Waste / In the beginning, waste was a place. Later on, it became a judgement of value. Since early modern times, the word “waste” has signified “to neglect to use”, and “to use up”: both meanings invoke and refute an idea of appropriate use. When “waste” is prefixed to the word “land,” the two original meanings join into one: “wasteland” is a place inimical to human civilization and its attempts to improve, control, exploit, define, or enjoy. “Wasteland” is now used to refer to land like a desert and to land like an abandoned industrial site. On the one hand culture’s antithesis, on the other its product, wasteland occupies a liminal place in the history of our ideas about the value of human industry.
Frugality / The apple tree is pruned hard and its fruit is thinned. This economy of management (or management of economy) is a fruitful practice, ensuring the largest, healthiest, sweetest fruit in the future. Frugality is thus an apt simile for utopian methods in landscape and urban design that seek to create places for human, environmental, and ecological flourishing. Utopianism is here an orientation toward the future coloured with hope and expectation, and one that learns from the past and requires action in the present, often collective action. Sustainability in design can thus be recast, in this economic model, as a form of delayed gratification and sensible (sensual) management rather than abstinence or forbearance, bearing fruit abundantly and deliciously in the future.