Drosscape resilience : from coal mine waste dump to performative ground

Abstract

As it is well known to all, coal mining is the leading industry in Shanxi, China. Shanxi people are overly relying on extracting coal resource from nature to make profits. Coal mining not only contaminates the natural environment, but also restricts the social development, as it is a resource-driven industry. As the symbol of coal mines, waste dump contributes most of the pollution to the city. A series of threats such as landslide, water pollution and shortage, air-pollution, and land contamination impair the social healthy and sustainable development. Without limiting the existing waste dumping activity, coal mining drosscape is transformed into performative ground and it offers infinite opportunity to treat phytoremediation, water purification and productivity as a whole. The innovative design strategy of this project can be treated as a landscape reclamation prototype to apply to other coal mine sites in the Xishan coal mining region.

The waste dumping site is still active in the future within a decade. Without preventing the coal mine company from dumping coal gangue, the design guides them to dump in a safer and reasonable way which the waste rocks are enclosed by the constructed walls rather than freely dumping everywhere from the mountain top. Most importantly, the coal mine company and the operational machines become the landscape architects to shape the intended landform. In this regard, waste dumping activities and bio-remediation coincidentally happen and develop separately on their own way.

Coal mining industry in the region is not a sustainable economic mode for the villagers because the coal resource will soon be exhausted. So it is essential to help the villagers to figure out a new kind of economic mode for make a living. It is a wise choice to engage in the forestry and farmland work again which they have done decades ago before coal mining industry was popular. The water system within the landscape prototype would be a effective irrigation system in the long run. Some space is defined as open space as the post-development stage. It can also solve the problem that the coal mine village has little open space for coal mine workers and villagers to go and have leisure activities. This innovative mining drosscape reclamation would be a paradigm for the whole coal mining region.