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A Field Guide to Sprawl (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Jim Wark (Photographer) "Words such as city, suburb, and countryside no longer capture the reality of real estate development in the United States..." (more)
Key Phrases: tract mansion, ball pork, asphalt nation, United States, New York, Los Angeles (more...)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A mere glance through the pages of this book offers a quick education about the excesses of the recently built environment. By its very nature, sprawl is hard to identify and track, but Hayden, a Yale professor of architecture and American studies, provides a combination of informed but breezy text and 75 large, crisp color images that greatly simplify the task of "decoding everyday American landscapes." Organized alphabetically, with a big two-page spread for each entry, the book moves from "alligator" (an investment that "eats" cash flow, represented here by the vast and ghostly grid of an unbuilt New Mexico suburb) to "zoomburb" (a suburb on steroids, illustrated here by Arizona's spiraling Sun City). Along the way, the reader comes to the depressing understanding that troubling phenomena one might have thought strictly local or temporary—for instance, houses where the garage is the dominant projecting feature—are common enough to have acquired names, in this case "snout house." But more than a set of colorful terms—all of which, from "ball pork" to "parsley round the pig" are carefully sourced—this book is a concise guide to not only sprawl itself but to the powerful political and financial forces that sustain it. If the book has one problematic aspect, it is that Wark's aerial photographs are often so vividly beautiful that they risk aestheticizing their often grim subjects—but their seductive quality serves to draw the viewer into Hayden's passionately sustained argument.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


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[A]landmark contribution to this literature. -- The Nation
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 144 pages
  • Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.; illustrated edition edition (July 19, 2004)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0393731251
  • ISBN-13: 978-0393731255
  • Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 7.1 x 0.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #95,409 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #9 in  Books > Nonfiction > Politics > Regional Planning
    #58 in  Books > Arts & Photography > Architecture > Urban & Land Use Planning
    #64 in  Books > Arts & Photography > Architecture > Landscape

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More About the Author

Dolores Hayden
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
Words such as city, suburb, and countryside no longer capture the reality of real estate development in the United States. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
tract mansion, ball pork, asphalt nation, truck city, aerial images, growth machine
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
United States, New York, Los Angeles, Main Streets, Long Island, New Jersey
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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This book cites 41 books:
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A Field Guide to Sprawl
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The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape 4.1 out of 5 stars (55)
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Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000
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Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 4.3 out of 5 stars (3)
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Sprawl: Coming to a neighborhood near you!, July 22, 2004
By Jenny Jenkins (Old Chatham, NY) - See all my reviews
If you have ever wondered what to call those cul-de-sacs that took the place of the dairy farm down the road, this field guide will finally give you the language to express yourself. With fascinating aerial photographs of all sorts of American sprawl, and interesting, to-the-point accompanying paragraphs, this field guide is a must to share with those neighbors of yours who lack the imagination to envision what will happen in their part of the woods (if the woods still exist) when subdividers come to town. (Naw, it's not happily ever after because the property taxes will increase revenue for the town.) Read this guide and you will never be content to leave the future of God's green earth in the hands of suburban planners again.

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The sprawl-buster's decoder book., September 16, 2004
Dolores Hayden's intriguing book visually decodes fifty-one examples of bad building in the landscape and the use of aerial photography to do this was a good idea, sprawl by its nature stretches off into the horizon but when seen at ground-level could seem pretty ordinary. Some of the differences though, especially with domestic dwellings, seem a bit arbitrary, there are seven examples of housing shown which, to me, don't seem that different. With commercial sprawl it is easy to understand the visual differences, from 'Rural slammer' (Soledad) to 'Tank farm' (part of the port of Houston)

Though the book is primarily visual, with seventy-five well chosen aerial photos used to illustrate the categories, I thought the essay on the first ten pages was first class in explaining the reasons behind sprawl, basically the fault of those folk in Washington allowing commercial interests to favor suburban white populations and male-headed households during the last few decades. The back of the book has a useful bibliography, list of websites and index.

Jim Wark's aerial photos were used by the author to carefully explain the categories and you can see several hundred other examples of his work in 'America' (ISBN 8854400033). If you like aerial photos have a look at Alex MacLean's book 'Designs on the Land' (ISBN 0500284148) with over four hundred stunning color photos of what is happening commercially on the ground.

Though a large number of Americans live in the sprawl environment (and by choice, too) it is worth remembering that over ninety percent of the US is still open land. This fascinating book is a useful visual guide to how bad things can get.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Great little book, April 7, 2007
By AcornMan (Manhattan, KS) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Field Guide to Sprawl (Reprint) (Paperback)
The numerous color aerial photos in this book do a wonderful job of putting US development patterns into a whole new perspective. This isn't intended to be the end all be all of commentary about sprawl. For that, there are plenty of other great books that emphasize analysis and critique rather than a visual approach (A Better Way to Live is an example of a terrific book in the former category). This book is a great introduction to the different kinds of sprawl and what they look like. Sure, Dolores Hayden puts a fairly cynical touch on what commentary there is, but when you see the pictures of how developers have ruined our open spaces, you'll understand why. In short, a great little book that achieves its purpose very well.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A gem!
This is a beautifully illustrated glossary of some of the terminology that has become associated with the phenomenon of suburban sprawl. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Barton Cramer

4.0 out of 5 stars A Field Guide to Sprawl
Small coffee-table format picture book. There is a 10-page introduction, which is excellent, then 51 vocabulary terms. Read more
Published on July 19, 2006 by Stephen Balbach

5.0 out of 5 stars Book in Great Condition
The book arrived ahead of schedule and was in great condition
Published on March 19, 2006 by Evelyn Smith

2.0 out of 5 stars Average at best
The book is very simple and somewhat boring. I looked through the thing in less than an hour and now it's stuck in the closet. Read more
Published on August 15, 2005 by D. Muldoon

4.0 out of 5 stars Great pictures, uneven text
I agree with both the positive and negative reviews: I loved the pictures (as did the positive reviews)- they definitely gave me a better feel for concepts like "pods" that I am... Read more
Published on August 1, 2005 by Michael Lewyn

2.0 out of 5 stars Mainly picked up for the pictures...
I've heard many of the term before. Zoomburb. Big Box. Alligator. I guess that's what happens when you grow up in the house of an engineer. Read more
Published on May 23, 2005 by Victory Silvers

2.0 out of 5 stars New Urbanist Propaganda
Where is J.B. Jackson when you need him? The spirit of the seemingly unbiased observer of the American built environment, who is said to have said that he never saw a landscape he... Read more
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5.0 out of 5 stars Nature Hater's Paradise
This collection of outstanding aerial photos illustrates the nonsensical contempt for nature inherent in American social and economic systems, as embodied by sprawl. Read more
Published on February 19, 2005 by doomsdayer520

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