Wastelands are anthropogenic landscapes in construction and conception; they are the sites upon which we project our disgust and perceptions of worthlessness, the places where we inter our excrement, and, generally, spaces we avoid.

This issue of Prospect finds our contributors in the field, sifting through the debris of past centuries, and removing contemporary garbage from otherwise pristine shores. Projects within this issue illustrate the subjective judgements we project onto landscapes with terms such as beautiful. They reveal moral lessons found in historical husbandry, introduce you to a bucolic utopia gone sour, and showcase the designed no-places encountered across a transect of rural to urban environments. As always, our collaborators have responded with projects that push and expand our conceptions of what wastelands might be, harnessing the pervasive anxiety about the climate crisis that engulfs us, turning it into a touchstone of cultural production and positive action.

COLLABORATORS:

Cecil Howell, Thomas Rinaldi, Marie Lorenz, Diana Gruberg, Jill Desimini, Je Sung Lee, Donna Dennis, James Walsh, Greg Owens, Vinzenz Adldinger, Wayne Morris, Matthew Alvarez, Katarina Jerinic, and Nancy Seaton.