I just finished a fabulous book called Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America, by Alan Berger. Published by the Princeton Architectural Press, the book just came out earlier this year. Berger, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, states the case for redevelopment, particularly in the context of “dross,” or wasted land within the built environment of metropolitan areas. Berger calls for the adaptive reuse of properties that have fallen into disuse on account of deindustrialization, post-Ford economic shifts and technological innovation. Sites contaminated by industrial processes, dying shopping malls, old landfills, decommissioned military installations, areas bordering infrastructural improvements, redundant sports stadiums, and transition areas for residential communities are just a few of the targeted parcels.
Berger makes the astonishing argument, which makes the pro- versus anti-sprawl debate irrelevant, that “there is no growth without waste and that urban growth and dross go hand in hand.” Comparing the growth process of metropolitan areas to any other living organism, Berger asserts that just as a living thing grows, cities produce waste in their pursuit to expand. “Dross” is an unavoidable byproduct of metropolitan growth. Nonetheless, Berger notes with great enthusiasm that these underutilized areas are great opportunities for designers, not to mention developers and other land use professionals, to return these parcels to productivity within the modern economy.
The greatest virtue of Berger’s work, however, is the phenomenal collection of aerial photographs that he has compiled while hanging out of an airplane high above his targets. Over half of the work is comprised of Berger’s capturing of the sites he discusses in the text. Berger chronicles the shifting dynamics in cities today by concretely showing how Americans use the land they occupy. New residential units, malls and warehouse facilities sprout on the far edges of existing communities. Central cities attempt to cope with this movement by redefining its place in the metropolitan area’s overall future. Berger supports these photographic examples with statistics displayed in easy-to-decipher graphs.
Essentially, Berger advocates using redevelopment to return the “dross” to the mainstream of the built environment. He notes the Kelo decision as an occurrence “for better and worse” but he misses the finer points of the Supreme Court’s decision. Nonetheless, Berger firmly stands behind its overarching vote for municipal power to carry out his “drosscape” agenda. Despite its glossing over of the existing land use process, a nagging problem with redundancies in the text and its calls for change without specifics commonly found in academic tracts, Drosscape offers a wonderful overview of the state of affairs in modern American land use. The vivid pictures alone are worth the price. It also demonstrates once again the power that land use holds over American psyches – even those deep and meaningful psyches that walk the greens of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Berger makes the astonishing argument, which makes the pro- versus anti-sprawl debate irrelevant, that “there is no growth without waste and that urban growth and dross go hand in hand.” Comparing the growth process of metropolitan areas to any other living organism, Berger asserts that just as a living thing grows, cities produce waste in their pursuit to expand. “Dross” is an unavoidable byproduct of metropolitan growth. Nonetheless, Berger notes with great enthusiasm that these underutilized areas are great opportunities for designers, not to mention developers and other land use professionals, to return these parcels to productivity within the modern economy.
The greatest virtue of Berger’s work, however, is the phenomenal collection of aerial photographs that he has compiled while hanging out of an airplane high above his targets. Over half of the work is comprised of Berger’s capturing of the sites he discusses in the text. Berger chronicles the shifting dynamics in cities today by concretely showing how Americans use the land they occupy. New residential units, malls and warehouse facilities sprout on the far edges of existing communities. Central cities attempt to cope with this movement by redefining its place in the metropolitan area’s overall future. Berger supports these photographic examples with statistics displayed in easy-to-decipher graphs.
Essentially, Berger advocates using redevelopment to return the “dross” to the mainstream of the built environment. He notes the Kelo decision as an occurrence “for better and worse” but he misses the finer points of the Supreme Court’s decision. Nonetheless, Berger firmly stands behind its overarching vote for municipal power to carry out his “drosscape” agenda. Despite its glossing over of the existing land use process, a nagging problem with redundancies in the text and its calls for change without specifics commonly found in academic tracts, Drosscape offers a wonderful overview of the state of affairs in modern American land use. The vivid pictures alone are worth the price. It also demonstrates once again the power that land use holds over American psyches – even those deep and meaningful psyches that walk the greens of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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