Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America

Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America by Berger, Alan. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781568985725.

Do you really know whats under the new house you just bought? Was that "big box" retail outlet 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 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 peripherary and to reuse old toxic waste sites while creating new ones – places Alan Berger has coined drosscapes. Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America is your guide to this vast, unknown geography of waste landscapes and sprawl. Ten cities and their drosscapes are analyzed through aerial photography, maps, charts, and graphs. Lured by liability reductions, tax incentives, and inadequate public awareness, corporate America is rapidly developing land for short-term gains and occupancy, leaving us to clean up their toxic land, wasteful places, and degredation of natural systems. Drosscape makes clear that "waste" is a design challenge of the most pressing order.