Influenced by the critique of oil culture, the project investigates postpetroleum imaginaries through architecture and landscape design. Focusing on a former refinery in Thames Estuary, the project explores possibilities of oil space, geography, petroleum contamination and technologies of remediation through natural systems. It aims to suggest ways in which toxic landscape can be visible, publicised and transformed to an inhabitable environment. Converging phytoremediation and bioremediation with design, it explores how a series of flexible and multifunctional interventions and infrastructures can sup- port a long term process of landscape decontamination and reclamation while simultaneously making the site operate as an experimental garden-town.
