Post-industrial nature

Many mining areas in the Saarland have been recultivated with woody plants and are therefore hardly recognisable within the surrounding land­scape of the Saarkohlenwald woodlands. The goal of this project is to pre­serve the landscape formations, such as the mine slagheap and the filled-in sinking pond as a testimony to the industrial history and to document the huge human impacts on the landscape. The new landscape offers a unique appeal and a characteristic morphological language based on the industrial history. The aesthetic does not correspond with the usual images of “ideal nature” (Dettmar 1999). In Gottelborn, a designed intervention will em­phasise the potential of “post-industrial” nature, i. e. vegetation established on industrial sites, known as nature of the fourth kind as defined by Ko – warik (1992, 2005). The intervention will present a special stage for dis­covering nature and experiencing the landscape through its characteristic aspects, e. g. the original barenness and changes brought about by vegeta­tion (see more examples for this method of treating brownfield in Grosse – Bachle 2005; Henne 2005; Korner 2005).