As a whole other issue, in mourning for the loss of dense pine forests, regreening quickly covers vast areas of bare rock; however while this is going on, a defining characteristic of the northern landscape, its geologic structure, is also being replaced by prescriptive ecological stereotypes. With blasting technology no longer just confined to mining, hills and channels are flattened and filled to make way for the rigid and hierarchical urban planning strictures of conventional subdivisions. New Sudbury, a neighbourhood northeast of the historic core, is organised into four perfect quadrants, demonstrating by counter-example the difficulty of redeveloping the old bifurcated downtown where houses follow the contours, finding the easiest places to build tucked up against the base of the hills. New hilltop developments blast enormous amounts of rock to make way for new houses with great views. Although the preservation of hilltops has recently become a focus of the city’s Greenspace advisory panel, so far there is no official stance against this erasure of original topography. Instead of encouraging development of abandoned or derelict land, avoiding development on hilltops altogether, the city advocates hilltop condominium development that reduces footprint and preserves views. Against a background of newly established ‘green’, support for an authentic regional identity could mean establishing connections to contested landforms. Blasted landscapes hold value as authentic places amidst generic (and green) public space. A new ecological paradigm could stimulate dialogue between ecologists, scientists and designers to fully realise a complex human geography that addresses both good and
bad processes in a renewed appreciation of historic value. Reclaimed landscapes are only partial truths, imposing a ‘natural’ heritage on a complex cultural one. Sudbury is often embroiled in contested preservation of its heritage. With little funding available to maintain its built heritage, there has been no concerted effort to develop a heritage plan for the otherwise ‘invaluable’ abandoned mines and town sites that punctuate the landscape. The preservation of barren sites have been considered – one idea was to declare the O’Donnell roast yard, one of only a few roast yards still visible in North America, a UNESCO world heritage site – but it is currently inaccessible on private company property and tours are increasingly rare. Without any effort to physically draw attention to the site it will soon be completely lost to public awareness. Happy Valley may have the least well-known history. A fringe development, occupied by farmers and miners who wanted to live outside the planned Falconbridge Mine townsite, it found itself in the path of gas spewed from the smelter – hazardous to both vegetation and residents. To mitigate the effects on the community, compromises were made to reduce days of operation, but when that became unsustainable, the company purchased Happy Valley land, paid for relocation costs, emptied Happy Valley and carried on operations unhindered. Completely abandoned, the site is closed to the public by a large steel fence.
41 implied that a certain depth of soil with all the bacteria and insects, plus all the plants, was self-sustaining and selfgenerating. Nature can overcome all difficulties was that narrative. If everything is presented as narrative, rather than as science, research and experiments, then we are never allowed to understand what the environment is capable of. This is a very (large C) conservative strategy, to reject science in favour of political wish lists, told as a series of fairy tales. None of it, not the black rocks, not the green stubble, not the sod
laid in the subdivisions, none of it is ‘natural’; it is all manufactured, with differing agendas, different ways to make and spend money. It is odd, Sudbury in the general Canadian imaginary was never a blighted place when I was growing up, and even in the 80s when I drove through it four times a year going to and from Vancouver to Halifax, it had a strange beauty — I did many drawings of the way the highway cut channels though the Canadian Shield, something I only realised when once I climbed up a bare rocky cliff and found the most
On Site review 33: intentional landscapes, inadvertent results
S W: Re-greening is a kind of ecological gentrification: the denigration of poverty, industry and the toxicity of industry in favour of an anodyne suburban landscape where grass is never very long, trees are never very tall and houses are huge. As Leanna points out, the un-greened landscape was a truer indication of long term toxicity. I read a few years ago of Sudbury remediation efforts that took a square metre at a time, half a metre deep from a forest somewhere and transplanted it intact to some blighted bit of the city. It was
