debris_scapes
Debris builds landscapes. The unwanted materials from public infrastructures, industrial and consumtion is the main force of topography change around the planet:
14 tons/year/person in France How to get rid of this polluting matter? We have no viable technology response for recycling it, as the cost and and energy invested is higher than producing new material. The most extremes cases are the nuclear waste or plastic, which has arrived to constitute the main sediment of the Anthropocene: 28.000 tonnes in the oceans
How to treat the waste? Is it a resource? How about the opportunity to model territories instead of hidding or exporting the problem?
This is a resarch about the challenge of being responsible for the matter we produce and move in the case study of Paris, an area highly modified where the human layer is inherent to it. After centuries of litterng in the periphery of the ever growing city and dealing with the problem afterwards, we need a new sensibility approaching matter management and topography change with scope.
the french case
In the French territory the issue of wild debris landfills are an emergency which worry a number of institutions and social organisations. The urban development produces necessarely a surpluss of matter which is usually littered in its periphery and farming land. The proximity to growing city is a hazard: artificial montains and damaged horizon are the consiquences to it.
Paris case
The issue of the movement of innert matter from the city to the periphery as a result of urban and infrastructures developement is extreme in the ĂŽle de France region. Paris pressures the territory way beyond its administrative limits.
This maps shows in red the layer in which the geological substrate is no longer intelligible: the layers were filled and modified to adapt to the city requirements. Paris is known for having a “waterproof surface�. Anything happening under the asphalt is disregarded, actively ignored.
This condition of creating spaces out of debris is not new. Buttes Chaumont park was built in the nineteenth century on a million cubic meters of the debris from the first lines of the Paris metro. The X layer shows the debris on the Parisien basin over the geological characterization.
Courneuve park used the earth extracted from the works of Les Halles. Long before these examples, the earthworks to create anamorphosis in Versailles also used debris from the old city.
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This maps shows the new orbital subway train and the amount of tonnes of debris of each branch. Source: supperposition of different maps from Grand Paris Express Institution.
The transport network in Paris has been on the verge of collapse for decades. The agglomeration of 12 million people needs an alternative to the car, which is no longer a viable option. In 2007 the project of the Grand Paris Express is announced: 200 km of new metro lines, 72 new stations, and the connection with the TGV (high-speed train). An insfrastructre which will be built in a scope of decades.
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Tunnel of debris
From the very beggining, the issue of how to get rid of the 20 million cubic meters of debris was regarded as a territorial one. 200 hectares at 10 metes high. The first step was to analyse the soil composition and sort it into inert and gypsum (to be recycled an reused) and polluted (to be treated).
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These materials are to be transported by water, train or truck.
Export debris However, by 2016 the extraction of debris surpased the capacity for recycling it. The material was then exported around the region and beyond to be stored. Waiting for a future use.
topgraphies of debris
Debris is not going to desappear. Instead, we need to allocate it with scope so that it constitutes lands as in the Paris city centre but in the territorial scale.
The T management of this material is interlinked with the idea of giving land a futue. They are already a geological layer.
We make, then, new lands, with new ecological dynamics. A tool to serve the collective will.
Deterritorialisation, scattering this new soil as an opportunity: imagining new geomorphologies. This map of the Paris Region shows the outline of the Grand Paris Express in red and the potential sites to store the debris in blue: we arrive to the point of setting the debris. How will it be layed out?
Characterization of the unfortunate sites These fringe sites where the debris will be litterede are not anonimous stains in the territory but places of opportunity. The action to be operated on them appears to be like a scar. Instead of this bleak approach, an alternative is on the horizon. How to improve a land adding what another rejects?
A case study The site of the Carrières-sous-Possy in Chanteloup, in the outskirts of Paris, will received the debris of the west part of the tunnel: almost 11 milion tones. It is already a derelict land.
Carrières-sous-Poissy
A tradition of dismiss This meander of the Seine hasbeen exploted for centuries as a stone quarry. At the same time, it also served a landfill when the city started to grow.
A place that has been abused.
Left to decay The characterization of the territory according to property shows how the activites that are a bother are concentred along this meander.
Flood map
Normal river profile.
Flood area.
A harzardous place This close meander is a danger for its floods, with more intensity as the global warming grows in intensity. Is it worth to protect it?
A man-made topography Its sublte topography is the result of centuries of extracting and littering matter. Along the rutes, on the fields... none seems to care.
A cry to be restored Collaborative mapping
Legal quarries.
Illegal landfields.
The civil organization â&#x20AC;&#x153;DĂŠchargeons La Plaineâ&#x20AC;? is trying to save this land through organizing tours, protests and a collaborative mapping to place all the legal and illegal landfills.
1. Protect from floods building barriers of debris.
2. Grow the topography on the already existing landfills.
3. Restore the greenery with an upper layer of organic soil.
The needs of a forgotten land The guidelines are all set in three points. With the same gesture, placing the debris on the area with a strategy, we can get a more secure meander towards floods, lessen the effects of creative destruction of topography placing it on already damage areas, and restore its greenery with an upper layer that allows plants to colonize and stabilize the new profile.
A fictional approach Taking these three principles as rules, we create a new topography with a catalogue of actions as a laboratory of how to place the 11 millions tones of debris from the Grand Paris Express. This fiction does not have as an objective to contain damage, but instead intents to really improve a scarred landscape.