Urban Salvage Yards as Hubs for Emerging Reuse and Repair Communities
is the title of a paper I will present at the Re-opening the Bin: Waste, Economy, Culture and Society conference hosted by the University of Gothenburg in June 10-12, 2021. This will include discussing Construction Junction (CJ) as an example of what Mira Engler has called “sites of material exchange” – which I will argue are instrumental in the parallel retention and reinvention of values of historic building materials. I am also looking at other examples of such sites from Gothenburg to Montreal. Depending on their scope, mission, and location, these sites have names such as salvage/reclamation yard or reuse/recycling centre. Other names are hubs, junctions, or exchanges. Although reuse centres may not (yet) have a major impact on the diversion of materials from landfill (according to a USEPA study from 2012), they play important educational roles. This can include both by building general awareness in the public, and through training for skills needed to repair for reuse. These sites are also important as “sights”, where alternate journeys for material discards are demonstrated.
The “spectacle of waste” associated with the consumption of secondary goods can be criticized as part of greenwashing or even gentrification, when the resulting reuse is also contributing to even more consumption and or inequitable access to resources. However some such sites are helping re-distribute access to materials amongst more people who need them. What do these existing models for more socially oriented salvage tell us about conditions required for greater equity, alongside empowerment and even job creation? Alongside CJ’s parallel social and environmental missions, another perhaps even more pointed example is the Materiaux-Sans-Frontières project in Montreal. This materials reuse organization was started as part of the OAQ’s “architects without borders” association. It recently acquired the Éco-Reno in Montreal when the architectural salvage company decided to close its operations.
When the salvage yard itself is demolished
The closure of well established salvage yards may be a trend, making it also important to pay attention to where the materials go. In the case of Walcot’s Reclamation in the Bath (UK), the company seems to have reopened in another location. In that case, the question still to ask would be what happened to the buildings themselves, and their materials in the context of the new projects on the site. These types of major shifts of where inventories are located also raises questions about where such places are located in the city and in relation to potential users.
Messy places or green sights?
Developing a culture of repair needs positive places associated with the messiness of sorting, fixing and making. Engler has argued that the sites of material exchange need to “free them from the ambience of charity or the formality of government” (Engler, p.174). The siting and design of the reuse centre itself is an area to examine, ranging from the warehouse to the community centre to the retail shopfront. While large scale operations like CJ, located in a warehouse that occupies a large urban block, have their role in creating a landscape for storage, salvage and construction activities, the integration of related functions within neighbourhoods throughout a city could help to normalize the more public dimensions of these initiatives. The Fixotek project in Gothenburg explores how to integrate reuse and repair stations within existing urban housing estates, however it notes greater success in neighbourhoods already practicing recycling (Ordonez and Hagy, 2019). The shift in perception from messy to green suggests an underlying moral assessment based on giving order and purpose.
One of the recent stories about Construction Junction highlights how one employee is developing his lock repairing skill alongside a more creative practice. So making place for individual projects alongside the more collective work of Project-Re or CJRegives is an important aspect.
Rethinking salvage’s boundaries
Examining how CJ works is also leading to a hypothesis that we need to blur the boundaries between architectural and other types of salvage and reuse. What happens when the questions around demolition waste meet food, packaging and fashion discards? Architectural materials and elements are somehow both more complicated (larger in scale, requiring specialized tools and trades, possibly containing toxic materials) and more acceptable (easier to sort, less decay or smells, and more inherent durability). Reuse centres help us to see the lifecycle of building materials outside a building’s history. This can include connecting historic uses to other spatialized material formulations – from retail furnishings to theatre sets – and engaging with many other hybrid contexts where architectural ideals are represented as spectacle.
One of the ways that material boundaries are now being dissolved and classifications unsettled is by the web-based platforms, which make it much easier to connect more people with more stuff in more places. The online department store has no limit to how many sub-categories of departments it includes. Online retail/second use platforms sell or share everything now. A reduced barrier between second-hand and new goods has however had its draw backs in architectural salvage. The interest in specific types of older items has meant that replications are often displayed and sold alongside originals. This is exactly the kind of development that has made heritage organizations in some places more resistant to the work of the salvage yard. Attitudes can change, as is illustrated by Preservation Resource Centre’s Salvage Store in New Orleans eventually joining forces with the Green Project Recycling Centre. Perhaps by connecting the really old stuff with the resale of newer items, the nuance of meaningful and appropriate options will be easier to articulate.
Street front places for reuse
With some exceptions, such as Yardley’s on Bank Street in Ottawa, most of the salvage yard examples I have seen so far are located far off the main streets or in neighbourhoods on the edge. Cities once had many types of repair shops on main streets, which have disappeared with the culture of obsolescence. The shoemaker is perhaps one of the last remaining such services to survive, albeit now often part of a service area in a shopping mall, as street fronts were redeveloped or demolished. From a heritage point of view, the shoemaker’s craft and shop can also be seen as part of a living or intangible heritage, which has often been displaced by redevelopment of the commercial main street and higher rents. In such contexts, how can the street front repair work be kept visible?
It turns out that shoe repair is an interesting case to study. According to the Shoe Service Institute of America, in the 1930s when many unemployed men turned to shoe repair as a small business, the shoe repair industry actually went through a period of renewing its image, including by cleaning up their retail spaces, and creating more skilled training. They may also provide models for campaigns that promote repair. Contrast this aspect of the shoe business history with the emergence of the place-less shoe bank, where unwanted shoes are given to charity, but perhaps encourage new shoe purchases. Places have a cost, and so does visibility. “Sights of material exchange” may help transform values, and even serve an educational purpose for some, but keeping track of all the other impacts is important.
Text and photos by Susan Ross, unless otherwise indicated. Posted April 6, 2021.
Selected key references
- Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things, Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge, 1986.
- Engler, Mira. Designing America’s Waste Landscapes, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004.
- Gutberlet, Jutta, Urban Recycling Cooperatives: Building Resilient Communities, Routledge, 2016.
- Herstad, Kaeleigh, “”Reclaiming Detroit,” Demolition and Deconstruction in the Motor City,” The Public Historian 39.4 (2017): 85–113.
- Kopytoff, Igor, “The Cultural of Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things, Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge, 1986. 64-91.
- Lynch, Kevin. Wasting Away, An Exploration of Waste: What it is, How it Happens, Why we Fear it, How to do it Well, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990.
- Ordonez, I. and S Hagy 2019 “Fixotek: Implementing and Testing Urban Reuse and Repair Centers in Sweden” IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci. 225 012007. doi:10.1088/1755-1315/225/1/012007
- SalvoWEB, Architectural Salvage, Reclamation Yards
- Straw, Will. “Spectacles of Waste.” In Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture, ed. Alexandra Boutros and Will Straw. McGill-Queens University Press. 2010. 193-213.
- Urban Remains
- USEPA, Construction and Demolition Materials Scoping Study: Building Materials Reuse Centers, Office of Resource Recovery and Conservation, 2012.
WASTE HERITAGE RESEARCH: deconstruction, salvage & re-use 