Rejected landscapes / recycled landscapes : waste disposal and recycling sites

This article resumes my doctoral research about landscape changes connected with the presence of waste. This is a tangible reality that invades the territory in many different ways, both in terms of time and space. The investigation addresses firstly the issue of garbage and its increasing accumulation, which ‘designs’ new and unexpected landscapes. It deals then with the ways waste accumulation can be turned into an opportunity to build up landscape and places. e present territorial dimension is inexorably besieged by garbage, it is exposed to a substantial environmental, cultural, economic and political alteration that some interesting projects tried to control and recover. A sort of ‘indicative atlas’ – where some reference plans are illustrated – has been therefore worked out, collecting and showing the actual distribution of existing plants for waste disposal and collection on the European territory in general, and more particularly in Italy. A further detailed study has been conducted about a territorial section of Lombardy, where territorial morphology and the inevitable environmental transformations has been also taken into consideration.