Mining Landscape, Death of an interaction

Human intervention in nature explains the reliance of human on earth and itsevolution. Benefiting from earth by extracting from nature started since the existence of man on earth and this kind of natural extraction still continues. As a result so many natural landscapes have turned into mining, industrial landscapes and etc. In contrary to agricultural sites, the mining sites are not sustainable geographical and economical sites. They are used temporarily and eventually become useless sites like post – industrial sites. It seems that mining is the constant and sustainable feature of post mining landscapes. The question is how these post mining and post industrial sites turn into potential landscapes in urban planning and design? How can they be managed and benefited from? This paper tries to research significant opinions in planning, design and reuse of mining sites with a landscape design approach. Meanwhile, a Spanish landscape architect, Juan Manuel Palerm, who uses matrixes to design and plan post mining sites, is introduced. Palerm emphasizes on relations and not absolute landscapes. His focus is on multi dimentional interrelations: of landscape and human, of people and etc. he believes that this interrelation must be identified and nature is the best guide in this process. Therefore he has a holistic approach to mining and post mining sites. Palerm considers matrixes a tool for decoding the complexities of the whole system (the whole world or landscape). He also uses them as a methodological tool for reading and interpreting mining landscape in these landscapes. The relevance between the keywords provides the codes for reading guiding projects. Matrixes help in finding the history of a place and introducing its future by answering all the questions about the place. He mentions that his goals in designing mining projects such as the Tarantino project (located in Italy) is to create a sense of satisfaction for the visitors because they don’t want to see the mines abandoned. Therefore, he designs these sites to achieve beauty. He believes to aspects of the site should simultaneously be taken into consideration in designing: the natural status of the site and the artificial elements which are added later. Homogenous design of mining and post mining landscape based on the defined matrix can impede the disorders caused by indiscriminative mining and human interventions and consequently create ecological identity for the region.