Landscape Urbanism Reader Summary of DROSSCAPE By Alan Berger

In this essay, Alan Berger talks about waste landscapes in America, and tries to answer some much debated about questions. How this waste landscape came to be? What will we do with it? How will it affect urbanizing areas in the future? He talks of deindustrialization in American cities, in relation to landscape and urbanization. WASTE LANDSCAPE Waste landscape emerges out of 2 processes1. Rapid horizontal urbanization urban sprawl 2. Leaving behind of land and detritus after economic and production regimes have ended A common term, post-industrial, has been used by architects, planners, landscape architects to describe industrial landscapes. The term creates problems, as it defines the site as being static, rather than as part of the ongoing industrial process. As the older city core deindustrializes, and rapid urbanization expands the cities at the periphery, drosscape or waste landscape is created. DROSS IS NATURAL In his essay Stim and Dross, Lars Lerup talks of a citys vast landscape as a holey plane where holes are the unused areas, and urban sprawl is the very motor of this entire plane. He writes, Combine weak controls, a huge domestic economy, and the will to live away from the city, and you have sprawl.1 Building on Lars theory, Alan Berger, defines the term drosscape as waste landscape. He writes that the growth of cities is a process, and the faster they grow, the more potentially hazardous waste they produce. The city cannot function without waste, so the challenge is not to expect drossless urbanisation, but to integrate dross into more flexible design strategies.

Lars Lerup (2000) After the city: Stim and dross, MIT Press

OLD RESPITE IS NEW WASTE In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter, a Harvard University economist, characterised horizontal urbanisation as the process of creative destruction. He examined how capitalism creates and destroys existing structures of industrialisation. Old technologies, equipment and skills become obsolete with new innovations. Ebenezer Howards Garden city, FLWs Broadacre city, Le Corbusiers Radiant city and the City Beautiful movement, all were designed as a respite from urban congestion created by industrialisation. Today these respite landscapes found in the older parts of the city, built when the city centre was the hub of industry, are in transitional phases of development and are in severe decline or disinvestment. CONTAMINATION AND INVESTMENT Deindustrialisation has many meanings. In relation to urbanisation, it reveals how industrial evolution alters the landscape of the city. As industry relocates from central cities to peripheral areas, dross/ waste will be created. But seen optimistically, there will be a net gain in the total landscape and buildings available for other uses. Other types of waste landscapes are those associated with former industrial use eg. Former military bases having some type of soil, water or structural contamination that requires remediation; former steel mill site along Lake Michigan. Today, developers seek out these contaminated brownfield sites, which are cheaper, and thus generate a higher rate of return. DROSSCAPE DEFINED, PROPOSED AND REALISED Drosscapes require design to be implemented as an activity that is capable of adapting to changing circumstances. The designer has to understand the future as being under perpetual construction. The landscape of the sprawling city is becoming fragmented. Alan Berger advocates a new type of designer who is better adapted to opportunistically engage the dross of urbanisation from within the processes and systems of its production. He sees the potential of landscape urbanism in its ability to improve regional landscape deficiencies of the urban realm, which would necessitate a shift away from small-scale sites as the primary focus of design. The big four design disciplines (architecture, landscape architecture, urban design and planning) can then be applied in alliance in new territories of dross.