Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
22
Derelict and vacant land
Philip Kivell
problem and some of its solutions. Gradually,
however, large-scale reclamation efforts started,
prompted by a concern for economic and
environmental improvement, the need for more
public open space, technical advances in land
reclamation, and the shock of 144 lives lost
through the collapse of a coal spoil tip at Aberfan
in South Wales in 1966.
By the 1980s, the problem had gained more
widespread urgency. Industrial change was still at the
core of land dereliction as Britain and other early
manufacturing nations lost their competitive
advantages in the new global markets. A massive
restructuring of production capacity followed,
prompted by new styles and techniques of
manufacturing, widespread mergers and closures,
new forms and locations of investment at national
and international scales, and new patterns of land use.
But it was not just industry that was restructuring
and abandoning its old sites; the same process was
happening to docks (and the cities that had grown
up around them), utilities and power sources, military
installations, and public institutions, including
hospitals. The land-use requirements of modern
society were being transformed. Sometimes
individual sites were abandoned (often in a severely
damaged state), but in other cases whole localities
and communities became effectively redundant.
Nowhere was this more marked than in Eastern
Europe, where the opening up of borders and the
pressing economic reorganisation after 1990 revealed
dereliction and contamination on a massive scale
created by chemical works, lignite power stations and
steel plants in the former East Germany, in the Czech
Republic and in the Don basin.
INTRODUCTION
Derelict land became an obvious fact of life in
many older industrial districts of Europe and
North America in the economically depressed
years of the 1920s and 1930s, but it did not attract
systematic attention from geographers and
planners until after the Second World War. The
pioneering work of Beaver (1946) in Britain drew
attention to the economic and environmental
consequences of dereliction, as well as to the
successes of some early reclamation efforts, in
localities such as the Black Country, the northeast
of England and South Wales. It was the
combination of attention from geographers, the
development of new mining and industrial
technologies, the process of industrial
restructuring and the establishment of a
comprehensive planning system that placed the
problem on the post-war political agenda. At first,
the problem was connected with heavy
manufacturing and mining industries and was
largely confined to those localities in which these
were located in Britain, Belgium, northern France
and Germany, and to related problems of large-
scale strip-mining in the northeast USA, Poland
and Germany.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, with
economic growth and new industrial investment,
concern for the problems of derelict land
remained largely confined to those with
specialised professional interests in planning and
mining, although comprehensive studies by
Oxenham (1966) and Barr (1969), and later by
Wallwork (1974), did much to publicise both the
