Socioplastics 11939 A Place’s Past Does Not Cover Its Surface Evenly
Editorial status: Working essay; full historical marker definition requires source verification. A reclaimed industrial landscape holds several temporalities at once: contaminated soil, new vegetation, obsolete infrastructure, remembered work and current leisure. ChronoDeposit describes the uneven persistence of these histories across a site. The past appears through material traces and lived recollections, each with its own duration, visibility and relation to present use. Edward Casey’s philosophy of place makes the spatial situation of recollection central. Bruce Braun’s work on forests, nature and political economy shows how landscapes are formed through material and political processes. Their approaches help examine a site as a field where histories overlap and persist at different rates, rather than as a transparent sequence of periods. A field section through a former industrial landscape could map soil contamination, building remnants, new planting, infrastructure, remembered work and current routes. Oral histories would be placed alongside environmental tests and planning records. The project could record which traces remain visible, which require instruments to detect and how current decisions redistribute attention across these temporal layers. ChronoDeposit helps researchers represent historical depth as uneven and active. It can inform remediation, heritage interpretation and landscape design by connecting material evidence with memory and ongoing use. The marker’s full historical definition remains to be verified against its source archive. This working essay proposes a method for recording how incompatible rates of persistence meet in one place. A longitudinal section could be updated as remediation, restoration and new uses change the evidence available to future visitors and decision-makers.
REFERENCES
Braun, B. (2002) The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada’s West Coast. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Casey, E.S. (1987) Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html