Switzerland comprises around 38'000 contaminated sites, of which 4'000 are to be cleaned, as stated by the Federal Environmental Agency. Up to 49% of this number are former and current industrial sites.
More than any other city in Switzerland, Basel's origins are deeply rooted in industrial production. In the second half of the 19th-century, aniline-dye production flourished as a byproduct of the resident silk industry. Those newly established companies, named Ciba (Chemical Industry of Basel), Geigy, and Sandoz, would soon change focus to chemical products due to the collapse of local silk production. A hundred years later, they merged to Novartis, a world-leading pharma- and life-science-corporation. With the shift from production towards research and development in the late 20th century, previous industrial sites along the Rhine river became obsolete.
In 2019, one of those vestiges, the Klybeck-Area, owned by the aforementioned Ciba-Geigy and BASF (Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik) had changed ownership and went over to two pensions funds. Their aim for the coming years is to open the area to the public and transform it into a vibrant new district with a high number of housing, offices, and public programs. Diverting from the common opinion of the investors, the following proposal deems one key aspect of paramount importance: historical documents and soil samples, analysed by Ärztinnen und Ärzte für den Umweltschutz (doctors for environmental protection), clearly show the necessity of a preceding purification of the site's soil, as happened in contemporary decontamination processes of comparable areas in the city of Basel.
If these claims are considered to be true, the current visions and masterplans have to be reevaluated due to a large-scale excavation resulting in a total shutdown of the area.
Lasting for decades, the soil decontamination evokes excessive numbers of masses, movements, and technical measures. After hermetically sealing the site to prevent volatile pollutants spreading into the air, around 500 million cubic tons of soil are unearthed by dozens of high-security machines and specially equipped workers: Under the thin membrane of the tent, a consistently generating, stalker-esque landscape emerges.
In an evolvingly globalised logic, nowadays the contaminated material is shipped abroad, up the Rhine river, to Germany or the Netherlands, where it is thermally-treated at waste plants, like ATM in Moerdjk, running on residue oil scraped from supertankers. Once stripped of hazardous substances, the clean soil is used for landfills, such as dykes — reacting to the rise of sea levels.
700 kilometres South, in the Klybeck-Area, a gigantic hole remains — a 100 thousand square metres negative form depicting all previous actions. Past projects crudely answer this issue by a refill with clean material from other excavation sites in order to forget and level out the past, like at the site of Novartis Campus where only the finest gravel from the French Alsace was imported.
From Wasteland to Sunken City takes the form of a speculative design research, where the pit endures within the city, tackling the questions of above and below split by a new horizon, resulting from the remaining structure of the gigantic tent. Based on the soil's pollution, the project accepts the givens of common remediation and excavation processes and transnational material flows — the design bases on the local implications of said drivers.
