Presentation short abstract

The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in East London has, since its inception, been framed as an archetypal project of urban landscape remediation. This paper explores the tricky, potentially even conceited, politics of in/visbility which underpins the parks claims towards ecological remediation.

Presentation long abstract

Urban pollution often becomes perceptible at moments when ecologies fail, break down, or die. But what happens when urban ecologies themselves become the modality by which histories of toxicity, pollution, and unequal exposure are hidden from view? By tracing the contemporary reconfiguration of urban metabolism at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, East London, this paper explores the tricky, often duplicitous, ways in which contemporary landscape infrastructure interventions are working to simultaneously remediate a historically polluted urban landscape at the same time as displacing its histories of toxic waste beneath the surface: out of sight, out of mind. During the construction of the park, 2,000,000 m³ of soil, contaminated with heavy metals and radioactive materials, was excavated, washed, 'hospitalized', bioremediated, and selectively returned alongside vast amounts of newly imported topsoil. A decade later and the landscape has undoubtedly been an ameliorative success - on the surface at least. Beneath the imported topsoils and undulating topography of bioswales, recovered riverbanks and rills, lies a geotextile membrane layer which serves as an artificial barrier to a vast amount of unremediated, toxic, and at places dangerously radioactive aggregate material. By illuminating this infrastructural 'sleight-of-hand', this paper conceptualises a new 'politics of in/visibility' (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000) which is being rearticulated by emergent design strategies that simultaneously celebrate remediation and recovery above ground, while actively sealing off the toxic legacies and chemical afterlives of unequal exposure which lie below.