Notes from the Underworld. Recycling Strategies for the Sulcis- Iglesiente Mining Compound
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NOTES FROM THE UNDERWORLD. RECYCLING STRATEGIES FOR THE SULCIS- IGLESIENTE MINING COMPOUND. CATERINA PADOA SCHIOPPA DIAP Department of Architecture, Roma La Sapienza University, Adjunct Professor at Politecnico di Milano SUMMARY: Brownfields, greyfields and greenfields – as wastelands are today commonly catalogued – have grown exponentially in the last half-century, almost as much as urban sprawl. Since the early 1990s most thoughtful landscape architects, urban planners and architects have acknowledged the transformative potential of those territories. The paper addresses this theme from a theoretical and experimental point of view, focusing in the legacy left by a long history of mining exploitation in the Sulcis-Iglesiente area in Sardinia. CONTEXT: LIFE & DEATH OF AN UNDERWORLD The area called Sulcis-Iglesiente in the southwest of Sardinia is Italy’s largest mining compound, with an extension of over 3700 square kilometres. It was progressively dismantled starting in the late 1970s after an extensive history of raw material exploitation. Extraction of metals and minerals – obsidian, carboniferous granites, diorites, silver, lead and zinc – started long before the modern era, in Neolithic times. From the geological point of view, Sardinia is certainly one the oldest and most primitive territories on the European continent, with carbonate rocks that are over 500 million years old and are a remarkable reservoir of scientific and environmental knowledge. This abundance of mineral resources is the explanation for an early interest in this remote and gorgeous territory. Indeed, many different peoples of the Mediterranean region have conquered Sardinia, which saw changing governance and the development of a mining industry, starting with the Punics in the VII century B.C.E. followed by the Carthaginians in the V century B.C.E., the Romans in the III century B.C.E., Pisa and the Spanish in the Middle Ages, and finally, in the mid- seventeenth century, Piedmont state. In these centuries the island became one of the most important European centres for the birth of western industrialized civilization, a place where novel production systems were tested, and avant-garde techniques and sophisticated technologies were adopted. The growth of industry peaked in the XIX century, when private mining companies were established giving new shape both to the physical landscape and the entire society. With the arrival of electricity at the end of the century, some of the main extraction sites – e.g. Monteponi – were transformed into little towns, with specialized plants, mechanical washeries, foundries, Proceedings Sardinia 2017 / Sixteenth International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium/ 2 - 6 October 2017 S. Margherita di Pula, Cagliari, Italy / © 2017 by CISA Publisher, Italy Sardinia 2017 / Sixteenth International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium / 2 - 6 October 2017 large warehouses, and railways, as well as services and housing for workers. At that time in the Sulcis-Iglesiente area metallurgical activity – the processing and refining of raw materials as well as the treatment and disposal of sterile and waste material – was added to mining activity. Thus new settlements were founded, such as Nebida with the La Marmora monumental washery, and the large compound of Masua, extending over 7 hectares, which in the 1950’s was one of the most important European centres specializing in froth flotation, the mineral process in which gangue, or worthless material, is separated and removed. Close to Masua, in 1924, Porto Flavia was founded as one of the most futuristic works of engineering in the Mediterranean sea, for the storage and transportation of mining material. Excavated in the cliffs, this unique harbour was designed to exploit the natural morphology, with nine gigantic silos 18 meters high and with loading and unloading galleries connecting the sea to the main extraction sites. Figure 1. Monteponi little town in 1875. While the local economy was entirely based on lucrative mining activity, in the second-half of the nineteenth century Sardinia went through a period of poverty, malaria epidemics, and a general economic crisis linked to the decline of rural activities, particularly breeding and harvesting, partly caused by soil and water pollution produced by the mining industry itself. During the fascist regime, before the final impoverishment of the soil and the gradual closure of all industrial sites, mining was a very flourishing activity, fuelling Mussolini’s political and military plan. After all, Mussolini decided to invest in Sardinia with several infrastructural works and with the foundation of Carbonia, a city in the heart of the Sulcis area, planned as the new centre of Italian coal production, symbolically representing the crazy yet pervasive mirage of the autarchic economy. Sardinia 2017 / Sixteenth International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium / 2 - 6 October 2017 Finally, starting in the 1950s the economy begins to shrink, leaving a heavy legacy both in terms of human health and environmental degradation. Gradually the mining sites were dismantled and the whole compound was shut in 1991, along with most large European mining and industrial districts, most famously the Ruhr region with its 477 mines, the first example of a large-scale operation of reclamation, recycling and transformation of an abandoned industrial site into a park. After a long process of cultural and political awareness, carried out by local forces, especially by former miners, in 2001 the Sulcis-Iglesiente area was declared a UNESCO protected site, as well as a so-called Site of National Interest (SIN), thus becoming officially part of a global network of post-industrial areas valued for their important architectural and environmental qualities. The “Historical and Environmental Geomineral Park of Sardinia” with its terribly polluted, hydrologically instable, hilly, wild environment, inhabited by vast abandoned infrastructures of tunnels, extraction wells, and industrial plants but also less noble mud hills, slag and sludge dumps, and landfills, is a desolate yet fascinating landscape of waste architecture. Figure 2. Monteponi topographic plan, Municipal Historical Archive, Iglesias 2015. LANDSCAPE OF EROSION: MATERIAL & INTANGIBLE HERITAGE The territory connecting Iglesias to the seashore, where one finds Monteponi, Masua and Nebida, is indeed a “magnificent hell”, to quote Luciano Ottelli, enlightened geologist and former Director of the Geomineral Park, distinguished by a very impressive manmade morphology. Underneath the hills stand a subterranean city, excavated down to 500 meters below the sea level, containing 15 millions square meters of voids and 60 linear kilometres of underground paths, configuring a complex topographic system made of vertical veins, horizontal tunnels, bell pits, and spoil heaps, as well as natural caves and all the typical plastic forms generated by the Sardinia 2017 / Sixteenth International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium / 2 - 6 October 2017 natural erosion of karst rocks, including the collapse and disintegration of the earth. It is a landscape in which – as in all “landscapes of erosion” – natural and artificial modification processes are temporally and spatially tangled, and the earth is permanently altered by the corrosive and destructive power of nature, personified by wind and water. Negative landscapes, literally fabricated through manmade excavation, in which large voids are molded “for denaturalization rather than scenic beauty” (Smithson, 1979), are mystical places, full of contradictions since the subtraction of materials has allowed the evolution of humanity and its physical edification, while displaying significantly the scars of exploitation and death. Hence, for their ambiguity and their enigmatic character, those “pulverized sites” have been the object of theoretical and artistic exploration by land artists since the 1960s, for example the American land artist Robert Smithson, who pioneered a radical change of perspective regarding wastelands in general. Their contribution can be measured not only by the stateliness of their artworks, but also by new notion of nature as well as of ecology that have been shaped by them – today embraced by earth and social sciences – notably the idea of integrating if not sublimating mankind’s irreversible modifications of the earth. For land artists, indeed, nostalgia for a primigeneous status quo is meaningless, and instead it is the entropy of these places which make them an object to be observed and framed by the artistic gesture. Figure 3. Dump in Masua, 2015. Landscapes of erosion resulting from human activity, such as quarries and mines, have also been favourite subject in the theoretical discourse among architects about wasteland recycling strategies. Perhaps this is because, compared to other terrains vague – abandoned, contaminated, unproductive or moribund lands – these areas have radically changed their geographical conformation, both in physical and human terms, so that the boundary between nature and artifice blurs, and the landscape eventually comes to resemble the natural structures Sardinia 2017 / Sixteenth International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium / 2 - 6 October 2017 in which economical behaviour generates beauty. In this territory, the idea of “palimpsest” operates not metaphorically but corporeally; the landscape affords us with a real and embodied tactile experience across the vertical thickness of geological strata.