cover image Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America

Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America

Alan Berger. Princeton Architectural Press, $34.95 (255pp) ISBN 978-1-56898-572-5

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.