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Urban rehabilitation of brownfields advances cities' resilience and contributes to residents' wellbeing and nature preservation. This article explores the transformation of one such site-Hiriya, once the largest landfill in Israel-into a large metropolitan park. The rebirth of the area, taken to new levels by the design of German landscape architect Peter Latz, combines a regional solution to problems exacerbated by climate change, drainage, and transportation and brings social recovery to neglected neighbourhoods in the southern Tel Aviv metropolis. We argue that the success of Hiriya's transformation was a national-scale event, resulting not only from an evolved Israeli environmental discourse but from parallel processes including a maturing national planning system, a new approach to water and streams, and an overdue national plan for waste treatment problems resulting from threats to vital infrastructures. Using a range of textual and visual documents, the article examines the processes that led to the transformation of Hiriya and looks at how an excellent design turned Hiriya from a brownfield on the outskirts of the cities into a lively, green, functioning space in an urban setting, thereby providing a regional, even a global, model for creating sustainable spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hiriya landfill, in central Israel, served Tel Aviv for 50 years and became a byword for neglect and ugliness until it was recently transformed from an environmental hazard, into a beautiful park. This article explores the idea and experience of waste, as concept and matter, and its representations in the 2004 international design competition for Hiriya's rehabilitation. Addressing the global issue of rehabilitating wasted sites, the competition encouraged landscape architects to address a polluted past and outline new cultural and ethical meanings in the reclaimed public space. Drawing from unexplored textual and visual sources, and combining landscape architecture with cultural studies on waste, we reveal that few of the 14 proposals touched upon the complexity of waste, with its cultural, ethical and social attributes. The winning entry by Peter Latz turned the mound into a striking monument to trash, but minimised the visitors' idea and experience of the waste itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]