Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the ecology of the site when the local courts ask for an Environmental Impact Statement before making a final decision. It retraces the master plan, focusing in particular on the city’s understated and underdeveloped “green belts” and its “Leisure Valley”—that can be read both as sites of recreation for the residents and as emergency drainage channels in the event of catastrophic flooding—as evidence of plans understated graphic entanglement with erosion field character of the site that is ultimately destined, and designed, to “fail.” The book suggests that making a place for a long durée imagination of the city as an ecological ruin, with no obvious design solution out of that problem, may be its more instructive legacy, an alternative reading of preservation and modernism inspired in part by the cultural ecologist Donna Haraway’s conception of “staying with the trouble”.