Guest lecture: Alan Berger / MIT Cambridge

Alan Berger is Associate Professor of Urban Design and Landscape Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he teaches courses in the department of urban studies and planning.

He is the founder and director of P-REX, The Project for Reclamation Excellence, (www.therex.net) a multi-disciplinary research effort at MIT focusing on the design and reuse of deindustrialized landscapes worldwide.

By using low-angle aerial photography, maps, and other graphic evidence, Berger visually reveals evidence and trends of landscape waste throughout the world—from public health hazards such as abandoned mine pits, mountains of slag, and pools of cyanide, to vacant land, landfills, military installations, and places associated with high and low-density urbanization. How these sites are cleansed, valued and considered for adaptive reuse at local and regional scales is Berger's main area of interest.

His work emphasizes the link between our consumption of natural resources, and the waste and destruction of landscape, to help us better understand how to proceed with redesigning our wasteful places for future productive uses and more sustainable outcomes.

His book Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America, published in 2006, won I.D. Magazine’s 53rd Annual Design Review Silver Medal for Design Distinction, and was named a top 10 planning book of 2007 by Planetizen. His 2002 book, Reclaiming the American West, received the Research Award from the Environmental Design Research Association and Places Magazine, and was named a Colorado Book of the Year by the Center for the Book. His other books include Designing the Reclaimed Landscape, published by Taylor & Francis in January 2008, and co-edited Nansha Coastal City: Landscape and Urbanism in the Pearl River Delta, published in early 2006.