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Drosscape:
Wasting Land in Urban America, by Alan Berger.
Drosscape is defined by
the author as "the productive integration and reuse
of waste landscape throughout the urban world." His
goal is not to solve society's ills through this, as Berger
acknowledges that waste is a natural product of a successful
civilization. So ideally that waste landscape will always
be somewhere, changing locations as previous ones are reintegrated
and new ones are created somewhere else. An example of this
evolutionary viewpoint are the early 20th-century industrial
sites near urban cores that have been abandoned in favor
of locations far outside the city center. These large and
sometimes hazardous areas are just now being changed into
housing and other uses in many cities as more people move
near the city center. In the future, these outlying industrial
sites will become waste landscapes, ripe for further reuse
and integration. This phenomenon seems to be born of a capitalist
and consumer-driven economy, where the landscape is waste
just like almost everything else.
Rather than providing solutions for
the designer interested in working with drosscapes,
the author instead presents his case for addressing the
issue. And this he does very well, combining aerial photography
with maps, graphs, and charts illustrating land use patterns,
populations densities, and manufacturing growth/decline,
respectively for ten American cities. Even though these
data representations (especially the graphs) tend towards
being too stylized, the similarities among the ten cities
indicates a phenomenon of sprawl and abandonment of
urban manufacturing sites that points towards a great amount
of land available for infill development.
By seriously thinking about these
waste landscapes that are the leftovers of growth and expansion,
developers, architects, politicians, and other interested
parties take a greater responsibility for their actions.
In this way, perhaps the drosscapes that Berger
proposes have a greater value beyond their potential physical
manifestations.
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