Gardening in a Wasteland
MICHELLE LI
Working at the intersection between architecture and landscape, my research examines spatial relationships between historic injustices and contemporary environmental risks. I received my Master of Architecture degree from the University of Toronto where I explored ecological design methodologies focusing on material circularity, post-wild landscapes, watershed stewardship, and public participation in design through my thesis project. Additionally, I hold a Bachelor of Architectural Studies from the University of Waterloo and worked in design offices in Toronto, New York, Paris, and Hamilton over the course of my studies.
Read the article in PDF form here.
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Figure 1. Botanical Craftings, 2023. Michelle Li.
TO WALK / WHAT IS SITE?
Positing the landscape as protagonist in the narrative of the city, this research explores the idea of site as a repository of collective memory, where each site can be understood through its material identities and cultural histories.
My MArch thesis, titled Gardening in a Wasteland, was completed at the University of Toronto in SUPERNATURAL studio and advised by Prof. Laura Miller. The starting point of my research began by following the journey of a brick, originating from now-decommissioned clay quarry, Evergreen Brickworks, to its destination at the Leslie Street Spit, a landfilling project built from construction debris and dredgeate that still serves an active dump site. These post-industrial sites exist today as ecological parks, transforming from abandoned wastelands to urban wilderness.
The act of walking as a research methodology rather than concentrating on a single or fixed destination is significant to situate landscape observations. Sounds, textures, a shift in wind direction, a drop in temperature, or changes in light are experiential qualities that are often lacking in a photograph or map. A series of dérives—from independent wanderings, site visits, and guided tours—led to encounters with local activists, citizen historians, and garden stewards. These walks became opportunities to engage directly with the land; an experience Rebecca Solnit characterises through discovering while moving in space:
Processes of urbanisation based on natural resource exploitation—sites of industry, excavations and demolitions—led to the creation of wastelands. Where quarries are landscapes of dispersion, landfills are landscapes of accumulation. Relegated to the city’s peripheries,these sites have plural histories, evolving in use, form, value, and ecologies. My research explores the remediation of these wastelands into wildscapes that weave together human and more-than-human assemblages. I experimented with alternative modes of model-making for landscape documentation through several series of exploratory artefacts. Working at the 1:1 scale, I focused on processes using found materials combined with other techniques: to walk, to record, to translate, and to reuse.
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Figure 2. Journey of the Brick: fragment, site, network, 2023. Image by Author
TO RECORD
To record considers landscape as a living archive of our collective ecological heritage. A site contains tangible evidence of geological time and human activity that can be read in the topography, soil composition, and local ecology of a place.
In Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, On Exactitude in Science, a fictional map is drawn and detailed at the scale of physical landscape, a ‘Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire,’ coinciding ‘point for point’ with the actual territory.[2] Addressing material histories, land artist Robert Smithson’s series of indoor earthworks, Nonsites, exhibit an absence of site. Collections of rocks, sand, rubble, or other minerals are displayed in a gallery setting alongside storyboards of maps and photographs. These sculptures altered the landscape by removing material, expanding the conventional notion of site from its outdoor geographical location to its indoor abstract representation.[3] In response, I explored processes of plaster-casting, texture rubbing, and papermaking that consider the complexity of 1:1 representations of the landscape.
Each plaster leaf forms a 1:1 scale map or a “three dimensional logical picture” that calls attention to the question: what is site?[4] Casting required a step-by-step process: each leaf was left to dry to maintain its structure, then “poured” or “painted” in plaster, cured till sufficiently hardened for the organic part of the leaf to be removed, and the negative cast was left overnight to finish curing. Using processes of collecting, casting, cataloguing, this series explore notions of craft, specificity, and fragility, transforming what might be considered as waste or ephemeral into an artefact of value. Each leaf is identified both by its botanical name and by the person who collected it.
Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, an earthwork that is experienced by walking, creates a site through the (re)arrangement of materials that is gradually disappearing due to erosion. How does one create a record of a place that is in constant transformation? The concept of ruin is typically associated with the decay of buildings and human-made artefacts—spaces that are reclaimed by nature. Paradoxically, cities are places where the landscape has been devastated. A term for a landscape in ruins is ‘wasteland’ – sites rendered inhabitable to and by humans.
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Figure 3. Plaster Leaves, 2023. Michelle Li. Top Left: American Basswood (Tilia americana) found by Michelle. Top Right: Common Lilac (Syringa vulgaris) found by Michelle. Bottom Left: Money Tree/Guiana Chestnut (Pachira aquatica) from Lilian. Bottom Right: American Sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) found by Laura.
TO TRANSLATE
To translate makes a connection between the act of interpreting language with the act of moving from one place to another.
In my research, I identified two significant keywords: wasteland and ecoactivism. Using the rubbing technique, I used graphite to translate the texture of a brick onto a two-dimensional surface as a 1:1 drawing. Considering the relationship between surface versus volume, these rubbings were created like unfolded elevation drawings, expressing the site as three-dimensional rather than a flat plane.
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Figure 4. Rubbings of brick fragments found at the Leslie Street Spit, 2023. Michelle Li.
KEYWORD: WASTELAND AND WILDSCAPES
Bad earth: land that has been degraded, resulting in a triple extraction: of minerals, of waste, and of human health.
Places of bad earth are urban habitats with a history of intentional human disturbance resulting in highly-altered soils and often spontaneous vegetation communities. French garden designer Gilles Clément set forth the idea of the ‘third landscape’ (le tiers-paysage)[5] that describes, “an undetermined fragment of the Planetary Garden that designates the sum of the space left over by humans to landscape evolution—to nature alone.”[6] Other names for the wasteland include ‘terrain vague’ coined by Ignasi de Sola-Morales and ‘urban wilds’ by Kevin Lynch that refer to spaces that have been abandoned and are in the process of transformation.[7]
Building upon these definitions, I understood wasteland as peripheral landscapes of displacement and accumulation. Sites of extraction and contamination and characterised by chaotic human presence. My research considers these ecosystems that are no longer pristine wilderness or cultivated landscape, thus “post-wild.” In the process of remediating places of bad earth, how can we heal our relationship with the natural realm?
KEYWORD: ECOACTIVISM
Ecoactivism: an environmental ethic for land-based justice and a space for remediating human and more-than-human relations
Linking land art with environmental activism, I conducted a precedent study of ecological artworks on reclaimed and recycled sites. These projects include Time Landscape (1965-1978–present) by Alan Sonfist, Ocean Landmark (1978, 1980-present) by Betty Beaumount, and Wheatfield: A Confrontation (1982) by Agnes Denes. The last was a wheatfield planted and harvested in the Battery Park landfill in downtown Manhattan to call attention to “mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns.”[8] These artworks lend to practices of care that celebrate natural phenomena by reimagining futures of a site. Framing the landscape as infrastructure, these works emphasise material narratives—respectively trees, fly ash, and wheat—that can be understood through acts of ecological restoration—reforesting, casting coal waste to form an artificial reef, and farming.
Defining keywords helped me to develop my vocabulary for describing these complex landscapes, which expanded a definition of nature beyond preserved wilderness or reconstructed historical ecosystems. Through case study research, I identified methods for material upcycling and ways to reclaim, restore, or repurpose sites that shaped my approach to landscape design.
TO REUSE
To reuse examines the process of transforming something from waste to value whether as a space, material, or artefact.
In this series of artefacts, I created handmade seed paper using scrap paper and found flora: allium seeds gathered from Evergreen Brickworks, leaves, flower petals, and other plant matter as embedded or embossed objects. I conducted multiple experiments such as pulping paper fibres by hand or with a blender. Next, sheet formation with a mould and deckle was fashioned from two wood frames and mesh. Then couching, when the wet sheet is transferred from the screen to a cloth surface. Last, pressing and drying to improve paper thickness, colour, grain texture and density, and smoothness. This papermaking process involves recycling waste and explores notions of craft and material transformation.
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Figure 5. Papermaking experiments, 2023. Michelle Li.
SPECIES MOVEMENTS AND MATERIAL CIRCULARITY
These exploratory artefacts were created alongside research on material and species movements at multiple scales, zooming out from the scale of a local watershed to regional shipping routes that facilitate the movement of natural resources. Centralised at port cities, international trade networks connect extractive industries to global supply chains to mass consumerism. In the Great Lakes ecosystem, the St. Lawrence Seaway has established pathways for non-native species. When introduced species cause ecological harm, conservation authorities label them as invasive— whether from threatening native biodiversity to harming water quality—and/or economic loss, with agriculture as the industry that is most affected.
Attempts to eradicate or remediate the damaging effects of non-native species remain ineffective, even counterproductive. Instead, harvesting introduced species for reuse can mitigate impacts of their permanent position in local ecosystems. Recasting ecological threats of diasporic communities as abundant resources invites new modes of urban biodiversity and co-production. Spontaneous vegetation often exhibits resilience and the ability to adapt to anthropogenic disturbances. Through design thinking, discarded materials—construction rubble and spontaneous vegetation—can be transformed into tools and infrastructure for rewilding the Don River Watershed. This framework introduces new understandings of urban biodiversity, circular economy, and material culture that can be combined with ecological restoration.
Embracing design for a post-wild world, ecological stewardship should consider ongoing management of introduced species. This position draws on Indigenous perspectives that emphasise a reciprocal relationship with plants, including non-native ones, by finding them a place and value rather than eradicating them. In the Anthropocene, what is the role of the designer? How does design embrace grassroots and populist perspectives to operate outside of dominant architectural paradigms? Merging organic and inorganic matter, my research proposes new material cultures that challenge biases associated with native/migrant dichotomy, confronting the fragility and mutability of our urban watersheds.
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Figure 6. Non-native species introduction in the Great Lakes, 2023. Michelle Li.
Working at the intersection between architecture and landscape, my research examines spatial relationships between historic injustices and contemporary environmental risks. I received my Master of Architecture degree from the University of Toronto where I explored ecological design methodologies focusing on material circularity, post-wild landscapes, watershed stewardship, and public participation in design through my thesis project. Additionally, I hold a Bachelor of Architectural Studies from the University of Waterloo and worked in design offices in Toronto, New York, Paris, and Hamilton over the course of my studies.
Read the article in PDF form here.
Figure 1. Botanical Craftings, 2023. Michelle Li.
TO WALK / WHAT IS SITE?
Positing the landscape as protagonist in the narrative of the city, this research explores the idea of site as a repository of collective memory, where each site can be understood through its material identities and cultural histories.
My MArch thesis, titled Gardening in a Wasteland, was completed at the University of Toronto in SUPERNATURAL studio and advised by Prof. Laura Miller. The starting point of my research began by following the journey of a brick, originating from now-decommissioned clay quarry, Evergreen Brickworks, to its destination at the Leslie Street Spit, a landfilling project built from construction debris and dredgeate that still serves an active dump site. These post-industrial sites exist today as ecological parks, transforming from abandoned wastelands to urban wilderness.
The act of walking as a research methodology rather than concentrating on a single or fixed destination is significant to situate landscape observations. Sounds, textures, a shift in wind direction, a drop in temperature, or changes in light are experiential qualities that are often lacking in a photograph or map. A series of dérives—from independent wanderings, site visits, and guided tours—led to encounters with local activists, citizen historians, and garden stewards. These walks became opportunities to engage directly with the land; an experience Rebecca Solnit characterises through discovering while moving in space:
“Walkers are ‘practitioners of the city,’ for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.”[1]
Processes of urbanisation based on natural resource exploitation—sites of industry, excavations and demolitions—led to the creation of wastelands. Where quarries are landscapes of dispersion, landfills are landscapes of accumulation. Relegated to the city’s peripheries,these sites have plural histories, evolving in use, form, value, and ecologies. My research explores the remediation of these wastelands into wildscapes that weave together human and more-than-human assemblages. I experimented with alternative modes of model-making for landscape documentation through several series of exploratory artefacts. Working at the 1:1 scale, I focused on processes using found materials combined with other techniques: to walk, to record, to translate, and to reuse.
Figure 2. Journey of the Brick: fragment, site, network, 2023. Image by Author
TO RECORD
To record considers landscape as a living archive of our collective ecological heritage. A site contains tangible evidence of geological time and human activity that can be read in the topography, soil composition, and local ecology of a place.
In Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, On Exactitude in Science, a fictional map is drawn and detailed at the scale of physical landscape, a ‘Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire,’ coinciding ‘point for point’ with the actual territory.[2] Addressing material histories, land artist Robert Smithson’s series of indoor earthworks, Nonsites, exhibit an absence of site. Collections of rocks, sand, rubble, or other minerals are displayed in a gallery setting alongside storyboards of maps and photographs. These sculptures altered the landscape by removing material, expanding the conventional notion of site from its outdoor geographical location to its indoor abstract representation.[3] In response, I explored processes of plaster-casting, texture rubbing, and papermaking that consider the complexity of 1:1 representations of the landscape.
Some families visit apple orchards or pumpkin patches during the fall. My family see the autumn foliage at Edward Gardens and pick maple leaves in lieu of fruit. Those were some of my earliest memories, walking in a landscape of golden orange, scarlet, and warm russet. An urban forest in the middle of Toronto felt like stepping into a fantasy world. With my sister and brother, we would search for the most unblemished leaf or those with unique gradients.
This memory echoed my obsession with casting a perfect replica of a leaf, as thin and as textured as possible. When the plaster was too viscous, the cast lacked detail; or else was too watery and became brittle, and prone to shattering. Iteration after iteration, I realised that imperfections—a tear or a hole or a discoloration—were marks of authenticity themselves. They were made to be handled—cradled—to hold the impression of something that had already become dust.
Each plaster leaf forms a 1:1 scale map or a “three dimensional logical picture” that calls attention to the question: what is site?[4] Casting required a step-by-step process: each leaf was left to dry to maintain its structure, then “poured” or “painted” in plaster, cured till sufficiently hardened for the organic part of the leaf to be removed, and the negative cast was left overnight to finish curing. Using processes of collecting, casting, cataloguing, this series explore notions of craft, specificity, and fragility, transforming what might be considered as waste or ephemeral into an artefact of value. Each leaf is identified both by its botanical name and by the person who collected it.
Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, an earthwork that is experienced by walking, creates a site through the (re)arrangement of materials that is gradually disappearing due to erosion. How does one create a record of a place that is in constant transformation? The concept of ruin is typically associated with the decay of buildings and human-made artefacts—spaces that are reclaimed by nature. Paradoxically, cities are places where the landscape has been devastated. A term for a landscape in ruins is ‘wasteland’ – sites rendered inhabitable to and by humans.
Figure 3. Plaster Leaves, 2023. Michelle Li. Top Left: American Basswood (Tilia americana) found by Michelle. Top Right: Common Lilac (Syringa vulgaris) found by Michelle. Bottom Left: Money Tree/Guiana Chestnut (Pachira aquatica) from Lilian. Bottom Right: American Sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) found by Laura.
TO TRANSLATE
To translate makes a connection between the act of interpreting language with the act of moving from one place to another.
In my research, I identified two significant keywords: wasteland and ecoactivism. Using the rubbing technique, I used graphite to translate the texture of a brick onto a two-dimensional surface as a 1:1 drawing. Considering the relationship between surface versus volume, these rubbings were created like unfolded elevation drawings, expressing the site as three-dimensional rather than a flat plane.
Figure 4. Rubbings of brick fragments found at the Leslie Street Spit, 2023. Michelle Li.
KEYWORD: WASTELAND AND WILDSCAPES
Bad earth: land that has been degraded, resulting in a triple extraction: of minerals, of waste, and of human health.
Places of bad earth are urban habitats with a history of intentional human disturbance resulting in highly-altered soils and often spontaneous vegetation communities. French garden designer Gilles Clément set forth the idea of the ‘third landscape’ (le tiers-paysage)[5] that describes, “an undetermined fragment of the Planetary Garden that designates the sum of the space left over by humans to landscape evolution—to nature alone.”[6] Other names for the wasteland include ‘terrain vague’ coined by Ignasi de Sola-Morales and ‘urban wilds’ by Kevin Lynch that refer to spaces that have been abandoned and are in the process of transformation.[7]
Building upon these definitions, I understood wasteland as peripheral landscapes of displacement and accumulation. Sites of extraction and contamination and characterised by chaotic human presence. My research considers these ecosystems that are no longer pristine wilderness or cultivated landscape, thus “post-wild.” In the process of remediating places of bad earth, how can we heal our relationship with the natural realm?
KEYWORD: ECOACTIVISM
Ecoactivism: an environmental ethic for land-based justice and a space for remediating human and more-than-human relations
Linking land art with environmental activism, I conducted a precedent study of ecological artworks on reclaimed and recycled sites. These projects include Time Landscape (1965-1978–present) by Alan Sonfist, Ocean Landmark (1978, 1980-present) by Betty Beaumount, and Wheatfield: A Confrontation (1982) by Agnes Denes. The last was a wheatfield planted and harvested in the Battery Park landfill in downtown Manhattan to call attention to “mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns.”[8] These artworks lend to practices of care that celebrate natural phenomena by reimagining futures of a site. Framing the landscape as infrastructure, these works emphasise material narratives—respectively trees, fly ash, and wheat—that can be understood through acts of ecological restoration—reforesting, casting coal waste to form an artificial reef, and farming.
Defining keywords helped me to develop my vocabulary for describing these complex landscapes, which expanded a definition of nature beyond preserved wilderness or reconstructed historical ecosystems. Through case study research, I identified methods for material upcycling and ways to reclaim, restore, or repurpose sites that shaped my approach to landscape design.
TO REUSE
To reuse examines the process of transforming something from waste to value whether as a space, material, or artefact.
In this series of artefacts, I created handmade seed paper using scrap paper and found flora: allium seeds gathered from Evergreen Brickworks, leaves, flower petals, and other plant matter as embedded or embossed objects. I conducted multiple experiments such as pulping paper fibres by hand or with a blender. Next, sheet formation with a mould and deckle was fashioned from two wood frames and mesh. Then couching, when the wet sheet is transferred from the screen to a cloth surface. Last, pressing and drying to improve paper thickness, colour, grain texture and density, and smoothness. This papermaking process involves recycling waste and explores notions of craft and material transformation.
Figure 5. Papermaking experiments, 2023. Michelle Li.
SPECIES MOVEMENTS AND MATERIAL CIRCULARITY
These exploratory artefacts were created alongside research on material and species movements at multiple scales, zooming out from the scale of a local watershed to regional shipping routes that facilitate the movement of natural resources. Centralised at port cities, international trade networks connect extractive industries to global supply chains to mass consumerism. In the Great Lakes ecosystem, the St. Lawrence Seaway has established pathways for non-native species. When introduced species cause ecological harm, conservation authorities label them as invasive— whether from threatening native biodiversity to harming water quality—and/or economic loss, with agriculture as the industry that is most affected.
Attempts to eradicate or remediate the damaging effects of non-native species remain ineffective, even counterproductive. Instead, harvesting introduced species for reuse can mitigate impacts of their permanent position in local ecosystems. Recasting ecological threats of diasporic communities as abundant resources invites new modes of urban biodiversity and co-production. Spontaneous vegetation often exhibits resilience and the ability to adapt to anthropogenic disturbances. Through design thinking, discarded materials—construction rubble and spontaneous vegetation—can be transformed into tools and infrastructure for rewilding the Don River Watershed. This framework introduces new understandings of urban biodiversity, circular economy, and material culture that can be combined with ecological restoration.
“In the Anthropocene, what is the role of the designer? How does design embrace grassroots and populist perspectives to operate outside of dominant architectural paradigms?”
Embracing design for a post-wild world, ecological stewardship should consider ongoing management of introduced species. This position draws on Indigenous perspectives that emphasise a reciprocal relationship with plants, including non-native ones, by finding them a place and value rather than eradicating them. In the Anthropocene, what is the role of the designer? How does design embrace grassroots and populist perspectives to operate outside of dominant architectural paradigms? Merging organic and inorganic matter, my research proposes new material cultures that challenge biases associated with native/migrant dichotomy, confronting the fragility and mutability of our urban watersheds.
Figure 6. Non-native species introduction in the Great Lakes, 2023. Michelle Li.
- Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London: Penguin Books, 2001).
- Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (London, 1973).
- Robert Smithson, “A Provisional Theory of Nonsites,” essay, in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (University of California Press, 1996).
-
Ibid.
- Gilles Clément, “Manifesto of the third landscape,” Trans Europe Halles, Lund [Translated by Bee M. and Fèvre R.] (2004).
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Gilles Clément, Manifeste du tiers-paysage, Paris: Sens & Tonka, 2013.
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Patrick Barron and Manuela Mariani, eds. Terrain vague: interstices at the edge of the pale. Routledge, 2013.
- Agnes Denes, Notes from an Interview with the Artist, November 7, 2015.