Edge City: Life on the New Frontier

Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (1991)
By Joel Garreau

Synopsis: In examining "the biggest change in a hundred years in how we build...cities" (xii), Garreau asks: What American values do Edge Cities embody, and are they places we will ever be proud of? Do Edge Cities really satisfy our longing for the good life? This is a journalistic account, and each chapter focuses on a different city or region, such as Detroit, Atlanta, Texas, Boston, Phoenix, and Southern California. He claims that while the phenomenon is new, they do embody timeless America values like individualism, mobility, and anti-urbanism. Edge Cities are places defined by tons of office and retail space - such as Bishop Ranch and Tyson's Corner, VA. He is undecided as to whether or not edge cities are "real cities," but does note that cities are always shaped by the "cutting edge" transportation of the time, and ECs are clearly shaped by the car. He also notes that cities are always a monument to the worship of something, and that ECs represent a reintegration of home, work, market, etc.

Interacts With:

In saying that ECs represent reintegration, could this then be seen as a counter-modernist plan? But it seems like such cities do not bring things together, they separate and categorize into different pockets of use. Could connect with lots of the pieces on this list, especially those that bemoan a loss of place:
Country of Exiles, Death and Life of Great American Cities, Variation on a Theme Park, J.B. Jackson (which a focus on understanding what's there as opposed to necessarily castigating it)

Learning From Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form

Learning From Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (1977 [1972])
By Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour

Synopsis: This book is about the symbolism of architectural form (rather than about Las Vegas, per se), and examines the architecture of the strip in order to counter Modernist design and to celebrate an architecture of movement. The authors analyze the layout, structure, and design of the strip, its buildings, and the significance of its architecture as symbols and signs, and as creating a zone of pleasure. The authors prefer the postmodern playful use of symbols and signs to the austere Modernist style which rejects symbol and decoration in favor of becoming the decoration itself. The megastructures of Modernism are all about imposed unity, whereas "urban sprawl" is more about variety and pluralism. While Modern architecture claims to have rejected symbolism, the modern buildings have just become symbols themselves. The authors castigate modern architecture for dismissing contemporary vernacular architecture and for dismissing the tastes of "the people" in favor of some kind of elitist "heroic" architecture. Basically, the authors reject the idea that sprawl and the strip is "visual pollution," and question its necessarily link to ecological pollution. They instead want us to see this style as just a new type of order and symbol system, an order imposed by speed, movement, and the car.

Interacts With:

Variations on a Theme Park, Jane Jacobs, City of Quartz, Baudrillard, Country of Exiles, J. B. Jackson (in his celebration of everything and of the "common" landscape), Neon Metropolis
Which book talked about the "age of hieroglyphics" (symbols)? This would definitely connect with anything that focuses on semiotics and symbols - even those books on 19th cent urban culture.
This actually has echoes of Janet's list in its desire to "take back" the architecture "of the people" and rescue it from elitist criticism.
This book supposedly launched the postmodern movement (according to Jeff's Design in the U.S.A. book)

Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies

Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971)
By Reyner Banham

Synopsis: Banham aims to "present the architecture...within a topographical and historical context of the total artifact that constitutes Great Los Angeles, because it is this double context that binds the polymorphous architectures into a comprehensive unity that cannot often be discerned by comparing monument with monument out of context" (23). Book is broken down into "four ecologies:" Ecology I: Surfurbia (beaches as biggest thing to envy; focus on indoor/outdoor living; spanish colonial revival; freeways); Ecology II: Foothills (fancy suburbs; mobility-focused architecture; landscape of "do your own thing;" city obsessed with transportation); Ecology III: The Plains of Id (flatlands as "heartland;" Schindler, Neutra, and the International Style ; plain cubes; people should accept the non-existent downtown for what it is: dead); Ecology IV: Autopia (freeway as central feature; L.A. as embodiment of bourgeois good life of urban homestead; people unfairly castigate L.A. when they should examine all the fabulous architecture there and think about why L.A. has inspired so much of that). Argues that "the language of design, architecture and urbanism is Los Angeles is the language of movement" (23). Southern California is an ecological wonder and the land of "perpetual spring." People are too hard on L.A., and should not fault it for being different; it really embodies many ingrained American values - especially the desire for freedom of movement.

Interesting Specifics:

L.A. architecture is emblematic of that particular American phenomenon:"...the convulsions in building style that follow when traditional cultural and social restraints have been overthrown and replaced by the preferences of a mobile, affluent, consumer-oriented society, in which 'cultural values' and ancient symbols are handled primarily as methods of claiming or establishing status" (124).

"...Los Angeles is...the home of the most extravagant myths of private gratification and self-realization, institutionalized now in the doctrine of 'doing your own thing'" (124).

L.A. is steeped in the "fantasy of innocence" (129).

"So recreational living tends to become another synonym for the social 'turf' system of closed communities; systematic planning remains the creation of privileged enclaves" (145).

Anyone who cares about architecture simply cannot ignore Los Angeles - and to do so would be a huge and elitist blunder.

Interacts With:

This is really an L.A. apologist book. Says hey, it's not so bad, it's just different - you have to look at all its different parts to understand it.

City of Quartz, Variations on a Theme Park, Neon Metropolis, Country of Exiles (these are all negative takes on L.A. and L.A.-ish phenom, though Mike Davis straddles line between pos and neg); Holyland (not on any list), Learning from Las Vegas (for a positive attempt to understand car-centric landscapes), Golden State, Golden Youth

The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape

The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (1996)
By Don Mitchell

Synopsis: "This book explores...the connection between the material production of landscape and the production of landscape representations, between work and the 'exercise of the imagination'..."(1). It basically seeks to "connect the shape of the CA landscape to the process of work that made it...and to wed a literature on landscape with that on labor history" (ix). One of main purposes is to interrogate the difference between representation and reality, and to put the reality of labor specifically back in to our understanding of landscape. Book begins around 1913 and travels through to 1930s through a series of vignettes and discussions of various bad working conditions, workers revolts, and the various attempts to disempower workers. Argument is that in order to make something a landscape, the work and labor behind it must be erased (and this has been particularly true of California which was created as a rural agricultural idyll). Landscape is thus inseparable from capitalist geographies based on commodifications of the land. Pain and work is hidden to produce a pretty image. California is shorthand for American Dream. Mitchell wants to reinsert workers' lives into the landscapes, highlighting their struggles. This is a Marxist labor history of California.

Interesting Specifics:

This book is essentially a labor history of the California landscape.

Follows Denis Cosgrove's line of thinking in that the history of landscape was "inseparable from the construction of capitalist geographies based on the full commodification of the land...and the subsequent need to represent ownership (or non-ownership) as a natural order of society" (4).

Says New Cultural Geographers have gotten too wrapped-up in representation and have abandoned "traditional concerns of geographers with material form" (5).

Landscape is "both a work and an erasure of work" (6).

Takes a very Marxist approach in his belief in labor as one of the defining features of humanity.

[I don't fully understand why the production of landscape should specifically hide labor more than other types of goods. Isn't the labor process hidden from the everything?? I guess this alienation is the central point of Marxism - but anything you don't make yourself is a repository of hidden labor.]

Has a great explanation of Carl Sauer and his view of landscape, that landscape "was the sum of its morphological components" - i.e. its buildings, populations, etc - and that one could understand a people by interpreting the landscape they created (24).

Says Denis Cosgrove led the shift in geography toward ideology and image (26).

Landscape as both a thing and a process/struggle (30).

Wheatland Riots of 1913 resulted when Durst farm workers rioted due to horrid living and working conditions; served to made workers visible and to bring labor problems to the public eye. Led to the formation of the California Commission of Immigration and Housing. The CCIH also held to the belief that bad environments led "triggered" innate bad genetic behavior, so they sought to "environmentally correct" for any such "outbreaks." Sought to hinder the anonymous mobility of workers (so common to the rotating crop pattern of CA) by watching them and increasing their feelings of accountability. A way to strip the power of mobility.

In CA, workers have to remain extremely militant in order not to be naturalized into the landscape.

Interacts With:
Ed Soja, Denis Cosgrove, William Cronon (Changes in the Land), "The Reinvention of Cultural Geography,"
This is a corrective both of "new cultural geography" and its focus on image, and of the "old" cultural geography of Sauer and its obsession with untheoretical morphology.

In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression

In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression
By Tim Cresswell (1996)

Synopsis: Looks at the ways space and place are used to construct normativity and "common sense," and shows that transgression of space can be a tool with which to question the normative world. This book is thus an examination of the "the way in which ideas about what is right, just, and appropriate are transmitted through space and place" (8). Place and geography are thus crucial in out understandings of social relations as "social power and social resistance are always already spatial" (11). Prefers the term transgression to "resistance" as resistance implies intentionality. Focuses on three case studies: graffiti in NYC in the 1970s (representing disorder and madness and disease); hippies converging on Stonehenge (transgressive mobility, blurs line between home and work and leisure, indecent because decency implies property ownership); Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp (a group of women set-up a protest site outside a military base and weapons site; media focused on the "horrible stench" and "dirtiness" of the women there - clearly they had transgressed social bounds in some way). Basically, "transgressive events prompt responses that define and seek to reproduce established geographies" (104).

Interesting Specifics:

"Society produces space and space reproduces society" (12).

Cresswell considers himself part of the new cultural geography.

"'Dirt,' then, is a mismatch of meanings - meanings that are erroneously positioned in relation to other things" (38). "Dirt" is something that is out of place.

"Mobility as a way of life involves being permanently out of place" (95).

"...place, as a phenomenological-experiential entity combines elements of nature (elemental forces), social relations (class, gender, and so on), and meaning (the mind, ideas, symbols)" (157). Place always combines all three elements, in that it links action and thought, concrete and abstract.

"The unintended consequence of making space a means of control is to simultaneously make it a site of resistance" (163).

Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life

Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life
By William Leach (1999)

Synopsis: Asks: What is this cast landscape of the temporary doing to us, and how did it come about? Since the 1970s or so there has been an incredible weakening of place in the lives of ordinary people, and the wearing away of this sense of place-connection is dangerous. We've become too obsessed with a freedom from history and freedom from place, and we need to reestablish the importance of place in order to connect to one another and to feel whole. Includes a discussion of transportation and the flow of global goods; yuppies and businessmen have replaced bohemians and the literary "higher goal" types by constructing a bland landscape of the temporary full of extended-stay hotels; Indian casinos (ironic) and gambling places as substitutes for "real" place; universities are more linked to global flow; "new cosmopolitanism" says it's good to not be tied to anything, but Leach says this is bad. Basically, Leach is all about regrounding us in a stronger sense of place and of the local. Says that all great art has arisen from a strong sense of place. Without this, we weaken and fragment as a nation. I think this can be seen as kind of a nostalgic and conservative book - seems like it should have appeared in 1993 and not 1999.

Interacts With:
Lure of the Local, Variation on a Theme Park (not on this list), Celebration Chronicles, Geography of Nowhere (not on list)

Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Made Sense on the World

Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Made Sense on the World (2001)

By Mona Domosh and Joni Seager

Synopsis: Place and gender are inextricably linked. This book explores issues of power, and brings feminism and gender to geography by pointing out the importance of examining the link between gender and place. Shows that ideals of gender do inform our use of space and affect out sense of mobility. Discusses home space and the gendering of public and private space within Victorian homes; female design tastes and the way male-dominated “modernist” movement (1890s-1930s) sought to streamlines and usurp home decoration which had previously been a female domain; discussion of middle-class women as “Americanizers” to “foreign”-types; Charlotte Perkins Gillman and other feminist efforts to collectivize female labor; fact that much female labor is not counted in GDP/work averages; idea that feminine implies natures and chaos, while masculine implies order/control/city [connects here with Terrible Honesty]; suburban space and the attempt to limit female mobility as cars are seen as “male;” rugged nature as male; women’s building at Columbia Expo; feminist environmentalism and scary male view of earth as a “mother” who will clean-up our mess.

Interesting Specifics:

Postwar females’ design tastes in home interiors were castigated by “taste” experts as middle-low brow kitsch, thus challenging and belittling female power (28).

Increased female presence in cities in the 1850s led such spaces to be increasingly “feminized” so as to be more appropriate for women. Example is the fancy arches of shopping arcades (93).

Suburban growth really increased in the 1920s

Gays and lesbians often lead gentrification efforts (102)

“Mobility is greatest at the extreme ends of the socioeconomic spectrum” (110).

Rise of masculine rugged farmer ideal in 1930s as way to counteract effeminate dependency of govt. aid during Depression (166).

Gender is the biggest determiner of attitudes towards animals (185)

Ecofeminism is concerned with control of resources, power relations, different way of viewing the environment, systems of oppression, etc.

Trivia:

First toilets were designed to look like parlor chairs, but were changed in the 1920s due to hygiene concerns (16)

Women, whether married with kids or not, tend to work closer to their homes than men [is this because women’s work tends to be more “low-level” and hence easier to find stuff anywhere/less justification for traveling far distances to work?].

Interacts With:

Terrible Honesty,