Is there an allure of spoiled places? Spoil islands are overlooked
places that combine dirt with paradise, waste-land with "brave new
world," and wildness with human intervention. Although they are
mundane products of dredging, these islands form an uninvestigated
archipelago that demonstrates the potential value and contested
re-valuation of landscapes of waste. To explore these islands,
Spoil Island: Reading the Makeshift Archipelago navigates a course
along the U.S. east coast, moving from New York City to Florida.
Along the way, a general populace squats, picnics, and reflects on
the islands, while other forces are also at work. New York City
parks commissioner Robert Moses first deplores then adopts Hoffman
and Swinburne Islands, UN Secretary General U Thant meditates on
the East River's Belmont Island, businessman John D. MacArthur
rejects the purchase of Peanut Island, artist Christo surrounds
Miami's spoil islands, Key Westers debate the futures of two spoil
islands that mark their sunset view, and artist Robert Smithson
augments this archipelago materially and conceptually. Historical
and contemporary stories highlight each island's often
contradictory ecologies that pair nature with infrastructure,
public concerns with private development, rationalized urbanism
with artistic impulse, and order with disorder. Spoil islands put
you in places you normally wouldn't-and perhaps shouldn't-be. To
examine these marginalized topographies is to understand emergent
concerns of twenty-first-century place-making, public space, and
natural and artificial infrastructure. Today, spoil islands
constitute an unprecedented public commons, where human agency and
nature are inextricably linked. Spoil Island will be of interest to
anyone working in the areas of architecture, cultural history,
cultural geography, environmental studies, or environmental
philosophy. Linking the islands with their environmental
aesthetics, Charlie Hailey provides a lively and critical
topography of places that play a part in current events and local
situations with global implications.
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