This project, co-conceived with University of Chicago colleague Prof. Mary Beth Pudup, explores the regional “slagscape”– post-industrial landscapes characterized by chemical and metallurgical waste from steelmaking and other fossil-fuel intensive heavy manufacturing around the Great Lakes– as a diagnostic for congenital processes of spatial ruination under capitalist urbanization. Drawing on multidisciplinary methods from across the physical and life sciences, social and spatial sciences, humanities, and arts and architecture, the project asks how the regional slagscape is to be empirically studied in the present, conceptualized in relation to fraught histories of urbanization, extractivism, and global capitalism, and traced into imaginings of potential futures pressured by climate change and ongoing environmental degradation.