Noted essayist Bettina Drew takes the reader on an in-depth exploration of several American cities-- Stamford, Hilton Head, Las Vegas, Dallas, Celebration-- to examine the consequences of built environments that fail to reflect regional, historic, aesthetic, and social values. Drew talks to the everyday people who live in these cities, along with the urban planners and developers who created them, about the cultural impact of big-business-inspired living. She concludes with an overview of the ways in which some architects and planners are now working to humanize American landscape development. Always searching for the impact of physical environment on human happiness, Drew focuses on what has gone so wrong with mass architecture and reflects on the possibilities for built environments in the future.
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Crossing the Expendable Landscape is a remarkable book--by turns scathing and mournful, witty and sad. The essays in this volume are much more than just a savage indictment of mass architecture in this country, they're a penetrating look at what our buildings say about Americans as a people. In our eagerness to get rid of our "built past," Bettina Drew writes, we have institutionalized a kind of historical amnesia. To remind us of how urban renewal first drained our cities of their character, she visits Stamford, Connecticut; to examine the vogue for gated communities with highly restrictive "covenants," she visits Hilton Head, North Carolina; and to judge the fruits of "New Urbanism," she visits the Disney town of Celebration, Florida. Add stops in Las Vegas, Dallas, and even Branson, Missouri, and an ugly picture begins to take shape. "I would have liked to live in a world where past effort actually mattered," Drew mourns, as she chronicles the way of life destroyed along with downtown Stamford. The popularity of gated communities like Hilton Head "speaks volumes for how willingly people have given up their democratic rights, and how acceptable autocratic rule really is to large numbers of Americans." Celebration represents progress of sorts, but the fact that community is now a "product we can purchase, rather than something we create for ourselves, suggests how deeply the values of the marketplace have penetrated our domestic lives."
As a doctoral student in Yale's American Studies program, Drew writes from the perspective not of an architect or urban planner but of a passionate advocate of old-fashioned cities. Rather than concentrating on theories or even solutions, she records what it feels like to travel through the bland malls, freeways, and office parks of edge city. And it feels bad. True, her urban prejudices are often on bold display, as in a vituperative passage about the South and its longstanding state of "social irresponsibility and denial" or in her assertion that "the huge numbers of Americans between the coasts ... live in a world that is deeply provincial and culturally starved." But no one could accuse Drew of dispassion. It's impossible to read this book without feeling that our desecration of the American landscape has impoverished our inner landscapes as well. --Mary Park
From Publishers Weekly
In a series of loosely organized chapters, biographer and essayist Drew (Nelson Algren: A Walk on the Wild Side) offers a disconsolate, myopic look at the origins of "the late twentieth-century landscape" and its expression in the architecture and planning of several American communities. The book's scopeADrew visited Dallas, Las Vegas, Hilton Head, S.C., and Disney's new Celebration, in Florida, among other cities and townsAprecludes comprehensive discussions of her main topics (unregulated capitalism, poor urban planning, white flight); too often she abandons objective analysis for impressionistic attacks on the easiest, vaguest targets: corporations, speculators and junk-bond salespeople. Concentration on more banal forces such as population growth, increased corporate competition and the aesthetically indifferent economics of mass-produced, affordable modern housing would have provided needed balance. (To claim, for instance, that shopping malls were "engineered by marketing experts to control how people moved and behaved" is to underestimate consumer fondness for the convenience, selection and lower prices malls provide.) Drew does suggest a positive alternative by praising Disney's controversial town of Celebration and other experiments by the New Urbanism movement, but the book's predominant tone is as somber as the landscapes it condemns.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
HITS YOU WHERE YOU LIVE!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Crossing the Expendable Landscape (Paperback)
Really good book! The last chapter on modernism would have been great @ the beginning of the book. Although Drew posed no real solutions to our ruined physical environments, (she does write about the "New Urbanism")Drew's treatise gives us all pause to reflect on both how we live & what we have settled for when it comes to our housing and living choices (or lack there of.) Read this & get angry & active!
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