Unit 15X
Toxic [urban] Landscapes

Unit Leader: Dr Finzi Saidi
Unit Leader: Jabu Makhubu
Unit Tutor: Dickson Adu-Agyei
Unit Tutor: Mathebe Aphane

In 2021, Unit15X explores the theme of ‘toxicity’ and ‘landscape’ in cities. Most cities and towns in South Africa have connections - which may be historic or ongoing - with mining activities: open pit or underground cast mining of mostly coal, gold or platinum. While mines close when mining activities cease, their toxic impact on the cities whether social, ecological, spatial and/or cultural remains for many years to come. While toxicity may be visible all around us, in the overburdened mine-dumps, in contaminated surface and ground water and in polluted airscapes, Unit15X recognises that there are many aspects of invisible ‘toxicity’ that are present in many of our cities. In order to address this wider meaning of toxicity, Unit15X has adopted a broad meaning of Toxic [urban] landscapes. These landscapes include the physical and non-physical experiences of toxicity that are socially and culturally described as, “… toxicity that focuses on the ways shared materials, interests and harms that ‘objectively’ bind communities and how these community ties are identified and become meaningful as these materials, harms and interests become visible.” (Stewart: 2017).

The Unit is not merely concerned with uncovering sites of environmental degradation, it is about exploring alternative ways to remediate the urban landscape and to create resilient public spaces. Moreover, it is about disrupting the crisis of toxic environments by asking what new questions emerge by raising the term landscape [urbanism] alongside toxicity. Our interest is in this full and wide array of the term Toxic [urban] landscapes.

In Unit15X we challenge students to imagine, ‘What does it entail to remediate or explore Toxic [urban] Landscapes?’ Unit15X encourages students to seek multiple and innovative ways to explore social spatial justice for people, animals and the environment in areas affected by toxic landscapes. Unit 15X students are encouraged to develop proposals that offer a multiplicity of unexpected, yet relevant possibilities.

In our quest to uncover these new questions, the Unit will use three methodologies (Catherine Dee’s the imaginary texture of the real and Abbot et.al (2018) method as the base of investigation in our subject matter. Dee’s imaginary texture of the real encourages students to explore five different mediums of representation: Art as enquiry; Dialogic drawing; Hypothetical design; ‘Mappings; and Visual narratives (Dee: 2004). Unit 15X borrows Dee’s methodological approach by arguing that visual studies and exploration can be used to bridge the practice-theory 

divide and enable investigations which are currently limited or absent in text-based methods and dissemination of a much broader debate. Abbot’s methods encourage students to explore the ideas of scenario generation, thick inventory, design critique and projective landscapes methodology to reflect on their position (T. Abbot et al 2018). Lastly, the Advance Landscape Urbanism group (Greenwich University) encourages several ways of working that include the production of composite drawings that mark a significant milestone within the design process, namely, the base drawing, the operational drawing and the scene. The base drawing is based on a culmination of research from which proposals are generated, the operational drawing visualises the complex relations that form the basis of the design proposal and the scene is an image that communicates the construction of the landscape as it is experienced.

Students will be encouraged to speculate on new methods, uses of and visualisations for some of these toxic [urban] landscapes to contribute meaningfully to deeper understandings of the toxic ecology and to propose ecological and social cultural solutions that ameliorate the ‘damage’. Our hope is that the work raises more questions such as to how the processes of re-making and imagining toxic [urban] landscapes, through social, cultural, architectural, and ecological means, can be represented. How can the experience of toxic urban landscapes be constructed and represented?

In 2021 Unit15X uses conditions of working imposed by Covid-19 as a process for students to bring to the design studio conditions of Toxic [urban] landscapes, within their towns and cities of their location. The aim is to identify common characteristics of Toxic [urban] Landscapes and to collectively, with their peers, imagine remedial design responses that project an alternative future of the urban landscape in various contexts. The projects explored by Unit15X students in 2021 include: urban spatial infrastructure; transient complex urban cultural and religious explorations; and mine infrastructure. These design research projects go beyond biological and ecological remediation of landscapes, and imagine new relationships where people are active participants in shaping the new environments. Unit15X’s aim is to develop proposals that offer a multiplicity of unexpected possibilities and imagery that would be to explore time, process, fictive and ‘human dramatic’ aspects of Toxic [urban] landscapes.