Investing in the Ground: Reflections on Scarcity,Remediation and Obdurate Form

Douglas Spencer develops David Harvey's notion of the ‘spatial fix’ in which material processes in the built environment and the ground itself are repeatedly used up for the purposes of capital investment. This can be to the detriment of the quality of the land itself, which is often abandoned after a period of time as polluted and unusable brownfield sites; while available resources are bled dry. It is a situation that has been worsened over the last few decades with the emphasis on entrepreneurial and intensive modes of urbanisation. Spencer indicates how this situation can be negated by landscape urbanism through critical interventions, such as those represented here in the work of the Architectural Association Landscape Urbanism (AALU) Masters programme in London and Groundlab, the practice associated with it.