“Disturbed Sites” in Rodeo

In this assignment, our group is focusing on OLUs 11–13, which occupy the northwestern part of Contra Costa County. The significant armature of this area is a coastline occupied by railways and highways, with urban areas squeezed by the steep natural terrain and the numerous industrial facilities and oil refineries. My personal design site is concentrated in Rodeo, a city that includes dense communities and Philips 66 SF refinery. Like other refineries in the Bay Area, the Philips refinery is planned to close within the next four years, only to be replaced by the world’s largest biodiesel refinery in 2040, and a major refinery center of the West Coast and even the whole US. Fact: Within the next decades, Rodeo will be forced to coexist with floods and large industrial facilities such as oil refineries but withstand 50% of the air pollution compared to the past.

Rodeo map (snapshot from Google Earth)

We can conclude that in my site, the challenge is how to combine resistance to sea level rise and brownfield restoration to discover the potential of a new lifestyle for the community. At the same time, it is necessary to increase jobs, reduce environmental carbon content, and maximize community equity.

Mapping of OLU11–13, future risks, infrastructure and natural elements (From left to right)

Elizabeth K. Meyer described such brownfields as “disturbed sites”, that is, contaminated landscapes that were previously used for industrial purposes, regardless of whether their pollution was intentional or unintentional, recognized or hidden, regulated or still uncertain. “Disturbed” captures the effects and characteristics of these locations. They have been disrupted by the new process — interrupted and disturbed — and this change makes us uneasy, anxious, worried, and excited. This term also resonates with contemporary ecological science theories, which recognize the importance of disturbance mechanisms in the succession process and ecosystem dynamics.

For Rodeo, it seems that it is a feasible way to transform some of the brownfields that will be abandoned to create a multi-profit green corridor for the public park. Nowadays, it is not uncommon to convert brownfields into parks. Many articles on large parks in disturbed areas have focused on the necessary remediation of these parks to clean them up before they are considered safe for human use. Although the ecological technology and operational design strategies used to turn these wastelands into parks are very attractive and creative, this particular attention does not show what these large parks might mean for the surrounding and the communities that use them. Is a beautiful civic park replacing the economic source of the community’s survival the number one need of people? What does it mean to build large urban parks on land degraded during human consumption and industrial production? Urban institutions, known as public parks, were once associated with the landscape, giving urban residents a respite from the world of work, consumption, and production, but now they are in garbage and uncertain, even toxic by-products produced. How acceptable is the society to those uncertain parks? Including the circular sidewalks along the metal plank roads, which are located on the poisonous ground planted with heavy metal plants? What kind of citizens and societies will be associated with the large parks in these devastated areas? How do they compare to citizens in a democratic society? Wouldn’t a large ordinary park with popular courts and picnic shelters be like a kind of amnesia, a behavior of forgetting the history of the site, rather than a sign of regional characteristics and identity? When I was trying to start with brownfield renovation, I would have such doubts.

This history — and the process of settlement, decomposition, repair, and groundwater leakage that accompany it — is hidden under a thin layer of green turf and tar as usual. Like open-air parks in the mid-twentieth century, these early large-scale industrial parks were a form of forgetting and deception, using what Mira Engler called the “disguise method.” This art of landscape camouflage obscures the history and process of ruined industrial sites and erases the connection that might make these parks more meaningful to the public and the look back on the history of consumption and production.

A draft of my Rodeo renovation project

Therefore, I hope to pay more attention to how to make full use of the by-products of biodiesel production, a new resources for the Rodeo community, and see if we can find the possibility of improving the landscape from the perspective of material circulation. I found that biodiesel is very different from traditional diesel in the composition of by-products. Although greenhouse gas production has dropped significantly, it will produce more wastewater, glycerin, and biological residues. If not disposed of properly, these valuable products will be wasted and will have a further impact on the environment. Especially in the Bay Area, this will make Rodeo more vulnerable to pollution while also facing rising sea levels at the same time. I hope that my proposed green corridor will help Rodeo deal effectively with these industrial by-products, while decarbonizing and meeting the three main goals of the ‘Green New Deal’ vision. Through my research, I have found three interesting ideas:

1/ A large amount of glycerol is the direct raw material of many vaccines such as pneumonia vaccines;

2/ Algae refining is a new refining model in the future. The output is large but small in scale, which can be used as a source of electricity for nearby communities. More importantly, when algae are cultivated, wastewater can be used as the raw material and will be greatly purified, and finally discharged into the sea;

3/ Glycerin can be used as part of ruminant animal feed. In addition, plant residues can be used as natural raw materials for pasture farms through organic composting.

So, in the detailed design stage, I used the long and narrow site (from the coastal area to the hillside) between the refinery and the community to create a series of landscape sequences. (Wetland Landscape-Riverbank Landscape-Algae Farming Landscape-Pasture Landscape) These landscapes are connected by groups of ponds like necklaces. Some of them are needed for production, and some are needed for ecological functions to resist floods. They can all be connected by pipelines and other infrastructure to form a unified landscape texture. Such landscape intervention methods also bring many benefits at the socio-economic level, such as adding nearly 1,000 jobs, reducing energy costs, and increasing affordable housing. I hope this large, disturbed park can be regarded as a new type of landscape that reproduces the relationship between consumption and production and becomes a spiritual landmark for the local past and future. This can also encourage communities to change their environmental attitudes, build new social groups, and act quickly.

Of course, all these strategies are ultimately carried out under the overall planning of the visual aesthetic upgrading. Contaminated places can also be found in a unique landscape beauty, such as the yellow moss on the slag heap of Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, or its birch forest, its bushes, willows, and butterfly bushes colonize the polluted Railway passage. It can also be enlarged, concentrated, or created on contaminated sites that have been restored. For example, Peter Latz designed children’s playgrounds and gardens in steel-edged bunkers that previously-stored industrial materials such as coke and limestone. In Vintondale Park in Pennsylvania, the surprising color development of the acid mine drainage basin condenses a unique landscape. There, as coal mine wastewater was gradually cleaned up in a series of discrete and interconnected basins, the mine wastewater changed from “acid orange, bean green to alkaline blue”.

Vintondale Park in Pennsylvania(From Google)

Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord (From Google)

It is not enough to just clean up one place when designing disturbed places Creating beauty-creating beauty from the strange and special characteristics found in polluted industrial sites-is the first step in the environmental reexamination process. My design is still in progress, and I hope the result can achieve the above expectations. This is both interesting and challenging.