Book Review: Drosscape by Alan Berger

Author Alan Berger, professor of urban design at MIT, takes an in-depth look at the leftover pieces of land in urban centers. Borrowed from Lars Lerup’s essay entitled “Stim & Dross,” dross refers to waste landscapes, the leftovers between developed lands. Berger calls this the in-between’s of a city’s urban fabric. He makes the case that urban lands are in constant flux and that urban sprawl is rampant, and will continue to do so even with the best of urban planning intentions. As business move out of the developed cores, obsolete lands form in the center, which spreads outward like a cancer. Lerup proposes that urban areas could intentionally provide a mix of developed and leftover lands, a hybridization of use and non-use. This is a refreshing concept and flies in the face of current urban planning, which seeks to place priority on infilling vacant lands (brownfields and greyfields) for new development. The idea is that infill curbs sprawl and perhaps maintain more forests and fields at the city edges. One problem with this idea is that unless there is an urban growth boundary (such as found in Portland, OR), infill doesn’t seem to hinder eventual sprawl. Something will build there eventually. The other, more insidious aspect, is that with an attitude of continual infill, few open green spaces are left within the city. Albert Pope, professor of architecture at Rice University, argues against filling in these voids. Continual infill results in communities like Roseville, Michigan; the city of my childhood that had no parks or open areas (other than athletic fields) within walking or biking distance—just wall to wall hardscape. Of course now with the demise of Detroit, the industrial edges of the city are becoming forested once again. Hopefully they will keep a few of these before they renew, redevelop, and infill. Berger takes a look at 10 urbanized areas in the book, ranging from Atlanta to Phoenix, and reveals the drosscapes found there, both in map form and aerial photos. Drosscapes presents a graphically intriguing overview of leftover lands in cities within an urban planning context. It provides some new terms for places that have no words—such as “demalling” (obsolete shopping mall areas) and “terrain vague” (economically failing areas). It also looks at cities at the metascale, providing a big picture view. But it also offers incentive to the architect, designer, or landscape architect at the project scale, to design “empty areas” within the property footprint—whether these be forested or reclaimed lands that remain unbuilt, or unpurposeful. What could these look like?