature is forever reconstituting itself after nature.

In their approach to transformed materials and images, their origins and interactions, the artists in ‘nature after nature’ abandon distinctions between synthetic and organic, man-made and natural. They present a nature that impacts beyond its sensory manifestations. A nature whose varied interactions undermine our notions of space and time.

The refusal to distinguish between nature and culture and to accept the claim to universal validity of these categories is also addressed by current philosophical theories. The symposium ‘nature after nature’ enquires how nature can be considered anew in space and time, materiality and immateriality.

Markus Gabriel, Ian Hamilton Grant, Frederic Neyrat, Cord Riechelman, and Jason Wirth Nature after Nature Symposium

EMBOSSED PRINTS

Printmaking allowed me the opportunity to explore and showcase proposed organizational strategies of destruction devised last semester.

I created stencils from existing acrylic laser cutting pieces which depict the proposed organizational strategies to expose edges for the inhabitation of wasteland ecologies, showcasing their materiality and form.

Making additional prints of the Quarry and Shopping Centre offered me the opportunity to test, in real time, the functionality of these geometries. As testing grounds, producing the additional prints to showcase organizational strategies of edges exposed. Smaller organizational matrices imposed would result in quicker rates of destruction, as smaller stencils puckered and ripped the paper. Smaller stencils were also subject to more variation, shifting at

each pass of the press.

Where stencil pieces met in the press, folded paper visualizes the edge of destruction, while materiality is showcased in the texture of the pieces themselves, showcasing the ecological materiality of wastelands.

Organizational Stragegy: Long linear strips responding to flat river bed geologies between Black and White Cart Rivers and tarmac runways.

Embossed Print No. 1 Citation: Morrone, G., 2021. Edge Ecologies (Semester 1). [Art] (University of Edinburgh).

EMBOSSED PRINT NO. 2

CLYDE SHOPPING CENTRE

Organizational Stragegy: Small quadrants complimenting the sharp edges of the man-made Firth and Clyde Canal (depicted, bisecting the site) and roadways crossing the Canal to link the two shores of the centre.

EMBOSSED PRINT NO. 3

DOUGLASMUIR SAND AND GRAVEL QUARRY

Organizational Stragegy: Rings surround lake-like quarries scarring the land, feeding them back into the adjacent burn as an oxbow gradually creates a lake of divergent river flow, reversing the process.

FULL PRINT CLOSE UP

FULL PRINT

FRAGMENTATION & FORMATION

FRAGMENTATION & FORMATION

DESIGN IMPLEMENTION

Making through unmaking.

“Woven lives intermingle at their surfaces... The texture is a surface not of concealment or covering up but of intermingling. And it is on surfaces such as these that we walk our everextending threads of life.”

Tim Ingold, Taking a thread for a walk

TESSELLATIONS

These tested organizational strategies then inspired the generation of tessellations with which to impose on the landscape in the geometries designed last semester (see Design Exploration: Part 1 portfolio submission or tessellation in plan pages 110117). Ever-expandable by nature of their geometry and mass-producable despite their bespoke construction by having been 3D scanned and modeled, these tessellations provide a model for destruction that can be implemented by the very industry they seek to challenge.

As ever-expandable pieces, they can be combined at a variety of scales— both the micro- and the macroscopically sublime (see viewsheds and model manipulation on pages 118-139) for implementation of speculative design futures.

These tessellation devices were tested in their ability to facilitate or block the growth of wasteland ecologies, bringing order to chaos. The matrices allow for order and disorder to work together, both harmious and disharmonious within the landscape, recreating the

tension between the built and natural of edge ecologies.

While some of these tessellations are designed to cover (for example, matting matrices that respond to the unique topography of the landscape), others are designed to penetrate, revealing the geologics of the Anthropocene and natural world. Here, intermingling in the wasteland and revealing an alternative edge. These models have theoretical standing when considering Donna Harraway’s “mesh world.”

TESSELLATION MODEL ONE: MALL TRELLIS

TESSELLATION MODEL TWO: AIRPORT TRELLIS

TESSELLATION MODEL THREE: PENETRATIVE TRELLIS (SHORT)

TESSELLATION MODEL FIVE: QUARRY TRELLIS

DIGITAL UNMAKING

Digital modeling of the landscape allowed for the disassembly and reassembly of the landscape, as well as the imposition of 3D scanned tessellations.

PHYSICAL UNMAKING: TECTONIC MASSING MODEL

The milling of the landscape allowed for a tactile and malleable model with which to generate and imagine the edge. Boring holes were created to outline the organizational strategies created by tessellations along each piece.

IMPOSING A SYSTEM OF DYNAMIC ENGANGLEMENTS

Dynamic entanglements was lieu of linear process of design in an effort to conceputally visualize the subversion of the future-postindustirla with the post-industrial. Intentional and unintentional fissures that form the edge make and unmake the landscape in a variety of forms and materialities that transcend linear time. The resulting “now” a product of decomposition.

TESTING

INDETERMINATE DESIGN: WASTELAND TEST PLOT

A wasteland test plot.

WASTELAND TYPOLOGY: Dalbeth Cemetery

Although speculative in scope, this design-research project was tested through the implementation of these tessellations on site in Glasgow.

A ‘wasteland’ in its historic and contemporary manipulation of the land resulting in a mingling of anthropogenic and regenerative ecologies, the Dalbeth Cemetery is uniquely home to a highly manipulated landscape of cemetery adjacent to landfill and dumping grounds evidenced by steel tips and slag, simultaneously home to 1970s Council-era land management tactics of dense, mono-species woodland regeneration. Blackened tree bark as a result of a chemical reaction with the “angel’s share” emitting from the

adjacent whisky bond. One can even see the growth of bouquet flowers within the woodland, having blown in from the cemetery grounds.

Tessellation trellises constructed of waste metal were placed on site in early March. LiDAR scanning documentation of this real-world application of these growth facilitators and inhibitors can be seen to the panel to the right.

A site in Glasgow—Dalbeth Cemetery— was chosen as a unique site with which to observe and test the propagation of invasive non-native and other ruderal species, interspersed with anthropogenic leftovers (including the models made of waste metal).

DALBETH CEMETERY FLORA & FAUNA (Surveyed March 20th and April 17th, 2022):

INNS:

Giant hogweed

Wild garlic (invasive, broad leaf variety)

Japanese knotweed

Himalayan balsam

NATIVE:

Wild garlic (native, narrow leaf variety)

Alder

Willow Carex

Poplar (evidence of mass planting from 70s-era council land management schemes)

Wood-rush

Tuberous comfrey

Hawthorn

Hart’s tongue (interesting anthropogenic interaction with lime mortar)

Briophytes

Ash (evidence of regeneration)

Elder

Aspen

Cuckoo flower/lady’s smock (orange-tipped butterfly)

NATIVE INVASIVE:

Cleavers

Bramble

Ground elder

Serviceberry

Stinging nettle

FAUNA:

Orange tipped butterfly

Moles

Badgers

Chiffchaff

Mallards

Goose antlers

The above species thrive in post-indsutrial ‘wasteland,’ thriving against the busy highway and within landfill conditions.

MODEL ONE: MALL TESSELLATION

MODEL TWO: AIRPORT TESSELLATION

MODEL THREE: PENETRATIVE TRELLIS

MODEL FOUR: PENETRATIVE TRELLIS

MODEL FIVE: QUARRY TESSELLATION

SPECULATIVE FUTURES

Making the dynamic edge

INTERVENTIONS AT SCALE / STAGE 1: SITES DISTILLED

Three future-post-industrial sites here reframe the project scope to the edgelands of Glasgow, juxtaposed against the naturalized Kilpatrick Hills.

INTERVENTIONS AT SCALE / STAGE 2: THIRD TRIBUTARY ALONG A SEAM

A third tributary linking the Black and White Cart Rivers is formed along the primary seam of the tessellations, recalling semester one’s initial design brief to design a showgarden. The third tributary runs alongside the Glasgow Airport tarmac, greeting COP26 dignitaries as they arrive with the hyper-local ecologies of post-industrial Glasgow, remnants of a city forgotten by global commerce and trade.

INTERVENTIONS AT SCALE / STAGE 3: TESSELLATIONS MEET

The primary organizational strategies of deconstruction are formed around each site, amalgamations of the geometries of tessellation matting matrices defined. The form of these proposed strategies higlights the viewshed to the Kilpatrick Hills across each future-post-industrial site.

INTERVENTIONS AT SCALE / STAGE FOUR: TESSELLATION EXPANSION

Tessellation geometries expand to deconstruct the future-post-industiral sites identified, returning each to a co-habitative state between wasteland ecologies and the urban commons. Here, The existing tree canopy of Glasgow is distorted through pointcloud to showcase the evolution of a green canopy throughout the urban matrix.

TECTONIC MASSING MODEL IN MOTION

The tectonic massing model explodes the landscape of future-post-industiral sites, allowing the viewer to manipulate stands and viewsheds to discover their own design. Malleable model making allows for the creation of infinite speculative futures, rejecting static design. See MorroneG_s2133567_

TectonicMassingModelInMotion to view a short video on how this model might be manipulated.

This model theoretically draws inspiration from drosscape theory and borrows the architectural practice of

massing to envision form and function. If all urban landscapes are the result of defunct capitalistic processes, it stands to reason all are the result of failed architectural practice. Harnessing the tool of massing to envision a deconstructed landscape highlights the interconnection of capitalistic and artistic endeavors, and how they impact our urban environment.

VIEWSHEDS STANDS

Viewshed stands for each site hold imagined edge ecologies that can be swtiched out by the user. Flipping them over reveals the tessellation of each site.

VIEWS IMAGINED: AIRPORT

Speculative futures of edge ecologies and tessellations score the landscape.

REPRESENTING INDETERMINATE DESIGN

Points, lines, and meshes

A visual language of points, lines and meshes enabled me to capture the dyanmic edge, interpreting and manipulating computer-generated amalgamations of space to exact the unexacting.

POINTS - The building blocks of lines and meshes, points allow for the assemblage of height data through light-detection. These point-clouds cature the dynamic edge in an instantaneous moment in time, archiving the interplay between parallel ecologies. Interestingly, point-cloud LiDAR technology was developed for military purposes, to capture the immediate before and after of warhead detonation. Wastelands are often linked through their shared traumascape history (see glossary). Further subsampling of the cloud data allows for the distillation and simplification of space.

LINES - Connectors, mesh formers, topography indicators. These nuanced, yet standardized means of representing the landscape can be manipulated or contorted to cut into the Earth’s surface.

MESHES - Mesh displays scale and form through the concentration and distortion of lines. Cutting through the mesh reveals the geologics of site.

Together these visual indicators remote sense the landscape. Subverting machine learning through their manipulation in the depiction of futurepost-industrial wastelands.

MODEL PRECEDENCE

Allen, S., 2021. Rescue Lines. [Art] (17th Annual Venice Architecture Biennale).

Callejas, L., 2012. Islands and Atolls. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Collier, P., 2020. Photogrammetry. International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography.

Anon., n.d. Atlas of Landscapes in a Room. s.l.:s.n.

Cilento, K., 2012. Tactical Archipelago/LCLAOFFICE. [Online] Available at: https://www.archdaily.com/261525/tactical-archipelago-lclaoffice

Torres, T., n.d. CNTX Studio. [Online] Available at: http://www.cntxtstudio.com/

Wall, E., Colthurst, E. & Liu, A., 2021. The Landscapists. [Art] (Stephen Lawrence Gallery).

Wu Wu, P., 2022. [Interview] 2022.

THEORETICAL & ECOLOGICAL PRECEDENCE / SUBVERTING THE STATUS QUO

Arènes, A., Latour, B. & Gaillardet, J., 2018. Giving depth to the surface: An exercise in the Gaia-graphy of critical zones. The Anthropocene Review, 5(2), pp. 120-135.

Berger, A., 1998. Drosscape: Wasting Land Urban America. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Chapman, S., 2021. New fronts in the fight against climate change [Interview] (22 October 2021).

Corner, J., 1999. Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice. In: The Landscape Imagination: Collected Essays of James Corner 1990-2010. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 111-129.

Edensor, T., 2005. The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in excessive space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Volume 23, pp. 829-849.

Farley, P. and Roberts, M. 2012: Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness. Vintage, London.

Franck, K. A. & Stevens, Q. (2007) Tying down loose space, in: K. A. Franck & Q. Stevens (Eds) Loose Space, pp. 1 – 33 (Abingdon: Routledge).

Gardner, Jonathan. (2022) Wasteland Lecture Series. Univeristy of Edinburgh.

Haraway, D. J., 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chtulucene. s.l.:Duke University Press.

Ingold, T., 2007. Materials against materiality. Archaeological Dialogues, 14(1), pp. 1-16.

John, D. & Lawrie, 2022. Glasgow Ground Ecologies Project. Glasgow: s.n.

Kahn, A., 2022. [Interview] 2022.

Matyushkin, A., 2021. No Function, Just FOrm. s.l.:s.n.

Jorgensen, A. & Tylecote, M., 2007. Ambivalent landscapes-wilderness in the urban interstices. Landscape Research, 2 August, 32(4), pp. 443-462.

landscape theory, 2003. Gilles Clement. [Online]

Available at: https://landscapetheory1.wordpress.com/tag/gilles-clement/

Langer, A., 2011. Chapter 11: Pure urban nature. In: A. Jorgensen, ed. Urban Wildscapes. s.l.:Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 152-159.

Lyons, S., 2017. Psychogeography: a way to delve into the soul of the city. [Online]

Available at: https://theconversation.com/psychogeography-a-way-todelve-into-the-soul-of-a-city-78032

Natura Urbana: The Brachen of Berlin. 2017. [Film] Directed by Matthew Gandy. s.l.: s.n.

Olden, R. G. M., 2016. River silting, watered common: reimagining Govan Graving docks. Glasgow: University of Glasgow.

Sieverts, T., 2003. An Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt. In: Cities Without Cities. s.l.:Taylor & Francis Group.

DESIGN PRECEDENCE

Brown, A., 2014. Art & Ecology Now. s.l.:Thames & Hudson.

Fabrizi, M., 2017. Construction Abstraction. Pablo Picasso’s Constellation Drawings (1924). [Online].

Fabrizi, M., 2021. Linear Analogies: a Selection of Paul Klee’s Black and White Lithographies. [Online].

Fusco, F. A., 2012. Relational Cities. [Art] (=).

Fredericianum, K., n.d. Nature after Nature. [Art] (2014).

Imam, J., 2021. Architects Dreaming of A fturue With No Buildings. [Online].

Holmes, D., 2013. Tempelhof Parklands Proposal: Berlin Germany: McGregor Coxall. [Online]

Available at: https://worldlandscapearchitect.com/tempelhof-parklands-proposal-berlin-germany-mcgregor-coxall/

Kossak, F., 2007. Shifts: Projection into the Future of the Central Belt. s.l.:The Lighthouse.

Meinhold, B., 2011. Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport to be Resurrected as One of Europe’s Largest Urban Gardens. [Online]

Available at: https://inhabitat.com/berlins-tempelhof-airport-will-be-res-

urrected-into-one-of-europes-largest-urban-gardens/

Murray, G., 1988. Art in the Garden: Installations. Edinburgh: s.n.

Schmidt, R., 2005. [Art] (National Garden Show 2005 Munich).

Schuiten, F. & Peeters, B., 1980. Les Cités obscures. Brussels: s.n.

HISTORICAL IMAGERY & VIDEOGRAPHY

Burrell Collection Photo Library, n.d. Dredger and Hopper on the Clyde, 1955. [Online]

Available at: https://www.theglasgowstory.com/image/?inum=TGSE01432

Clyde Yards on Full Time. 1938. [Film] s.l.: Pathé Gazette.

Glasgow City Archives, n.d. Finnieston Ferry. [Online]

Available at: https://www.theglasgowstory.com/image/?inum=TGSW00044&t=2

Glasgow Gets to Work. 1935. [Film] Scotland: Scottish Educational Film Association.

National Library of Scotland, 1939. River Clyde - A Survey of Scotland’s Greatest River. [Online]

Available at: https://movingimage.nls.uk/film/0377

Parker, R., 2020. The history of Glasgow’s rotundas and the secret Harbour Tunnel. [Online]

Available at: https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/history/clyde-rotunda-tunnel-history-glasgow-11781803

Shipbuilding on the Clyde. n.d. [Film] Directed by Matt McGinn. s.l.: s.n.

SITE RESEARCH / UNDERSTANDING PROCESS & RHYTHMS OF INTERCONNECTEDNESS

Canmore, 2014. Douglasmuir Quarry. [Online]

Available at: https://canmore.org.uk/site/312211/douglasmuir-quarry

Climate Central, 2021. Coastal Risk Screening Tool: Land Projected to Be Below Annual Flood Level in 2100. [Online]

Available at: https://coastal.climatecentral.org/ map/12/-4.3521/55.9017/?theme=sea_level_rise&map_type=year&basemap=roadmap&contiguous=true&elevation_model=best_available&forecast_year=2100&pathway=rcp45&percentile=p50&return_ level=return_level_1&rl_model=gtsr&slr_mode

Clyde Reflections. 2013. [Film] Directed by Stephen Hurrell, Ruth Brennan. s.l.: Hurrel and Brennan.

Clyde Waterfront, 2014. Glasgow Green. [Online]

Available at: http://www.clydewaterfront.com/clyde-heritage/glasgowgreen

Clyde Waterfront, 2014. Govan. [Online]

Available at: http://www.clydewaterfront.com/clyde-heritage/govan

Clyde Waterfront, 2014. International Trade. [Online] Available at: http://www.clydewaterfront.com/clyde-heritage/river-clyde/ international-trade

Digimap, 2021. Digimap. [Online] Available at: https://digimap.edina.ac.uk/ [Accessed 2021].

Evans, B. M., 2020. Glasgow 2020 - A fair COP?. s.l.:s.n.

Fraser, D., 2020. Reverse the flow of the Clyde story. Again.. [Online] Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-54232887

Glasgow City Council, n.d. Local Habitat Action Plan: Rivers and Streams, s.l.: s.n.

Harrison, E., 2019. The Glasgow Effect: A tale of class, capitalism and carbon footprint. Luath Press Ltd: Edinburgh.

Holder, G., 2012. Evening Glasgow Times. [Online]

Available at: https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/lifestyle/13245507.historic-times-the-river-clyde/

Hurrel, S. & Brennan, R., 2013. MAPPINGTHESEA.NET. [Online] Available at: http://www.mappingthesea.net/

Lost Glasgow, n.d. Goin’ down the tubes.... [Online] Available at: https://www.lostglasgow.scot/posts/goin-down-thetubes-485/

Moore, J., 2017. The Clyde: Mapping the River. s.l.:Birlinn Ltd. Olden, R., n.d. Tributaries. [Sound Recording].

Palenske, A., 2015. Glasgow Made the Clyde and the Clyde Made Glasgow. [Online]

Available at: https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2015/08/10/glasgowmade-the-clyde-and-the-clyde-made-glasgow/

The Airport Guides Network, n.d. Glasgow Airport Guide. [Online] Available at: https://www.glasgow-airport-guide.co.uk/history.html

The Conversation, 2020. Culverts - the major threat to fish you’ve probably never heard of. [Online]

Available at: https://theconversation.com/culverts-the-major-threat-tofish-youve-probably-never-heard-of-143629

The Editors of The Gazetteer for Scotland, 2021. Clyde Shopping Centre. [Online]

Available at: https://www.scottish-places.info/features/featurefirst11986.html

The Scottish Waterways Trust, n.d. Glasgow’s Canals Unlocked. s.l.:Scottish Waterways Trust; Scottish Canals; Glasgow City Heritage Trust; Glasgow City Canal, Heritage Lottery Fund.

UK Government, 2021. COP26 Explained. Glasgow: s.n.

PERFORMATIVE FIELDWORK METHODOLOGIES /

LEARNING SITE

Alves, M. T., 1999-ongoing. Seeds of Change. [Art].

Donald, M., 2019. Guddling About: An Ecological Performance Practice with Water and Other Nonhuman Collaborators. GeoHumanities, 5(2), pp. 591-619.

Donald, M., McGuire, N. & Millar, N., 2016. Then/Now. [Online] Available at: http://www.then-now.org/symposium

Donald, M. & Millar, N., 2015. Guddling About: Govan. [Online]

Available at: https://guddlingabout.com/portfolio/guddling-about-govan/

Donald, M., Millar, N. & Cayetano, M., 2019. Aguas Ocultas Aguas Olvidadas. [Online]

Available at: https://guddlingabout.com/portfolio/aguas-ocultas-aguas-olvidadas-madrid/

Donald, M., Millar, N. & McGuire, N., 2020. Then/Now. s.l.:British Library Cataloguing. dredgepoint.org, 2016. Clyde dredger no. 6. [Online] Available at: https://www.dredgepoint.org/dredging-database/equipment/ clyde-dredger-no-6

Terremoto, n.d. Test Plot. [Online] Available at: testplot.info

ALTERNATIVE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WASTE LAND / UNDERSTANDING PERCEPTIONS

Eliot, T., 1922. The Waste Land. [Art].

Fandom, n.d. T.S. Elliot’s The Waste Land Wiki. [Online] Available at: https://tseliotsthewasteland.fandom.com/wiki/T.S._Eliot%27s_The_Waste_Land_Wiki

Lorimer, H., 2017. Against Our Ruin. s.l.:BBC Radio 4.