At the Intersection of Expertise and Landscaping: How Technical Advisors Created New Nature

In this chapter, I argue for understanding landfilling as a blurring of the rural and urban. The chapter follows the connections between environmental planning, waste management, and landscape planning through the plans for a new landfill outside the market town of Kalundborg in Denmark between 1975 and 1979 and its subsequent use and closure. In this example, a landfill was placed in close proximity to a small, rural hamlet. Because landfills after the environmental law counted as a technical site, this designation changed the relation between the site, the municipal authorities, and the villagers. By analysing the process, I show how the lines between what counted as rural and urban were blurred both through material changes to the site and through ideational understandings of what a rural village was.