America is deindustrializing. In 2005 more than 600 000 abandoned and contaminated waste sites have been identified within U.S. cities.1 How did this "waste landscape" come to be? What will we do with it? How will it affect urbanizing areas in the future? Controversial questions like these are difficult to answer, and this subject has produced some of the late-twentieth century's most debated bodies of scholarship.2 An essay such as this cannot definitively answer these questions. It can and does, however, address the topic of deindustrialization in the context of the relationships between landscape and urbanization. But deindustrialization cannot be discussed in isolation. As America rapidly deindustrializes, it is simultaneously urbanizing faster than at any other time in modern history. What then are the links between urbanization and deindustri¬alization, and the production of "waste landscapes" in American cities? Most importantly, who is best qualified to deal with the abundance of waste?
Grappling with these questions in the design of the built environment pres¬ents a fascinating challenge. Landscape architects in academia give little atten¬tion to urbanization, often dwelling instead on the traditional areas of landscape history—site engineering, construction detailing, and project-based design stu¬dio education. But beyond and behind these topics is a reality so huge we tend not to see it at all—what I call the drosscape, or the inevitable "waste landscapes" within urbanized regions that eternally elude the overly controlled parameters, the scripted programming elements that designers are charged with creating and accommodating in their projects.3 Adaptively reusing this waste landscape figures to be one of the twenty-first century's great infrastructural design chal¬lenges [FIG. 11.4This essay chronicles this condition and suggests that those with an understanding of both landscape and urbanization will be best positioned to act on these sites in the future.
WASTE LANDSCAPE
The waste landscape emerges out of two primary processes: first, from rapid horizontal urbanization (urban "sprawl"), and second, from the leaving behind of land and detritus after economic and production regimes have ended. From its deindustrializing inner core to its sprawling periphery to the transitional landscapes in between, the city is the manifestation of industrial processes that naturally produce waste. Designers often paint a black-and-white picture of complex industrial processes. A common term, "post-industrial," has been used by landscape architects, architects, and planners to describe everything from polluted industrial landscapes to former factory buildings usually found in declining sections of cities. The term itself creates more problems than solutions because it narrowly isolates and objectifies the landscape as the byproduct of very specific processes no longer operating upon a given site (residual pollution aside). This outlook reifies the site as essentially static and defines it in terms of the past rather than as part of ongoing industrial processes that form other parts of the city (such as new manufacturing agglomerations on the periphery). I sug¬gest that it would be strategically helpful for understanding the potential for these sites if designers avoid the term "post-industrial" and its value system when discussing them.
Drosscape is created by the deindustrialization of older city areas (the city core) and the rapid urbanization of newer city areas (the periphery), which are both catalyzed by the drastic decrease in transportation costs (for both goods and people) over the past century.5 It is an organic phenomenon heedless of the academic and human boundaries that separate environmental from architectur¬al/planning/design issues, urban from suburban issues, and nostalgic defini¬tions of community from actual organizations of people, workplaces, and social Structures. I argue that planned and unplanned horizontal conditions around vertical urban centers are intrinsically neither bad nor good, but instead natu¬ral results of industrial growth, results that require new conceptualization and considered attention, and that these must be in hand before potential solutions to any problem discovered can be effectively addressed or devised.
DROSS IS NATURAL
The design world's use of the term "dross" derives from one of the most inter¬esting manifestos written about the urban landscape over the past two decades: "Stira & Dross " a seminal essay by Lars Lerup, Dean of Rice University's School of Architecture.' Lerup saw tremendous potential in what most of the design world was ignoring at the time: the "in-between" surfaces left over by the dom¬inant economic forces of urbanization; forces including land investment, devel¬opment practices, policies and codes, and planning (or the lack thereof). I sing Houston, Texas, as his example, Lerup theorized the city's vast stretch of urbanized landscape surface as a "holey plane" the "holes" being currently unused areas:
This holey plane seems more a wilderness than a datum of a man-made city. Dotted by trees and criss-crossed by wo-men/vehicles/roads, it is a surface dominated by a peculiar sense of ongoing struggle: the struggle of economics against nature. Both the trees and machines of this plane emerge as the (trail or) dross of that struggle.
Breaking from pro- and anti-sprawl rhetoric, Lerup momentarily suspended judgment in order to understand the forces creating the horizontal city.
Lerup’s "holey plane" is particularly useful for understanding relationships between landscape and urbanization. It reconceptualizes the city as a living, mas¬sive, dynamic system, or a huge ecological envelope of systematically productive and wasteful landscapes/" Films such as Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka illustrate this by imaging the city and mass-human dwelling and building behavior from aerial overviews and via time-lapse photography to reveal their strikingly organism¬like aspects.' The city is largely a natural process whose unperceived complexi¬ty dwarfs those aspects of it that can be consciously controlled and planned.
The natural process of the city is not unlike that of living organisms, whose hard parts—from the bones and shells of terrestrial vertebrates and marine inver¬tebrates to the iron and other elements and compounds precipitated by cells— originated in the expelling and/or managing of wastes. Calcium, for example, used for that living infrastructure of the human body, the skeleton, is routinely extruded by cells in the marine environment; this striking example is not an analogy, but arguably a homology for how waste becomes incorporated into landscape structure and function. The economies that provide the energy and materials for the growth of cities, such as manufacturing and housing, are less things than processes. And, as is true for organisms, the faster they grow the more (potentially hazardous) waste they produce. This is a natural process that can be ignored, maligned, or embraced, but never stopped. "What is now emerging," writes Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine, "is an 'intermediate' description [of reali¬ty] that lies somewhere between the two alienating images of a deterministic world and an arbitrary world of pure chance."10 These words regarding the func¬tioning of complex systems in unpredictable ways apply perfectly to the realm of landscapes in urbanization. Cities are not static objects, but active arenas marked by continuous energy flows and transformations of which landscapes and buildings and other hard parts are not permanent structures but transition¬al manifestations. Like a biological organism, the urbanized landscape is an open system, whose planned complexity always entails unplanned dross in accord with the dictates of thermodynamics. To expect a city to function with¬out waste (such as in a cradle-to-cradle approach), which represents the in situ or exported excess not only of its growth but also of its maintenance, is as naive as expecting an animal to thrive in a sensory deprivation tank. The challenge for designers is thus not to achieve drossless urbanization but to integrate inevitable dross into more flexible aesthetic and design strategies.
Contemporary modes of industrial production driven by economical and consumerist influences contribute to urbanization and the formation of waste landscapes—meaning actual waste (such as municipal solid waste, sewage, scrap metal, etc.), wasted places (such as abandoned and/or contaminated sites), or wasteful places (such as oversized parking lots or duplicate big-box retail ven¬ues). The phrase "urban sprawl" and the rhetoric of pro- and anti-urban sprawl advocates all but obsolesce under the realization that there is no growth with¬out waste. "Waste landscape" is an indicator of healthy urban growth.
THE OLD RESPITE IS NEW WASTE
With regards to "waste" it is impossible to isolate recharacterizations of the city from its socioeconomic milieu. Horizontal urbanization is linked to economies and simultaneous modes of industrialization—to what, in 1942, Harvard University economist Joseph Schumpeter characterized as "the process of cre¬ative destruction"11 Schumpeter believed that innovations made by entrepreneurs began with this process, which caused old inventories, technologies, equipment, and even craftsmen s skills to become obsolete. Schumpeter examined how cap¬italism creates and destroys existing structures of industrialization.12 Lerup's stim and dross is the physical cognate for creative destruction. Both terms acknowl¬edge the totality of the consumption/waste cycle, and the organic integration of waste into the urban world as the result of socioeconomic processes.
For much of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the American city landscape was designed and built to represent a view opposite to those devel¬oped by industrialization, and the professions of landscape architecture and urban planning were influenced by anti-industrialization offerings. Ebenezer Howard's Garden City, Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City, Le Corbusier's Radiant City, and the City Beautiful movement were all designed under the premise of using landscape as a respite from urban congestion and the pollution created by industrialization. The outcome of these approaches is a net increase in the amount of "waste landscape" in cities. Urban populations continue to decentralize. As a result of fewer constituents, "respite" landscapes in the inner city are now in severe decline and disinvestment. Today the respite landscapes found in older parts of the city, built during periods when the city center was the hub of industry, are in transitional phases of development. Thirty states in 2004 operated with frozen or reduced Parks and Recreation budgets. Currently hundreds of state parks are closed or operate for fewer hours with reduced serv¬ices, such as maintenance, in order to remain fiscally solvent.13 In 2003 California s Department of Parks and Recreation, the nation s largest with 274 parks, raised entrance fees to compensate for a S35 million budget cut. Roughly $600 million is still needed for deferred maintenance projects.11 The U.S. National Park Service also seeks private-sector support for park maintenance in the face of staffing shortages and budget cutbacks of billions of dollars.
CONTAMINATION AND INVESTMENT
Deindustrialization has many meanings, which often refer to topics other than loss of manufacturing jobs. In relation to urbanization, for instance, it reveals how industrial evolution alters the landscape of the city.16 Its broadest meanings are derived from the history of capitalism and evolving patterns of investment and disinvestment.17 Manufacturing in America, as in much of the developed world, is decentralized. It takes fewer people located in one central place to make the same or more product than in the past. Fulton County, the central county comprising the city of Atlanta, Georgia, experienced a more than 26 percent decrease in manufacturing establishments from 1977 to 2001, while outlying counties (some seventy miles away from the center of Atlanta) experienced more than 300 percent growth in this sector. Optimistically, it could be argued that as deindustrialization proliferates, and as industry relocates from central cities to peripheral areas, America's cities will enjoy a net gain in the total land¬scape (and buildings) available for other uses.19 Changes in manufacturing and production, new modes of communication, and decreases in transportation costs have resulted in the dispersal and relocation of industrial production to outly¬ing areas, and even to other parts of the world, leaving waste landscape inside the city core while creating it anew on the periphery.
There are many other types of waste landscapes, such as those associated with former industrial use. Between 1988 and 1995, the federal government closed ninety-seven major military bases around the country. Most had or still have some type of soil, water, or structural contamination that requires remediation.
By 1998 the U.S. Department of Defense had completed thirty-five military base property conveyances (transferring of the ownership title); by 1999 twenty-seven of these properties had undergone subsequent development. In Irvine, California, the nation's third largest home builder, Lennar, won an auction to buy the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station for a record $650 million, from the Department of Defense. Lennar's proposed redevelopment includes plans for 3,400 new homes in the heart of Orange County, the nations hottest real-estate market. El Toro will be the largest of five major former military bases in California being redeveloped by Lennar. The Department of Defense is contin¬uing its evaluation of some 5,700 military installations for decommissioning or closure in the future. In May 2005 a new round of military site closures was released, and it has already been determined that most of these sites contain some form of contamination. They will be transformed through private redevel¬opment into a variety of new civilian uses, which will take considerable time and investment.
Since the 1990s, brownlields have received much attention from the federal government. In 2003 more than $73 million in grants were dispersed to thirty-seven states to promote the redevelopment of contaminated landscapes. Most were former urban industrial-production sites. Today developers seek out con¬taminated sites instead of clean ones: a former director of the National Brownfield Association noted that developers generate a higher rate of return from contam¬inated properties than from non-contaminated properties. New federal subsi¬dies for brownfield development make this possible. Tax increment financing, for example, allows for the taxes assessed on property value to be used for rede¬velopment activities such as infrastructure improvements. One recent example is a 138-acre, 12-million-square-foot mixed-use project on the site of a former Atlantic Steel Mill in midtown Atlanta. A developer paid $76 million to purchase the land in 1999. Even with $25 million in clean-up expenses, the total cost of the improved land was $732,000 per acre. A nearby "uncontaminated" site, pur¬chased for the new home of the Atlanta Symphony, cost $22.3 million for 6.36 acres, or about $3.5 million per acre.'"1 City leaders in Chicago, which currently has one of the nations most aggressive brownfield redevelopment programs, agreed to sell a 573-acre former steel mill site along the shores of Lake Michigan to a team of developers for $85 million. This site had produced steel for warships and skyscrapers for more than a century. It will be transformed into a mixed-use neighborhood for tens of thousands of residents. Home Depot, the chain of home-improvement stores, actively seeks to develop store locations on urban brownfield sites. Their site-development strategy typically includes the excavation and relocation of toxic soil to the parts of the site planned for the stores vast parking lot. The building footprint is then laid down on the area of clean soil or on areas where toxins were removed or reduced below legal levels. This practice is obviously quite lucrative, as Home Depot saves large sums of money on the purchase of land.
Contamination and abandonment may also bring favorable ecological sur¬prises. Ecologists often find much more diverse ecological environments in con¬taminated sites than in the native landscapes that surround them. Because of their contamination, industrial contexts, and secured perimeters, brownfield sites offer a viable platform from which to study urban ecology while performing reclamation techniques. These sites have the potential to accommodate new land¬scape design practices that concurrently clean up contamination during redevel¬opment, or more notably where reclamation becomes integral to the final design process and form.
DROSSCAPE DEFINED
Planning and design cannot solve all problems associated with the vast amount of urban waste landscape. However, the alarm is sounded to those who cope writh the increased pessimism and cynicism spawned by the inefficacy of the "big four" design disciplines—landscape architecture, urban design, planning, and archi¬tecture—in the face of unfettered, market-driven development. The recent emer¬gence of landscape urbanism may be a reaction to the frustration shared by many people in the landscape, planning, and architectural design arenas. The polarizing rhetorical arguments of the pro- and anti-urbanization contingen¬cies, as well as dynamic economic processes, make traditional masterplanning approaches for future cities seem absurd. But advocating a revolutionary form of urban landscape study and practice, such as landscape urbanism, is not exclu¬sive of the current mainstream design disciplines. There is no need to develop an entirely new design discipline in order to rethink landscape's relationship to urbanization. Drosscape has the potential to coexist with the big four, by work¬ing within their knowledge structure while constructing a radically different agen¬da. The traditional way to value urban landscapes is through "placemaking" or by using landscape as a placemaking medium (such as for public parks or plazas). This idea is now blurred. The landscape of the contemporary horizontal city is no longer a placemaking or a condensing medium. Instead it is fragmented and chaotically spread, escaping wholeness, objectivity, and public consciousness— terra incognita.
This condition begs for landscape architects and other designers of the urban realm to shift a good amount of attention away from small-scale site design in order to consider how we can improve regional landscape deficiencies of the urban realm. This is the potential for landscape urbanism. If this disci¬pline is to be taken seriously, it must craft a specific agenda that both works with the big four and finds new ground to work on—ground that has been over¬looked or bypassed by the status quo, such as Drosscape. The term drosscape implies that dross, or waste, is scaped, or resurfaced/rein-scribed, by new human intentions. Moreover, the ideas of dross and scape have individual attributes. This is where my use of the term dross departs from its Lerupian origin. The suggestive etymology of the word includes shared origins with the words waste and vast, two terms frequently used to describe the con¬temporary nature of horizontal urbanization, as well as connections to the words vanity, win, vanish, and vacant, all of which relate to waste through the form of empty gestures.
DROSSCAPE PROPOSED
Drosscapes are dependent on the production of waste landscapes from other types of development in order to survive. In this rubric one may describe drosscaping as a sort of scavenging of the city surface for interstitial landscape remains. The designer works in a bottom-up manner, conducting fieldwork while collect¬ing and interpreting large-scale trends, data, and phenomena in search of waste. Once waste landscapes are identified, the designer proposes a strategy to pro¬ductively integrate them.
As degraded and interstitial entities, drosscapes have few caretakers, guardians, or spokespersons. The importance of a drosscape is only appreciated through a bottom-up advocacy process. The future of any given drosscape or any entity that is undervalued lies profoundly in the interaction of human agency and emergent novelty derived from explicit transfers and sharing of knowledge, suggesting therefore that design, as a professional and creative endeav¬or, is recast to resist closure and univalent expertise. The designer, as the strate¬gist conducting this advocacy process, understands the future as being under perpetual construction. Drosscapes require design to be implemented as an activity that is capable of adapting to changing circumstances while at the same time avoiding being too open-ended as to succumb to future schemes that are better organized.
DROSSCAPE REALIZED
Processes of deindustrialization and horizontal urbanization will continue in the foreseeable future to saturate urbanized regions with waste landscape. Sub¬sequent to these processes, designers will need to rethink their roles in creating built environments. Urbanization will no doubt be controlled by a wider array of factors in the future. As deindustrialization illustrates, analyzing cities can no longer be done by one source, nor by one body of knowledge, nor by one bureau¬cracy. Designers must identify opportunities within the production modes of their time to enable new ways of thinking about the city and its landscape (whatever form it may take). Landscape architects, architects, and urban planners often follow too far behind these processes, scavenging commissions from their jetsam as they change course. It is time for designers to find opportunities with¬in these processes by advocating more ambitious ways of challenging urbaniza¬tion, such as landscape urbanism.
As a strategy, drosscape provides an avenue for rethinking the role of the designer in the urban world. Given a constriction of natural and other material resources, politicians and developers alike will shift attention to infill and adap¬tive reuse development. None of this work will be achieved with a unidisciplinary design approach, nor will the site conditions present univalent environmental solutions. All, however, will be affected by countless unconventional adjacencies and unforeseen complex reclamations.
In his criticism of the scientific world, Bruno Latour states that "soon noth¬ing, absolutely nothing, will be left of [a] top-down model of scientific influence"
The matter of fact of science becomes matters of concern of politics. As a result, contemporary scientific controversies are emerging in what have been called hybrid forums. We used to have two types of represen¬tations and two types of forums: one, science... and another politics — A simple way to characterize our times is to say that the two meanings of representation have now merged into one, around the key figure of the spokesperson.
Latour's brilliant elucidation leads one out of the lab to discover the city anew. Its composition is part economics, part science, part politics, and part specula¬tion. This new city is reconceptualized from drosscape. As such, it will serve as the stage for the performance of Latour's hybrid forum.
Such ripe conscious design attention mirrors natural environments that are inescapably marked by waste. The continuous material transformation of the environment produces dross, and this waste is most profound in the areas of the highly successful growing organisms and civilizations. Thus dross will always accompany growth, and responsible design protocols will always flag such dross as the expanding margin of the designed environment. The energy that goes into rapid growth, after populations and civilization reach temporary limits, can then be used to refashion and organize the stagnant in-between realm, thus going back like an artist to touch up the rough parts of an otherwise elegant production. Humanity's fantastic growth has inevitably confronted us with commensurate wastelands. Drosscape, the inescapable entropic counterpart to evolution and urbanization, far from marking failure, testifies to previous suc¬cess and the design challenge for its continuance. Studying how urbanization elegantly co-ops wastes, and reincorporates them in the service of efficiency, aesthetics and functionality, should be at landscape urbanism's center—which is, one need hardly emphasize, increasingly where we find drosscape in the real urban world.
