-Waste +Substrate : Designing the Informal Waste Landscape

This thesis explores the role of landscape architecture in spatializing the dematerialization and contamination of informal waste landscapes that have emerged in Accra due to global consumption. As a design response, it speculates how waste and excess can become a driver in creating an alternative future that fosters new social, ecological, and economic interactions while addressing the complexities and challenges that have arisen due to these landscapes. Waste and excess give rise to new landscapes. To confront them, we can restructure our preconceptions and negative connotations of these wastelands and its associated actors that have been rendered invisible and excluded. The proposed design critiques the binary of the contaminated landscape and remediated landscape and alternatively seeks to find a co-existence of the two by drawing out the potential reciprocity between them. As a result, a tension is created between the aesthetics of remediation and containment. There is both beauty and ugliness in the process of regeneration and decomposition.