Postindustrial Landscape, a New Field of Landscape Architecture; Review on theories and approaches

The natural process of a city is like a living organism, whose parts are in the process of growth and progress. These parts and cells are deteriorated over this process and exchanged over time. The waste landscape emerges out of two primary processes: first, from rapid horizontal urbanization (urban “sprawl”) and second, from the living behind of land and detritus after economic and production ending. This has resulted in the combination of industrial sites in the process of city developments, which were once out of the city structure; therefore, new evacuated areas found within the city structure that brings out a new definition of landscape. The vast areas evacuated by the physical movement of city structure that has caused decentralized manufacturing which are also known as (Brownfield) provide precious opportunities in city renovations and promoting the quality of urban spaces despite their contaminated context that can detect problems. Optimistically, it could be argued that as deindustrialization proliferates, and as an industry relocates from central cities to peripheral areas, the cities will enjoy a net gain in the total landscape and (buildings) available for other uses such as ecological revitalization, cultural and social spaces and economic growth. Creating these features requires the perception of dross cape as a remained area in the process of the city structure development and as a part of cultural landscape of the civilized man. A matching reclamation of these wasted landscapes, as wide parts of contemporary cityscape, has been the most fundamental challenge for the landscape designers. These sites have been landscape architecture projects all over the world in the past three decades. The landscape architects have gone through lots of efforts in rehabilitation of these sites that have resulted in new approaches in landscape architecture and new methods in creating city parks. This new generation of parks, unlikely to their mere ones in the industrialized cities of the past two decades which were created opposed to their city movements, not only have been a treatment for contaminated city environments but also a corresponding aspect to the city process. Basically, three general approaches are detected in these projects: the heritage landscape approach, the social and cultural approach and finally the environmental and ecological approach. Although the special conditions and the context of each project explains the project strategies, the environmental and ecological approaches have been mostly the dominant strategy in the time of environmental and sustainability concerns. This paper tries to answer the following questions: what is the process of the waste landscape emersion in relationship with the urbanization of societies? How can a true perception of these cases be gained and how should they be faced? What is the landscape approach in dealing with the post-industrial cities? Eventually, with a phenomenological view to the waste land and post industrial landscapes, the different approaches to these landscapes are discussed and criticized to find out their successfulness in responding to the new city development demands.