Memory Gardens: Aesthetic Education and Political Emancipation in the "Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord"

Designed around a disused Thyssen iron mill, Peter Latz's Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord is widely held to be one of the most important public park projects of the last decade. Fusing remnants of the former plant with innovative landscape design that integrates the historical memory of the site's abuse, the park affords visitors the opportunity to reappropriate terrain once controlled by industry. However, emphasizing the sublime beauty of industrial ruins and highlighting individual encounters instead of the historical trajectory of economic exploitation, the design also obscures the site's social significance, thus affirming rather than contesting the destructive logic of industrial production.