Urban Land

I started working as miner when I was seventeen at Sainte-Barbe. In those days, in the 60s, Sainte-Barbe served as school and training mine. The normal sequence was fifteen days at school followed by thirty days down in Pontil 2, and this for two years. This sector was difficult. I remember the temperature... climbing up to fifty degrees, the ventilation was out of date, the galleries were narrow... This all made working difficult. I am sure that I would have changed my job after my graduation if I had to stay in that sector. Fortunately I was transferred to the Oules Mine. We did the thirty-eight, only our headlamps giving us light. There was also neon lighting, but that went no further than thirty meters. Only the foreman had the privilege of a security light. When there was firedamp, the flame started to fade. Lighters and matches were forbidden, and somebody caught with these could be fired. The work was very physical; we had to use the pneumatic hammer. We were paid by the meter. The foreman asked everybody how many meters he would do; depending on courage and strength the maximum length was fifteen meters. But careful: one should no be mistaken too often since the work had to be finished by the remaining shift members. Down there, we always helped each other; we had lots of fun. Since the work was hard, we couldn’t afford to be cross with each other. We had the impression of being in a different world, where there was solidarity.

The past 250 years have been characterised by an astounding sequence of key innovations changing fundamentally the strategies for the production of goods to satisfy the needs of a dynamically growing population. Production patterns have been optimised, industrialised and urbanised. Mechanisation was already introduced in the late 18^th century, giving rise to an unprecedented increase in production efficiency referred to by some historians as the 1^st industrial revolution. The mechanisation of weaving, for instance, led to mass production of textiles. Steam engines enabled man to exploit resources at a scale before unseen. Coal mines were established, as were steel mills and chemical plants. New cities were founded. Earth’s resources were considered as being unlimited. They were there to be exploited. At the end of the 18^th century, workers were needed and money was there to pay them. The mass poverty that stigmatised the pre-industrial, agricultural society vanished. Urban population rose. At the advent of the 19^th century one billion people populated our planet, five times more than in the times of the New Testament.

At the beginning of the new millennium, every two months every European produces an amount of household wastes corresponding to his own weight. In the United States this quantity is already reached after one month. One of the most demanding challenges of an urban society is to handle these wastes, i.e. to collect, transport, stock and transform them into new resources.

While Earth’s population keeps on growing, more and more resources are consumed. After the easily accessible ones at the surface had been depleted, more complex exploitation methods were applied to reach deeper into the ground. Exploitation work focussed on

In order to understand the dimensions of investments made to prepare for and pursue military conflicts it may be mentioned that about seven percent of the annual global budget for military expenses would be sufficient to solve the forthcoming global water crisis, which affects already today about half of Earth’s population and lets a child die every eight seconds somewhere on this planet.

Regardless of project size and location, be it in the centre of a city, in the outskirts, or on virgin land, the principal steps of a site investigation are the following:

The goal of the desk study is to collect information relevant for judging the feasibility of the project. A desk study is an inventory that includes the evaluation of the following material (Dodt, Genske, Kappernagel, Noll 1993):

Field reconnaissance aims at confirming the findings from the desk study in the field. Additional information relevant for the project is collected and simple index tests on ground properties are carried out.

New life grows out of the ruins: It greens and blossoms out of the industrial fallows of the Ruhr District.

Ferber (1995:16) expresses the opinion that three strategies to recycle land can be distinguished in the European Community:

Waste disposals are often treated in combination with derelict industrial land since their impacts on the environment are comparable. Furthermore, industrial sites are often associated with landfills because production waste is usually dumped on or next to the site. There are, however, major differen­ces between a leaking landfill and industrial wasteland:

Mining operations are associated with manifold impacts on the natural environment as introduced already in the first part of this book. These impacts include the contamination of air, water, and soil. Sources of pollution are

Sites of warfare are degraded in many different ways. A general distinction has to be made between land directly affected by military conflicts and land used by armed forces as military bases. In the first case land degradation is mainly caused by:

The concept of sustainability as formulated in Agenda 21 of the Rio Convention of 1992 clearly states that our practice of consuming resources shall not compromise on the ability of future generations to benefit from these resources (Brundtland-Report, World Commission on Environment and Development 1987). The consumption of virgin land as being observed all over the world contradicts this concept. It is the task and the duty of today’s scientists to put an end to the shortsighted land consumption by introducing strategies and concepts to recycle used land. The 10^th Chapter of Agenda 21 addresses an integrated approach to the planning and management of land resources:

Land is a finite resource, while the natural resources it supports can vary over time and according to management conditions and uses. Ex-panding human requirements and economic activities are placing ever increasing pressures on land resources, creating competition and con-flicts and resulting in suboptimal use of both land and land resources. If, in the future, human requirements are to be met in a sustainable manner, it is now essential to resolve these conflicts and move towards more effective and efficient use of land and its natural resources.