Anthropocene Wastelands: from the Margins to the Center

International audience ; For a long time, wastelands have been geographically and intellectually kept on the margins of society. The dualistic thinking of the relationship between humans and nature permeated modern representations of places where the uncertain or disused sites were held in contempt. However, the deconstruction of the nature-culture dualism opened up a new theoretical landscape that paved the way for the revaluation of wastelands. Combined with the development of urban ecology in a context characterized by the scale of human presence on earth, postmodern ecological thinking tends to place wastelands at the center of attention as places where new ways of living in an unstable world are being developed. From the margins to the center, wastelands challenge our representations of places and forms of life in the Anthropocene.