A Frugal Beauty
At the edge of Gothenburg’s historic inner fortified city lies the piers of Masthuggskajen. Remnants of a shipping industry that in adjustment to its time always seems to make a nomadic journey towards the new borderlines of the growing city. Today its prospected prime property in hibernation, cut off by the former route of emmigration connecting to the America ferries, leaving a wide ribbon of tarmac separating the piers from the rest of the city. Just too close, just too much in the spotlight of future development, but as a contradiction or consequence to this, it isn’t really noticed, isn’t maintained or cared for. Just cut off from the urban fabric and the intersections of daily flow of people. A “dead end”, or more as a “dead edge”, but then there’s the thing, it is just not dead. A void of terrain vague.
The relative undisturbed places of terrain vagues, is also the very thing tend to gain ecological diversity, despite the contradiction that these gaps are also often in between of sites of heavy human impacts.
Where nature becomes the primary driver in a landscape previously governed by human activity, where human-made conditions underlay a succession of nature, shaped by both the human abandoners and the non-humans who fill the gaps.
“Spaces of confrontation and contamination between the organic and the inorganic, between nature and artifice”. (Stalker)