Publications

Quattrone, G., 2016. RE-cycling Territories, Territories of RE-cycling. In C. Nava (ed.), The laboratory_city: sustainable recycle and key enabling technologies. Rome: ARACNE editrice S.r.l., pp.73-89.

About the Book

Sites and landscapes are created and altered by large-scale human activity, industrial and manufacturing processes in the name of progress, economic development and profit. Places where waste manifests itself in nearly all of its semantic inflections – from loss to dross, from cast-off to garbage to destruction, places that mercilessly mirror who we are, what we pursue, our relationship with the planet.

Brayford Pool Area, in the heart of Lincoln’s historic centre, is analysed as a best practice case study of urban and architectural re-cycling, and used as a site for a research-led design exercise which is centred on re-cycle tactics and tools and explores two interrelated thematic areas. The first area is the re-cycling of discarded assets – be they waste lands, waste buildings or waste materials – as a strategy aimed to counteract resource and energy consumption by reviving what has been cast off. An un-doing and re-doing of physical matter that occurs as much in terms of dis-assembling, re-locating and re-arranging, where a displacement of matter and the consequent shift in meaning take place, as in terms of re-processing, re-working, re-placing and re-ordering, where matter and meaning are manipulated contextually on-site. The second area is urban soil management with a focus on land take and soil sealing, which has recently constituted the subject of a report by the European Commission. The overarching principle is to look at re-cycling, land take and soil sealing as interdependent challenges and to address them with a fresh, unbiased and creative attitude which is able to convert problems into opportunities and detractors into quality generators, through theoretical exploration and matter manipulation into innovative design solutions.