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by: Dolores Hayden with Aerial
Photographs by Jim Wark
Review by: Ann Sussman, AIA
This brave little book is a must see for anyone interested in what our land-use practices have done to America in the last fifty years. A self-described ‘devil’s dictionary,’ the Field Guide defines fifty terms depicting the environment where the majority of us now live. With full-page photographs it illustrates a full lexicon of what some might call slang or developer speak—everything from boomburg to zoomburg, with entries for sitcom suburb, snout house, and starter castle along the way. The Field Guide demystifies those silly acronyms, like LULU and TOAD that might have confused you at a recent public hearing, too. But it’s the book’s remarkable aerial photographs, by Jim Wark, accompanying each term, in crisp full-page color, that really stick in the memory—at least, they did in mine.
Cruelly beautiful, shot on sunny, cloudless days, each photo, whether of a logo building or an edge node, could stand on its own as a fine-art print. There’s something in their composition and in the magnitude of the wastefulness on display and the sheer obliviousness to natural surroundings that moves these images of snaking highways and endless suburbs into the realm of high art. Evidently, I’m not alone in thinking so. An exhibit of Wark’s photographs from the book opens at the Gallery of the Yale University Department of Architecture, in September, 2007. (Details on opening and symposium to follow per Yale...)
A quick read, A Field Guide, like most field guides, is meant to be flipped through. Taken in one sitting, it can leave you feeling a little awe-struck and queasy. That appears to be the point. Dolores Hayden, a professor of Architecture and American Studies at Yale, views this book, her seventh, as part primer, part sustainable-development manifesto.
She laces these definitions with fascinating tidbits that highlight the basic unsustainability of so much in our built-out environment. The U.S. has twice the retail space, for example, at nineteen square feet per citizen, of any other country, and at the same time, increasing numbers of ‘dead’ malls. Gridlock, that bane of highway drivers, promoted by single-use zoning where residents and businesses are far apart was actually coined by two city engineers in Manhattan in 1980, worrying about the impact of a local transit strike.
“Americans do not have to tolerate sprawl,” she concludes in the book’s opening essay on the history and economics of sprawl. But first, they need to define the problem, and naming is an essential part of the process. Then they can move on to envision other possibilities for their communities where “social interaction and sensitivity to the natural landscape have not been sacrificed to mindless growth machines.” Use aerial photographs to better understand your community, she advises, they are easier to understand than most planning maps, and bring along this little guide to your next community planning event. It might just ‘elevate’ the discussion to a whole new level