Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

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. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Alan Berger is an associate professor of landscape architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He is also the author of Reclaiming the American West (2002).