Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America [Paperback]

Alan Berger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 3, 2007

Do you really know what is under that new house you just bought? How about what lies beneath the neighborhood playground? Was that "big box" retailer down your street built atop a toxic site? Will the warehouse just beyond your backyard be converted into a shopping center, factory, or trucking hub? These are just a few of the worrisome scenarios facing us all as our cities begin a stealth relocation of industrial facilities from the inner city to the urban peripheryplaces Alan Berger has coined "drosscapes." Now available in paperback, Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America is your guide to this vast, hitherto largely ignored field of waste landscapes.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Before readers hit the title page of this heavily illustrated if scattershot treatise, they'll see the following line alone on a page of brown paper: "Drosscapes accumulate in the wake of the socio- and spatio-economic processes of deindustrialization, post-Fordism, and technological innovation." Readers, however, will have to wait until the end of the book for Berger to offer a working definition of drosscape ("a design pedagogy that emphasizes the productive integration and reuse of waste landscapes throughout the urban world," or "the creation of a new condition in which 'vast,' 'waste,' or 'wasteful' land surfaces are modeled in accordance with new programs or new sets of values that remove or replace real or perceived wasteful aspects of geographical space"). Such roundabout writing, typeset in a stark sans serif font, will keep most readers-even those with a more than passing interest in issues of sprawl, waste-land, development, urban planning or the environmental consequences of industrialization-at bay. However, the dozens of charts, maps and aerial photographs, which depict urban sprawl and patterns of land usage-both wise and wasteful-are telling and place a much-needed real-world foil on the author's halting prose. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Berger's challenging new book on urban landscape...turns attention shockingly from the 'figure' of American cities to its ambiguous 'ground'." -- American Arts Quarterly, Spring 2006

An irresistible photograph album of drosscapes in 10 metropolitan areas. -- Planning Magazine, June 2006

Demand(s) to be read in order to understand the broader challenges of deindustrialization and rampant urbanization. -- World Architecture Magazine, May 2006

Exhibits a particular way of seeing the world and outlines what may be described as a uniquely "landscape intelligence." -- Landscape Architecture Magazine, May 2006

It is thought-provoking stuff, contributing graphic evidence to American exceptionalism in matters of land use, scale and programmes of ecological rehabilitation. -- Green Places, Nov. 2006

Makes excellent use of aerial photography and complex, detailed charts and images showing population densities and the migration of manufacturing activity... -- Civil Engineering, Oct. 2006

Offers seductive views of the phenomenon of sprawl... (Berger) obviously hopes to convey a little of the eerie, alienated beauty of the contemporary urban no-man's land as well. -- The Architect's Newspaper, Dec. 11, 2006

The chilling photographs of sprawl in Alan Berger's Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America. Rating: highbrow and brilliant. -- New York Magazine, Approval Index: Week of May 1, 2006

This book provides a follow-up to Berger's Reclaiming the American West, suggesting new ways to think about the 'dross' along the edges of American cities. -- Kansas City Star, Nov. 19, 2006

This profoundly original book at once advances and subverts the great challenge of "thinking regionally." -- Cite/Rice Design Alliance, summer/fall 2006 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press; 1 edition (May 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568987137
• ISBN-13: 978-1568987132
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 7.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #579,555 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Lot of Dross in this Book, May 21, 2008

By 

Lichanos - See all my reviews

This review is from: Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America (Paperback)

This book has a marvelous collection of aerial photographs of sprawling urban areas, but not much else. The use of GIS (geographic information systems) to buttress the author's diffuse and confusing argument is intriguing, but the statistical maps seem to be designed more for visual impact than for conveying significant information. The text of the book is filled with needlessly arcane terminology and logic, and comes to no real conclusions. This is a book by a person who is fascinated by contemporary urban dynamics of land use, but who has no ideas about it that are not purely aesthetic. That is, he finds the process of wasteful consumption of land fascinating and awe inspiriring...beyond that, zilch.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars So ambivalent about this book, beautiful yet somehow hollow, December 19, 2008

By 

Michael A. Duvernois (Minneapolis, MN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America (Paperback)

The photographs are very impressive, beautiful through the decay, disaster, indeed the dross surrounding cities. Space wasted by bad design mostly. Yet, there just isn't much in the book besides that. There's nothing like a solution in here, nothing in the problem definition even aside from the examples. Sure, there's wasted space, but moving on from that, what is there here?

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars the subtitle is forgotten, March 12, 2008

By 

Elizabeth Frenchman (NY NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America (Paperback)

Why write a book then design it so it is painful to read? That's the first clue to the detached amorality of the author's premise: you can't beat them, you don't even want to beat them, so join them. Consumerism, the religion of the 20th and 21st centuries, is a given so I don't need to mention it, in fact, I'm going to celebrate it. And since I have a prestigious spot on the faculty of a prestigious institution of higher learning and I take great pictures, my bankrupt theories will have weight.

This book is a good survey of the real world but buy it for the pictures, buy it for a look into the mindset of current corporatist acceptance, buy it for examples of unchecked capitalism's disrespect of simple human and aesthetic dignity. Don't buy it for background on how it came to be.

NB: the "geospatially derived maps, charts, and graphs" are unreadable.