ABSTRACT
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.
