REHABILITATION OF LANDFILLS. NEW FUNCTIONS AND NEW SHAPES FOR THE LANDFILL OF GUIYANG, CHINA

The enlargement of a modern landfill may provide an opportunity to intervene with large-scale projects and thus restore spaces for community use and potentially providing an added value. Based on these premises, the intervention on the Guiyang landfill in China has been developed focussing on the possibility of future reclamation of the site under construction during the design stage by applying an approach that takes into account future use from a technical and, more importantly, economical perspective from the outset. The design proposal has been developed following analysis of these elements: landscape and territory (predominant features of the area, naturalistic features to be preserved, optimization of the interrelationship between the adjacent areas and functionality of the territory); analysis of the residential, infrastructural and productive systems (fundamental in ascertaining the size of the catchment area of potential users). The landfill mining intervention planned in the area allows a more efficient operation of the landfill and has been studied to redesign the site in terms of morphological shapes. Indeed, the project suggests the use of the mass of waste as a plastic element for the reconstruction of a redeveloped landscape according to the shape required by the new configuration of the area. In view of this consideration, in this case study, the typical shape of a landfill is abandoned and the site has been reshaped according to the design of the Chinese landmarks in the surroundings. The area has been conceived as a new green space and defines the role of the landfill site as an Environmental Education Centre and a recreational urban park for public uses, located close to a highly urbanized area. This project design was developed in the context of the ROLES initiative funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the framework of the Scientific and Technological Cooperation Agreement between the Government of the Republic of Italy and the Government of the People’s Republic of China. ROLES was coordinated by Raffaello Cossu (University of Padova, Italy) with the collaboration of Roberto Raga (University of Padova, Italy) and Dongbei Yue (Tsinghua University, China). ROLES (Remediation of Old Landfills for Environmental sustainability and final Sink) proposes an innovative approach to landfill reclamation, analysing in depth the issue of functional requalification, i.e. the possibility of enhancing the valorisation of landfill surfaces for specific uses aimed at ensuring environmental and landscape sustainability.