The project 'Excavating Landfill: Towards an Environmental History of Architecture’s Waste' was initiated by Kim Förster and me at the 9th Biennial Conference of the European Architectural History Network in Aarhus (#EAHN2026). Encouraged by the very positive response to the call for papers and the panel turnout, we are now developing the book proposal based on the panel.
Panel description
The Warsaw Uprising Mound, the Trümmerberge across Germany, Liverpool’s Crosby Beach, and Leslie Spit in Lake Ontario near Toronto are paradigmatic examples of twentieth-century landfills of construction and demolition waste. Emerging from urban warfare and architectural obsolescence (Abramson, 2016), these landforms constitute a unique architectural record structured by cycles of development and destruction. Nonetheless, despite increasing scholarly interest in extraction, production, and demolition, landfills remain an underrepresented—if not repressed—subject in architectural and urban history. Rooted in disciplinary calls to critically examine architecture’s waste (Cairns and Jacobs, 2014), this panel positions the landfill as a crucial site of inquiry for historians of the built environment in the Anthropocene.
Over the past decade, historians and theorists have analysed the centrality of wasteland to the development of modern concepts of property and productivity (Di Palma, 2014), examined abandoned spaces produced by twentieth-century capitalist and socialist industrialisation (Hauser, 2001), and explored the entanglement of wasting and production in the built environment (Labban, 2019). Although the issue of architecture’s waste—and of landfilling in particular—is addressed by the Basel Convention (1989) and the EU Landfill Directive (1999), a comprehensive history beyond the official chronologies remains to be written, aside from a few notable exceptions (Cerba and Hutton, 2021). Moving beyond these regulatory timelines and the imaginaries of control and containment they legitimise, this panel foregrounds the material and environmental realities of construction and demolition waste (CDW) and the landscapes it produces.
Recognising ongoing challenges—including the sheer volume of CDW, which accounts for nearly 40 per cent of all solid waste globally, and its toxicity, involving substances such as asbestos, PCBs, and radioactivity—the panel engages with more complex and globally situated architectural histories of landfills. Drawing on the concept of “reciprocal landscapes” (Hutton, 2018), it examines the historical role of the architectural profession in classifying, depositing, and reclaiming waste; identifies strategies of urbanization, landfill development, and property formation; traces material flows linking construction sites and disposal areas; analyses the complicity of the building materials industry in perpetuating waste and pollution; and explores the situated politics and economies of contamination and land use.
Bibliography
Abramson, Daniel M. Obsolescence: An Architectural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Cairns, Stephen, and Jane M. Jacobs. Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.
Cerba, Alison, and Jane Hutton. “Demolishing the City, Constructing the Shoreline.” In History of Construction Cultures, Volume 1, edited by João Mascarenhas-Mateus and Ana Paula Pires, 350–358. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2021.
Di Palma, Vittoria. Wasteland: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.
Foster, Heidi, and Jennifer Schopf. “Urban Ecological Evolution through Mineral Migration: Extracting, Recomposing, Demolishing and Recolonizing Toronto’s Landscape.” Landscript 5 (2017): 47–64.
Hauser, Susanne. Metamorphosen des Abfalls: Konzepte für alte Industrieareale. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2001.
Hutton, Jane. Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements. New York: Routledge, 2019.
Labban, Mazen. “Rhythms of Wasting / Unbuilding the Built Environment.” New Geographies 10 (2019): 33–41.
Papers presented during the EAHN 2026 session
Making Ground: Waste and the Materiality of Urban Expansion in Interwar Helsinki
Ella Müller, PhD Candidate, Department of History, European University Institute
Bricks and Waste Clay Pits in the Rupel Region as Reciprocal Landfills of Belgium’s Regime of Cheap Urbanisation
Tom Broes, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Ghent University, Vrije Universiteit Brussel & Université Libre de Bruxelles
The Hidden Landfills of Architectural Whiteness: Titanium Dioxide Production and Accumulated Injustice in Kerala, India
Kshitija Mruthyunjaya, PhD Fellow, The University of Manchester
Reading the Landfill from the Stockpile: The NYC Clean Soil Bank
Amelyn Ng, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Columbia University GSAPP