Industrial development often leaves behind contaminated soil, creating derelict brownfield sites that can remain abandoned for decades. These landscapes pose risks to both communities and the environment, while the high cost of conventional remediation often makes redevelopment uneconomic for local authorities, regeneration companies, and landowners.

Turn Systems is a speculative nature-based remediation service that uses phytoremediation and bioremediation to restore contaminated land through ecological processes. Carefully selected plants, fungi, and microbes are deployed across sites to absorb, stabilise, and break down pollutants commonly found in post-industrial landscapes, including heavy metals and hydrocarbons.

The project combines living systems with emerging monitoring technologies. A distributed network of soil probes and underground electrodes interfaces with plant root systems and mycelial networks, translating biological and electrochemical activity within the soil into real-time environmental data. This allows remediation progress and soil conditions to be monitored in real time, enabling adaptive management of moisture, pH, nutrients, and microbial activity to optimise the remediation process.

Rather than leaving brownfield sites inactive while awaiting redevelopment, Turn Systems reimagines them as active landscapes of ecological recovery. The system positions phytoremediation as an interim land-use strategy that can improve biodiversity, reconnect communities with nature, and contribute towards Net Zero and biodiversity gain targets while preparing land for future development.

Rooted in systems thinking, sustainability, and stewardship, Turn Systems explores how design can work with natural processes to restore damaged landscapes and create new relationships between people, ecology, and the post-industrial city.