Coping with post-industrial sites is a pressing issue throughout Europe and North America. One point of departure for their general rediscovery was the revitalisation by Latz + Partner in the early 1990s of an abandoned steelworks as Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord; industrial relics were not demolished but seen as integral parts of the overall concept and imbued with new meanings and uses. Many more projects with a similar approach have since been executed and this book presents a selection of the most seminal, such as Chemetoff’s Île de Nantes, Parc del Clot in Barcelona, Hargreaves/PROAP’s Parque do Tejo e Trancão in Lisbon and Michel Desvigne’s Parc aux Angéliques in Bordeaux.

Beauty Redeemed offers a systematic framework for the consideration and use of post-industrial sites. The author, Professor of Landscape Design at Copenhagen University, places these ‘leftovers’ in their broad historical and aesthetic context, proceeding from the 19th-century Romantic fascination with ruins through present-day industrial decline as exemplified by Detroit to a renaissance of the transformed landscape. Transformation, understood as designing with the ‘as found’, forms the basis of this design theory; it explores design work informed by a sensibility for redeemed beauty and various concepts of relating past, present and future