Photo Alicja Kielan
In Wrocław, the former sewage treatment farm has an important share as a component of the local wetscape. With its scale, the level of hydration or dehydration of the farm may decide on the city’s microclimate. If the land dries up it will not cool concrete or mitigate the urban heat island. If it retains humidity, it will have a potential to support water and air circulation, generate drafts and saturate the wind with cooling water vapour. The wet farm would grow to become the most powerful defence against abrupt climate phenomena. The three scenarios speculate on the preferred future developments:
1. The dyke infrastructure, the canal system, and the sewers are unsealed, only those ensuring the permanence of settlements are kept. Naturalization processes, and rewilding occur. The Odra River rediscovers its old beds, and in place of the sewage treatment farm, pools form coinciding with the periodic surges of the river. In periods of sufficient water new architecture would drift, but in times of drought it would settle on land.
2. The sewage treatment farm is transformed into hydrobotanic plantations, used as urban nature-based solutions. Between the plots of rainwater irrigation, reed beds and meadows, nurseries for water and mud plants are introduced for Wrocław’s cultivations, herb beds, nettlebanks, mosslands, and soil decomposing leaves from Wrocław parks are established. The orthogonal landscape is extremely diverse in nature and becomes again essential for the city’s metabolism.
3. Elements of the landscape from different periods have been preserved or restored, fragments are given to the workings of nature. The areas of spontaneous growth are adjacent to the relics of the hydrological system maintained in the state of “arrested decay”, part of the Drain Fields infrastructure is renewed and constitutes Wroclaw’s rainwater treatment, in selected places instead the “Memory of landscape” is entrusted to recreate ancient systems.
Photo Alicja Kielan