This research addresses the heavy metal soil pollution of the IJmond region caused by the presence of the industry for over a hundred years. Currently, Tata Steel’s steel industry is transitioning towards Green Steel production, which will decrease air pollution significantly; this does not solve the issue of soil pollution that has accumulated over the years within the region. Even though heavy metals in the soil surpass the legally allowed concentration, nothing is being done about it. Heavy metal soil pollution influences human health when interacting with the soil and can indirectly contaminate produce grown on the soil. Due to this decennia-long pollution of the steel industry, the value of the surrounding landscape (the IJmond region) has decreased, limiting the residents’ health and future potential for development. That is why this research will focus on how to return value to the IJmond region in the Green Steel future of the steel industry. This will be done by creating a strategy concentrating on the spatial impact of soil pollution and the societal impact on the residents in working towards healthy soil again.
The revaluing strategy will focus on three sub-values: the current value that should be maintained, the intended value that should be created and the process value of ensuring a just process in revaluing the landscape. The current value is the presence of the steel industry within the region and how it is engrained within the societal structure of the IJmond region. A consequence of the presence of this current value is soil pollution, which causes a conflict with the livability of the region. This is why the intended value is a healthy soil that returns livability and remediates pollution. The process value stresses the need for an inclusive process that creates agency and transparency for residents.
The strategy combines these values by integrating collaborative governance with spatial remediation, both of which are essential to realising healthy soil on a large scale. This is done in four phases that focus not only on planting, maintaining, and harvesting plants that clean the soil through phytoremediation but also on creating stakeholder interaction and engagement.
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For the last decades, technologies, new agricultural trade policies, environmental restrictions, high pressure through economic competition in combination with a sharp competition of land lead to the development of intensive farming. As a result, patchy landscapes have been replaced by monofunctional, homogeneous agricultural landscapes that fragment natural landscapes and take away natural and cultural diversity. The consequences of the processes of fragmentation and homogenization are both socio-economic and landscape-ecological and cause biodiversity loss and social injustice among farmers.
Through changing existing paradigms about nature conservation, this project suggests an alternative approach for understanding possible interrelations between nature and agricultural practices. By reintroducing concepts about commons, a synergy can be found that compliments natural connectivity and agricultural landscapes through the establishment of a regenerative agro-ecological network that connects biotopes in a multi-functional way using current agricultural parcels and natural zones. This newly introduced Common Ground network produces a new farming method in which agricultural practice has a temporal character and is a continuous modifiable process. In this way, the vision makes use of the dual crisis as a solution rather than seeing it as the source of the problems.
The Commons also resemble a new way of practising agriculture, in which land, knowledge, resources and financial risks are shared among farmers in a socially just way. In addition, these shared landscapes reflect on the social context in which farmers are considered as environmental stewards who share some of the responsibility for an ecologically balanced system.
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