The nature of contamination: Paradoxes of planning in toxic military-industrial sites

Abstract

This paper explores a paradox at the heart of contemporary urban ecologies: contamination, long framed as the antithesis of nature, has become - under certain conditions - a protective condition for specific ecologies. In former military-industrial sites at the core of the Tel Aviv metropolitan region in central Israel, high levels of toxicity have stalled development and, in doing so, allowed ecosystems to persist and regenerate, including the reappearance of rare species. Drawing on interviews, site tours, and close analysis of planning documents and ecological reports, we trace how pollution inadvertently enables biodiversity, limits extensive urban redevelopment and reshapes planning temporalities and imaginaries. Rather than treating remediation as a linear path from damage to recovery, we argue that contamination itself has become a condition of governance - delaying and deterring neoliberal redevelopment while enabling the persistence and regeneration of ecological life. This shifting dynamic reveals an emergent planning culture marked not by control or restoration, but by delay, cohabitation, and pragmatic accommodation. Inspired by Haraway’s call to ‘stay with the trouble’ and Tsing’s notion of the ‘latent commons’, we highlight a prospective political ecology - one attuned to the entangled, uneasy alliances through which toxicity and forms of life endure together.