From remediation to landscape design: design tactics and landscape typologies derived from post-industrial experiences

Abstract For the last few decades there has been a growing interest in transforming post-industrial sites into public spaces with new programmatic contents. However, contamination in such sites poses challenges to the transformation process. In such cases remediation has become not just a technical issue requiring solutions through remedial actions but a design tactic that offers different solutions for the development of ecologically and functionally well-grounded spatial design schemas. The main aim of this research is to investigate the relationship between design and remediation and offer a research matrix and typological classification that show how remediation methods can be interpreted as a landscape design tactic through an examination of ten high profile landscape design cases. As a result of detailed investigation on the cases, eight different landscape typologies were offered, namely: multi-layered landscapes, topo-landscapes, adaptive landscapes, structured landscapes, emergent landscapes, superficies landscapes and traced landscapes.