“It’s Alive!”

Heavy industrialization leaves behind unnatural landscapes that can pose risks to human and nonhuman health due to contaminated soils, substrate, and groundwater. Once an industry ceases operation, the site’s rehabilitation process creates new landscapes that are unrecognizable from what existed before. In this study, we argue that understanding these stitched-together, Frankenstein-like, scarred landscapes is not intuitive. We take the Open Hearth Park in Sydney, Cape Breton, as a case study. Once considered Canada’s most contaminated site, the park is now disconnected from its industrial past, and the remediation process has reduced the possibility of grand green spaces. Using walking, phenomenology, and autoethnography, we layer multiple histories to develop a new understanding of this monstrous site and engage in a process of healing the land. We offer an alternative form of scholarship that is more responsive to entangled geographies.