Waste(d) Imagination Tour

Imagine eliminating waste and achieving greater sustainability and circularity in the built environment through preservation, deconstruction, and building material reuse.

“Waste is a failure of the imagination" - Douglas McMaster.

The Waste(d) Imagination Tour is aimed at spurring imagination about greater sustainability and circularity in the built environment. In the tour, you will learn about problems with demolition and the alternative methods that address them. These include sustainable practices like preservation and adaptive reuse, moving buildings, and systematically deconstructing buildings and reusing their materials.

This tour was created by the Just Places Lab, a platform for research and creative action in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University, with assistance from Historic Ithaca.* The Just Places Lab and Historic Ithaca are founding partners of the Circularity, Reuse, and Zero Waste Development (CR0WD) network, a group that works towards a more sustainable built environment in New York state. The content in this tour was sourced from CR0WD partners, including photographs and text contributed by Historic Ithaca, Finger Lakes ReUse, and the Circular Construction Lab at Cornell University.

We plan to continue to expand this tour. Please contact us with suggestions and check back for updates (email j.minner@cornell.edu).

Additional credits: The Just Places Lab team that created this tour includes Wyeth Augustine-Marceil, Ketaki Ghodke, Medha Kulkarni, Jeff Iovannone, Chloe Long, Charles Zhang, and Jenni Minner. Some material for the tour was developed by students in a Land Use and Spatial Planning Methods course at Cornell University. Thank you to Susan Holland and Christine O'Malley for all of their assistance, the Clarence S. Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies, and the Department of City and Regional Planning for their generous support.