Waste metal repository for adaptive reuse: historical (Erasure) and the toxic mining landscape of Johannesburg's central basin

Abstract

The city of Johannesburg is defined by the commodity of gold. Upon finding its rock embedded presence along the Witwatersrand reef line, the city began to grow accordingly generating the historical formation of a city around the mining industry. This in turn accredits the city that exists today on the basis of these gold pockets; however, a history of the rich landscapes is commonly unacknowledged in the process of identifying the final metallic product. In order to obtain the precious metal from the earth, a previously vigorous landscape was wounded and carved in order to extract the gold particles. In the wake of this landscape stripping, the carvedout earth was displaced from its origins and placed above ground as mountainous landfills known as the gold mine dumps that scatter along the Johannesburg skyline from east to west. These compacted mounds create the memory of the scarred earth but further represent a toxicity that is deeply embedded in the mining industry. The soil upon its removal and exposure to air becomes toxic, contaminating soil, water, and dust. This creates an environment of toxicity that is caused by human landscape destruction that today requires chemical rehabilitation in order to detoxify the expansive physical contamination. While physical contamination acts a marker of the environmental damage this industry has inflicted, a further toxicity exists in the form of social wounds. The marginalization, inequality and treatment historically imposed by the mining force is a toxicity that is more difficult to visualize that the physical extraction mounds of the landscape. Today the production of gold has decreased, and the city of Johannesburg has become more dependent on a series of other industries. The call for mine dump removal is essential to the expulsion of physical contamination; however the query arises around the removal of a historical marker and monument of social, environmental and historical ruination. The design proposal objective of this research is to identify how these toxic wounds can be mended, while simultaneously creating a memory of historical erasure.