Introduction

Waste is a major theme in urban planning and landscape design. However, while the majority of chapters in this book focus on urban waste in the form of household and industrial waste, this chapter examines waste and more particularly wastelands in the urban spatial context. Waste is a difficult concept to define yet, as Blaustein (2011: 5) observes, ‘our cultural definitions and regulations of waste are central to the ordering of our environments and ourselves’ (see also Kennedy, 2007). Blaustein (2011: 5) argues that ideas of waste are ‘registered in terms of space (blight, sprawl, vacancy), time (waiting, boredom, drudgery), resources (refuse, trash), and increasingly in terms of digital information technologies (e-waste, obsolescence, “delete”), waste marks the residue, the left-over, the cast-off, the remainder, the damaged, the unclassifiable, the useless’. According to Lynch (1990a: 146), waste ‘is worthless or unused for human purpose. It is a lessening of something without useful result; it is loss and abandonment, decline, separation and death. It is the spent and valueless material left after some act of production or consumption, but can also refer to any used thing: garbage, trash, litter, junk, impurity and dirt. There are waste things, waste lands, waste time and wasted lives.’ Similarly, Berger (2006a: 203) argues that:

The description of parts of the city as wasteland is often seen in terms of the social construction of the urban environment (Hough, 2004). While such a perspective is important for understanding how landscapes are perceived, it may tell us little about the urban ecological significance of such locations. This chapter provides an ecological perspective on supposed urban wastelands by identifying their environmental functions. It first examines the way in which wasteland has come to be regarded as urban wilderness, before looking at issues of urban biodiversity. It then discusses the ecological value of wastelands that are some of the most species-rich environments in many cities. However, although ecologically significant, wasteland is not necessarily socially valued.