This post is part of a CityLab series on wastelands, and what we squander, discard, and fritter away.
This week, we’ve written a lot about how cities let things go to waste. We looked at what we can learn from our trash and what words like “blight” do to a place. We witnessed how our waste gets into our water—from industrial spills in Lake Erie to the sewage of Phnom Penh’s canal to garbage piling up in the Arctic Ocean.
But cities don’t just throw stuff away: They also recycle, often in wildly inventive ways. Here are a few reminders that no space needs to be wasted forever, and urban renewal doesn’t always involve bulldozers.
