In 2012 I started this blog as the basis for a photobook project in response to photographing industrial wastescapes in Melbourne's west with Stuart Murdoch. The first post was about photographic anxiety; the third embraced the idea of conceptual documentary, the fifth post introduced interpretation, the sixth post introduces the idea of perspectivism, whilst the seventh signalled a rejection of the positivist underpinnings of documentary photography.
The notes in those posts opened up a pathway for the project and the various posts can be interpreted as brief notes. It -- the photobook -- remains uncompleted. It had been put on the back burner.
The initial concern or subject matter was edgelands, or more broadly drosscapes, which can be interpreted as an urbanized region that is the waste product of defunct economic and industrial processes of late capitalism. Drosscapes are the inevitable darkside of human made industrial landscapes. Many are highly toxic.
Alan Berger's concept of drosscape implies that dross, or waste, may be "scaped", or resurfaced, and reprogrammed for adaptive reuse. Berger is specifically concerned with American urban landscape, but it is what is happening in and around Sunshine, Melbourne, or more broadly the post-industrialized sites of Melbourne's western suburbs.
Berger's landscape architect focus is about the in-between’s of a city’s urban fabric. He makes the case that urban lands are in constant flux and that urban sprawl is rampant, and will continue to do so even with the best of urban planning intentions.
That sprawl is what is happening in western Melbourne, and there are vast tracts of wasted land in Melbourne's west -- vast scarred, ugly, abandoned and industrially polluted land, creeks and rivers.
Berger's argument says that designers – architect, landscape architect or urbanist –--should shift their attention to properly developing these types of derelict spaces, given our growing constraint on natural and other resources. These sites (railyards, harbors, landfills, factories, industrial-manufacturing sites) are no longer dismissed as permanently destroyed and beyond recovery and re-inhabitation but, conversely, are in various stages of reclamation for new uses and revenue generation, including housing, retail and office developments.
Berger argues that the drosscapes of yesterday have the potential to be new [cultural] landscapes for tomorrow. The cleanup of the post-industrial wastelands in Melbourne's west can be seen in the ongoing rehabilitation of Kororiok Creek that flows through Melbourne's western plains to Port Phillip Bay.