The Site Analysis: Drosscape*

The Loop is also home to many “drosscapes,” or underutilized or vacant land produced by the city’s horizontal expansion. The largest of these areas is the railroad right of way that bisects the Loop from east to west. When the highways were built, the rail yard lost its significance as a regional transportation and economic asset. Although it is still used for freight shipping today, its appearance is blighted. Throughout the Loop, including along the rail yard, there are parcels large and small of vacant or underutilized land, or waste, that have resulted from Phoenix’s horizontal expansion and changing economy. In the last decade, a Warehouse District has begun to emerge along the rail yard, which makes use of some of this existing building stock to provide new commercial and entertainment space. Some of these parcels are Brown field sites, and have been listed by the US Environmental Protection Agency as having toxic material underground leaking storage tanks, or USTs. Given federal tax incentives that help finance the remediation of Brown field sites, these areas provide opportunities for phased redevelopment without displacement.

* Berger, Alan. Drosscape: wasting land urban America. Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.

Drosscape is an urban design framework that looks at urbanized regions as the waste product of defunct economic and industrial processes. The concept was realized by Alan Berger, Professor of Landscape and Urban Design at MIT, and is part of a new vocabulary and aesthetic that could be useful for the redesign and adaptive reuse of ‘waste landscapes’ within urbanized regions.

Drosscapes + flood risk map

Source: Hazel O’Neil