Photo credit: Marcus Eliasson (2025)
According to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, there are currently about 86 000 contaminated areas in Sweden, of which approximately 27 000 have been surveyed. Among these, up to 10 000 are considered to pose a high or very high risk to human health and the environment. New sites, as well as new types of pollutants, are continuously being identified in line with growing scientific knowledge about environmental toxins. The predominant method for remediating contaminated land is to excavate and transport polluted soil to landfills, which is a massively resource-intensive process. Moreover, the demand for remediation is increasing in connection with contaminated land being used for development. Consequently, decisions about which sites to remediate are driven less by risk assessments and more by the potential for land exploitation. On top of this, the high economic costs associated with remediation often accelerate the development itself.
There is an evident need for more knowledge on resource-efficient methods to address contaminated sites, both in terms of remediation and land use. However, while certain types of contamination can be treated, delimited or destroyed, the broader issue remains: pollution as a whole does not simply disappear. On the contrary, it is inseparable from the industrial legacy and, in some cases, even from ourselves. To navigate the new ecological realities that have emerged because of contamination, new approaches are required.
The artistic research project Love Your Monsters: The Toxic Heritage of Contamination explores the challenges associated with managing contaminated sites through the lens of the architectural discipline and knowledge field of Rebuilding culture. By framing contamination as a specific form of difficult heritage, the project emphasizes that long-term sustainable management is not solely a matter of resource efficiency, but of engaging with the complexity of these environments from within. What is more, how they are experienced as heritage depends less on the contamination itself, but more on how they are managed, underlining the necessity of critically reflective architectural approaches to interventions in them. The project is thereby an experimental search for an architectural language capable of engaging with contamination in, and as a part of, the existing environment. How should we approach the repurposing of contaminated sites in terms of restoration ideologies, and are the ones we currently have sufficient? What aspects of these sites should be preserved, if any, especially if the contamination remains?
The doctoral education is funded by the Knowledge Foundation.
Malte Ottosson is an architect and a PhD student in Rebuilding culture. Trained at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, he also has a post-master degree in Restoration art from the Royal Institute of Art. Although currently based in Stockholm, he has previously also been a scholar at the Danish Institute for Science and Art in Rome.
Main supervisor: Lone-Pia Bach, Kungliga konsthögskolan
Admitted to: Konstfack, employed by Kungliga konsthögskolan
Project period: 2025-2029