Plant A Tree Or Die

"For the past 200 years, the ideal image of nature has been a symbolic, transformed and man-made landscape, typified by idealized areas of agricultural production. Such idealizations led to the creation of unique parks, but, as symbols of a past romantic ideal, these landscapes cannot now be restored. These cultural landscapes are as lost to us now as are the social dreams of nineteenth-century Romanticism, and can therefore only fail as ideals for a contemporary landscape. The tasks of dealing with run-down industrial areas and open-cast mines require a new method--one that accepts their physical qualities but also their destroyed nature and topography. This new vision should not be one of "re-cultivation", for this approach negates the qualities that they currently possess and destroys them for a second time. The vision for a new landscape should seek its justification exactly within the existing forms of demolition and exhaustion. We have to ask ourselves which spaces from among the dilapidated and redundant places we want to use and occupy, and which of those have to be changed by the mark of a cultural intervention or the remediation of historical contamination.

Would it not be better to attach to the ideal image of our occidental culture, to 'paradise', an oasis in the desert, a place where man has to make his way against the rigors of physical nature? This imagination of an oasis as a garden in desolate spaces is my ideal type of discourse with the nature of old industrial sites, which in their parts can be left to themselves to develop the fantastic images of the future from already existing formations--creating values between art and nature in a way which could never be made by the artist nor mere nature alone."

-from Peter Latz, "Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord: The Metamorphosis Of An Industrial Site", in Manufactured Sites, ed. Niall Kirkwood.