"Wastescapes": landfills as landscape

In Greece, spontaneous "wastelands" appear quite often in natural landscapes and across rural ones. These can be dump sites of unwanted waste varying from dry to wet, such as inert materials from demolished buildings and even organic leftovers. "Wastelands" can be open dump sites or even different kinds of landfills "digesting" any type of waste, from industrial to urban. In the past, each municipality used to have its dumping area for the produced waste. As various health and environmen-tal issues arose, landfilling seemed the new solution as waste was capped with soil. Since the European Landfill Directive was created, the main goals of landfilling are "the prevention of negative effects of the environment and risks to human health from landfilling waste, during the whole life cycle of the landfill" (1999/31/EC, Article 1/1). Non-sanitary landfilling developed into sanitary, where liquids (leachate) are processed, and gases (biogas) are used for energy production. Since the 2000s, sus-tainable landfilling followed, where organic waste is composted separately to achieve a shorter "drying" period of the landfill (post-management). By the end of the waste disposal, the landfill continues a waste "digestion" process for several years, so that the space can be "recovered" back to nature, "recycled" as a land-scape, or even "reused" as a public space. Landfilled areas are state or communal-owned spaces that can be, and in some cases used as common spaces of activi-ties. Through the Research by Design approach (Roggema, 2016), questions such as what the various typologies of these transformed "wastescapes" are, how they "work" and what is their "afterlife" will be investigated through examples in different stages and sizes. How waste molds a moving ground and how "wastelands" can be thought of as spaces of care will be investigated (De la Bellacasa, 2017).