{"id":541,"date":"2003-09-15T08:21:00","date_gmt":"2003-09-15T13:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=541"},"modified":"2003-09-15T08:21:00","modified_gmt":"2003-09-15T13:21:00","slug":"geography-of-nowhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=541","title":{"rendered":"Geography of Nowhere"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanks to for recommending this book, it’s good. It’s a review of how America’s urban and real estate structure evolved, and a criticism of its current state. The author is accessible and engaging, without being banal. There were a couple words I had to look up, though. =)<\/p>\n

A longish quote, a little more than a page of text, from it that I especially liked. He’s talking about the tourist-town of woodstock, VT, if you don’t want to read the whole thing, try reading just the last paragraph, and see how it strikes you.:<\/p>\n

For instance, there were quite a few art galleries in woodstock filled with paintings that in one way or another tried to depict small town and rural life. Some of the paintings were very accomplished; some were amteurish. Some obviously tried to capture a contemporary scene (often of rural desolation) in a contemporary way; others blatantly resorted to cliches (covered bridges in the snow, et cetera). But they all had this in common: not one included an image of a car.<\/p>\n

I asked the gallery owners what this signified and got a set of explanations ranging from “Beats me,” to “Paintings with cars don’t sell.” Yet the village of Woodstock was jam-packed with cars, cars not just of great monetary value, but of great symbolic value to their owners–Mercedes Benzes, BMWs, Land Rovers. The rural landscape around Woodstock was infested with cars. every half-million-dollar vacation home, ancient or modern, had three or four parked in the driveway as did the few working farms that remained in the area. It was much easier to spot a car in Vermont than a cow. <\/p>\n

Of course, the paintings were totem objects, invested with a specific set of symbolic meanings, in this case relating to the sense of place that is a part of every person’s emotional equipment. People bought the paintings in order to bring a little sense of place home with them–home being somehow deficient in this quality.<\/p>\n

All of this is probably more or less obvious. But what is less obvious is the confusion that Americans feel about the entire issue of place<\/i> and the abstract quality of their thinking about it. Hence the sentimentality. Everywhere in America, cars had destroyed the physical relationships between things and thereby destroyed the places themselves, and yet Americans could not conceive of a life without cars. They couldn’t imagine any modifications to their living arrangements that would make their home places more humane–for example, changing their zoning laws. They didn’t want to challenge the status quo, or their own ideas about it. Undoubtedly, many of these visitors to Woodstock made money in the very entirprises that ruined places–like shopping plazas, or mass retailing, or any number of other endeavors that had the final consequence of making America ugly and killing local economies. This left them in quite a psychological pickle. What they did in the world and what they yearned for were at odds with each other. Unwilling to think clearly about the meaning of place in their lives, or their responsibility for making good places, they sought comfort in paintings of places with the cars deliberately left out. They finally reduced the whole question to just another commodity for consumption–shopping being one thing they could understand. This made them ridiculous, and aperhaps a little evil.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are a few things in the book I disagree with. Like many people interesting in pedestrian oriented neighborhoods, he cites the end of WWII as the beginning of sprawl. The truth is that since the invention of the railroad, long before the automobile, cities have been decentralizing. (A point my professor has made) Many people demand a location far from the city, and when the technology becomes available to make that possible, they pursue it. Now, the immense subsidies provided to highways (and the relative lack of such provided to rails) in the united states has certainly made a difference, as have the FHA subsidies, tax cuts for real estate ownership (or mortgage payments if you prefer), and a large number of other factors. But this oversight is important.<\/p>\n

This book was written in ’93, and the author very definitely believes that the oil supply is running out. As Ro has pointed out to me explicitly, this isn’t an abrupt process, rather, we start extracting oil from more difficult, and thus more expensive, locations driving up gas prices, but doing so gradually. And while that is the likely result of continuing to rely on petro as our prime energy source for autos (since we consume it at a rate which already exceeds its rate of production and continues to grow), we won’t do that. We’ll only use petro until it is as expensive as fuel cells, or pick-your-energy-source, and then we’ll switch over. Classic economics. <\/p>\n

The point is, sprawl is demanded, and technology enables. So his ‘optimism’ that we’ll run out of oil, and do as Churchill might have predicted, and start building ‘correctly’ then, is, to my mind, misguided. <\/p>\n

I also disagree with his assessment of the individuals involved as “a little evil”. They are people with unappealing choices. It really is true that if they, individually, don’t put up the suburban “community” of cookiecutter houses, then someone else will. This is a problem of economic incentives and regulations working against the development of a good human habitat. <\/p>\n

He, like myself, is a fan of both relatively untouched nature, and the amenities of urban living (well, village living, in his case). And we’re also pissed off at the way the world has gone, and is, by and large, going. In both of our cases, some of is nostalgia for a life we never experienced, some is taken from the good and bad things we’ve experienced about the places we’ve lived, and some of it is imagining the possibilities for a better tomorrow. <\/p>\n

If you feel a nameless dissatisfaction with the places you live, feelings of disconnectedness or insecurity in your daily life, frustration about your everyday travel to perform everyday functions, wonder why you don’t like to go outside your house in your own neighborhood, but reserve that for some place you have to drive to get to (contemplate the likely effect of that on civic values and your opinion of your neighbors\/fellow man, in light of the ‘mere exposure effect’), get fed up with the continual nuisance of finding parking for your car, or just plain ol’ wonder what the hell I’m talking about, this book might give you something to think about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to for recommending this book, it’s good. It’s a review of how America’s urban and real estate structure evolved, and a criticism of its current state. The author is accessible and engaging, without being banal. There were a couple words I had to look up, though. =)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}