Designing America's Waste Landscapes (review)

Mira Engler teaches landscape architecture at Iowa State University. But Designing America's Waste Landscapes will appeal to an audience beyond her own discipline. She effectively demonstrates "that rejected landscapes can tell us as much as cherished landscapes, that landscapes at the extremes, both loved and hated, are indicative of ourselves and exercise great power over us" (p. xx). Others have made similar observations, but Engler brings broad meaning to the value of marginalized places. She focuses on three types of waste landscapes: dumps (a generic term that includes modern sanitary landfills), facilities for waste recycling, and sewage-treatment plants, her aim in each case being "to set free their contradictory powers" (p. ix).

As a landscape architect, Engler not only appreciates the social and cultural implications of waste-making—the underside of production and consumption, if you will—she also understands that the creation of new geographical features on society's margins has physical as well as symbolic meaning. And even though it is not as well developed, Engler's study also affirms a particular perspective on policy, raising questions about how to deal with existing waste places and how to avoid problems created by waste landscapes. Although she is on target when she suggests that "society considers waste a private matter but a public issue" (p. xv), not enough of the book deals with potential resolution of the problems she poses.

Chapter 1 effectively contextualizes the waste issue in theoretical terms. Here, the author borrows from those who have examined waste as a product of nature, as a by-product of human needs and habits, as a societal problem, as a cultural construct, and as an elusive idea. This discussion is a prelude to a wide-ranging treatment of waste landscapes, especially as they relate to the relationship between waste and physical marginalization. Particularly informative is Engler's discussion of a design framework for understanding waste landscapes that goes beyond simplistic notions of "sinks" or "places of last resort" (p. 36). She discusses a variety of modern approaches to waste facilities and waste spaces: a camouflage approach, a utilitarian approach, a restoration approach, a mitigation approach, and so forth. This chapter alone is a worthwhile read because it synthesizes so many issues dispersed among a variety of sources.

Chapter 2 provides a historical overview of household-waste issues, but is decidedly more breezy and less well developed than the first. The third chapter combines a look at the historical evolution and a basic description of dumps and landfills. Few issues related to the collection and disposal of waste raise more public concern and ire. Through a variety of examples such as the monumental Fresh Kills landfill in New York, she attempts "to comprehend the full meaning of dumps." This requires "an understanding of their relationship to the value-laden human concepts and imagination that produce them" (p. 75). Particularly intriguing is Engler's discussion of art exhibitions focusing on landfills. These raise questions about their design and what potential exists for redesign through the efforts of visual artists and architects. Such a perspective rarely invades the historian's discourse of waste and society, but would probably help historians in understanding waste sites as cultural artifacts.

Chapter 4, on recycling and reuse, traces familiar ground, but like the previous chapter explores the cultural and social connection of the ideology of recycling and the texture of recycling landscapes, from junkyards to transfer stations. Chapter 5 concerns sewage-treatment plants and follows a similar pattern, beginning with the mental image of Jean Valjean—the protagonist in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables—seeking refuge in the sewers of Paris, and then turning to the architecture of sewers as conceived by engineers.

Engler ends her book with speculations about the future challenges of waste landscapes and the many meanings that such sites engender—from the potential horrors of radioactive-waste and toxic-waste sites to the "sacralization of a previously debased site" (p. 229) when human remains and debris from...