© Dolores Hayden. Not for quotation without permission.

Contested Landscapes

Dolores Hayden

Yale University

Going Public with the Built Environment

Charles Warren Center
Harvard University
April 30, 2005 (revised 6.28.05)
Landscape history interests multiple audiences, as architects remind themselves that “site

matters,” geographers rediscover “place,” historians write of “taking up space,” art historians

speak of landscapes and power, and the American Studies Association posits a “spatial turn” as a

reason for the November 2005 annual meeting on “Groundwork: Space and Place in American

Cultures.”1 Yet exact definitions of the history of the American landscape remain difficult. In its

broadest dimensions, the subject includes both the natural environments we occupy and the built

environments we create at the scale of the building site, the neighborhood, the metropolitan

region, and beyond.2 And landscape is a vital part of the political economy, part of the history of

economic production and social reproduction, readily seen in the workings of the real estate

sector, from speculation to construction, and on to inhabitation, decay, and demolition.

This panel is entitled “Going Public.” Reaching out to the general public with landscape history

demands engaging subject matter, accessible language, and accessible graphics. First comes the

choice of subject—scholars who wish to increase the audience for public debates will find that

citizens are drawn to controversial issues and contested places. In American history, some of the

most important themes about the political economy include the abuse of government to support

private profit making, the exploitation of labor, and the exclusion of women and people of color

from basic civil rights.3 Exploring these issues in terms of landscape history means framing

questions of power around the politics of land use. For most of American history, bankers,

speculators, developers, and builders have been a powerful force in society as the producers of

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built space. Analyzing their power can complement assessing the creativity of designers, who

often fascinate architectural historians. It is also important to analyze the inventiveness of

laborers in the building trades as well as the experience of workers and residents who are not

developers or designers. People inhabit space and adapt it as part of paid work in fields,

factories, offices, and malls as well as unpaid nurturing in shacks, tenements, ranch houses, and

mansions.

Accessible Language

If choosing controversial subject matter is a start, when analyzing the politics of contested

places, accessible language is also vital. To launch public discussion in 2005, I would hesitate to

lead with “reconceptualizing the history of the built environment in North America.” I confess

that I was responsible for introducing the British term, “built environment,” when I headed an

area of the urban planning program at UCLA in 1980. Recently the phrase has been kidnapped

(or “reconceptualized”) by representatives of industry, including the manufacturers of

mechanical heating and cooling equipment who form the International Society for Built

Environment.4 A few weeks ago a major Texas developer told me he thought the phrase, “built

environment,” implied buildings going higher and higher—his eyes lit up. “Built environment” is

also a term that will run up against competition from the broad field of environmental history,

defined by William Cronon in 1992 as “the story of how different peoples have lived and used

the natural world.”5

For public debate, I prefer the more enduring word, “landscape.”6 “Landscape” is now widely

used to include both the built and natural environments, as in “the suburban landscape” or “the

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automotive landscape.” It has been popularized by journalists as well as academic writers who

include many art historians, landscape architects and geographers interested in politics.7 (For

example, the great British geographer, Doreen Massey, author of Space, Place and Gender, an

important book emphasizing women’s labor within economic geography, offers a sharp analysis

of landscapes divided by gender and class as a left alternative to the esoteric, male-oriented

Marxist geography some have nicknamed “Men in Space” or “Boys Town.”8 Recently Don

Mitchell has built upon the work of Massey and others to revive the term “cultural landscape,” a

phrase used long ago by Berkeley geographer Carl Sauer. Mitchell updates this tradition,

combining cultural geography and cultural studies in a politically inclusive, introductory text

integrating perspectives on labor, ethnicity, race, class, and gender.9)

My own most recent book on the history of postwar American landscapes, A Field Guide to

Sprawl, engages many controversies about contemporary landscapes by addressing the need for

more accessible language and accessible graphics directly.10 In writing my previous book,

Building Suburbia, a history of suburbs from 1820-2000, I found few consistent terms used to

describe recent construction in edge cities and rural fringes, the last two of the seven suburban

landscapes I analyzed.11 I started a personal file, and this file turned into A Field Guide to

Sprawl, organized as a dictionary of building patterns, illustrated with color aerial photographs

by Jim Wark. It runs from A to Z, alligator to zoomburb. The guide emphasizes bad practices, so

the definitions form an architectural, economic, political, and environmental “devil’s dictionary,”

to borrow a term from Progressive-era journalist Ambrose Bierce.12

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While there are hundreds of books and articles about sprawl, most rely on quantitative methods

for the analysis of land use. (Don Chen of Smart Growth America is well known for outstanding

work of this kind.13) My work takes a different approach, wielding slang and visual images. It

challenges readers to decode everyday American landscapes, to identify local patterns. I put

building patterns in the foreground and then critique the economic and political forces behind

them.

Most Americans inhabit complex metropolitan areas layered with tracts, strips, office parks,

malls, and highways.14 Widespread dissatisfaction with speculative building provokes many

critiques of something called “sprawl,” but precise terms to define the physical elements of

metropolitan landscapes are often missing.15 Since words such as city, suburb, and countryside

no longer capture the reality of contemporary places, planners, architects, and real estate

developers often invent slang to discuss current projects. The essential vocabulary for debating

common building patterns not only includes familiar words, such as subdivision, highway, and

parking lot, but also more the exotic ruburb, ground cover, category-killer, privatopia, tank farm,

tower farm, power center, snout house, and boomburb. My field guide includes colloquial terms

for fifty-one conditions (and dozens of synonyms).16

I define sprawl as excessive growth expressed as careless use of land and energy as well as

abandonment of older built areas in favor of constant green field construction. Sprawl as a

product is most obvious to the eye at the periphery of a metropolitan region in affluent areas

where speculative new construction is usually supported by a range of federal, state, and local

government subsidies.17 Sprawl as a process is most obvious in declining city centers and aging

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suburbs because in an economy organized around new construction, existing places (with

infrastructure of schools, playgrounds, sidewalks, roads, and sewers) are often left to fall apart.

The contrast between affluent, private new growth and abandoned public infrastructure marks

sprawl as socially destructive.

As social science researchers William Goldsmith, Robert Bullard, Gregory Squires, and others

have shown, the worst burdens fall on poor households (predominantly of people of color and

women) residing in declining inner cities and older suburbs.18 The destructive process can be

compared to the activities promoted in fifties marketing jargon as “dynamic obsolescence”

(General Motors designer Harley Earl coined the phrase for Cadillac fins—a new tail fin every

year to hasten consumption). Turning over the built environment so rapidly is a process no

country can afford, but in 1954, Eisenhower introduced accelerated depreciation for green field

commercial real estate development, providing huge tax windfalls for just this approach.

I argue that the visual culture of sprawl should be read as the material expression of a political

economy organized around unsustainable growth. Sprawl is driven by “growth machines,”

coalitions of business and political leaders who favor unlimited growth and green field

construction. In Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, social scientists Harvey

Molotch and John Logan have defined a pro-growth political lobby pressing for unrestricted real

estate development as the national expression of many “growth machines” or “sprawl machines”

operating locally.19 Growth boosters appear everywhere—for example, billboards advertising

banks may carry photos of construction in process along with the word, “growth.“ Elected

officials who object to excessive growth are often compelled to work with growth machines

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because in the United States local governments rely heavily on real estate taxes to fund essential

services such as schools.

Well-educated Americans often lack words for the political and cultural upheaval caused by

sprawl. My dictionary of sprawl is intended to stimulate observation and discussion for people of

all ages. Naming is critical to identification and action. Architects and planners often wield

highly specialized, impenetrable jargon. Architects use “archi-speak” consisting of Latinate

phrases like “interstitial spaces” to describe the spaces between built areas. Planners mix

statistics, acronyms, legalese, and bureaucratic circumlocutions such as “non-attainment area” to

describe a smoggy region that has failed to meet federal clean air guidelines. They add

engineering jargon borrowed from transportation specialists, such as LOS-F (level of service,

failing) to measure a traffic jam.

For both generalists and specialists, bland styles of naming defy everyday experience just as

obscure words do. Reference books for professionals often play it safe by defining terms in a

neutral way. Take an entry in an urban planning glossary for “billboard”: “A sign that directs

attention to a business, commodity, service, or entertainment conducted, sold, or offered at a

location other than the premises on which the sign is located.”20 “Sign” begs to be amplified by

language conveying the aggressive size and garish qualities of the billboards themselves--an

acronym like JAWS (jumbo abrasive wall signs) or an environmental term, like Scenic

America’s label, “litter-on-a stick.” Bland names can also hide political controversy. “Public-

private partnership” is vague but “ball-pork,” as used by columnist Bob Herbert of the New York

Times, combines ballpark and pork barrel to characterize public subsidies for privately owned

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ball teams.21 The slang entries in my dictionary are each accompanied by a 100 to 300-word

essay (fully sourced) on the history, politics, and economics of the built pattern.

Accessible Graphics

The Field Guide could not succeed in making language accessible if it did not also include

accessible graphics. Color aerial photographs from across the United States by Jim Wark

accompany every entry in the dictionary. Low-level (500 to 2000 feet), oblique-angle aerial

photographs can be understood by people without technical training, in a way that zoning maps,

zoning codes, satellite surveys, architectural drawings, and traditional site plans cannot. Aerial

photographs of this kind show building facades as well as site massing, entwining natural and

constructed elements. Although they rarely include recognizable people, aerial images can show

inaccessible places such as wetlands, steep terrain, or freeway interchanges, as well as hidden

sites such as LULU’s (locally unwanted land uses), automobile graveyards, tire dumps, or

privatopias. Most of all, aerial photographs show scale in a way that ground level photographs

cannot easily capture. In an era when a truck stop or a truck city can be larger than a traditional

town, aerial images can convey the vast spread of much twenty-first century development and

can bring up-to-the-minute data on the progress of construction.

Aerial photography has been in use since the 1920s in campaigns for land as a contested

economic and political resource. Recently major developers and large corporations such as Wal-

Mart and franchise operations such as McDonalds have used aerial photographs in combination

with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology to locate future development sites.

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Developers and architects have also commissioned costly aerial pictures when seeking approvals

for projects such as regional malls, office parks, and subdivisions. If aerial photography has been

used by boosters to promote local growth in the past, it also has the potential to become an

essential tool for groups and elected officials combating unwise proposals. In 2000, I developed

a website on the town of Guilford, CT with an essay and over thirty aerial images by

photographer Alex MacLean. In addition to serving a Yale class, I hoped to stimulate local

citizens’ discussion of land use in advance of a revision of the town plan.22 (See

http://classes.yale.edu/00-01/amst401a/guilford/) Universities and town websites can now carry

aerial images inexpensively, pairing them with maps and plans. Citizens can easily contrast

aerial images of proposed developments with images from other towns where similar projects

have occurred.

People all over America, in rural areas and growing suburbs, in small towns and big cities, want

to debate the landscape, in all of its contested dimensions. As developers and practitioners

transform landscapes with new construction, activists try to preserve existing landscapes, and

ordinary citizens pay taxes supporting the ones they inhabit. People everywhere puzzle over the

changing scale and character of neighborhoods. They want to know what they are getting for

their tax dollars. Scholars may choose to ignore this basic curiosity, but if historians do not try to

engage developers, practitioners, and activists, the possibility of learning from both good and bad

practice is diminished. If historians do not join with other groups around the preservation of

historic landscapes and buildings, opportunities for saving older places disappear. In a nation of

subsidized shopping malls and teardowns, there will not be many wonderful buildings left to

research.

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It is my experience that scholars who decide to “go public” will find audiences eager to engage

with inclusive histories of landscapes, provided that subjects are carefully chosen, language is

accessible, and graphics are clear.23 The broad field of landscape history includes theoretical

analysis, historical research, and criticism. “Going public” is not for everyone—it demands

girding up for public speech after a long academical day of teaching and writing. It is best

approached with a sense of humor as well as a commitment to broad popular understanding and

heated public debate.

I was pleased that A Field Guide to Sprawl appeared on an AP Human Geography reading list

for high school students within a few weeks of publication last summer. Although I never give

multiple-choice tests in the university, this form demands satire, so I drafted a “sprawl quiz” to

help promote the book. Then several young writers added more trick definitions. Making up the

wrong answers was more fun that learning the right ones—“impervious surface” auditioned as

“the name of a platinum-selling rapper” or “a skin treatment similar to Botox.” This summer I

am working with K-12 public school teachers to explore how sense of place (and sense of

sprawl) can be incorporated in their classes—so watch for more details on a phony cocktail

called “Rural Slammer” and a heavy metal band known as “Asphalt Nation.”

The history of American landscapes compels public attention. I have sketched a brief history of

sprawl as a story of hidden government subsidies and pro-growth hype, as well as a story about

the constant destruction of older neighborhoods and cities. You may agree with me or disagree

about sprawl and obsolescence—these are controversial topics--but I hope you will sign on to my

major argument, that since the history of the natural and built environments is the story of our

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material lives, these issues deserve more historically-informed public debate. The current

president of the United States likes to boast about growth and high rates of white male

homeownership. The United States is also a nation with a history of expropriation and

discrimination that has been especially hard on people of color and women. If we historians of

the American landscape do not hone our skills to engage broad public debate about land use and

building, illuminating the subsidies for green field development and critiquing the negative

effects on older suburbs and city centers, we lose the possibility of wider political understanding

of our complicated subject.

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Notes

I would like to thank Daniel Bluestone and Gail Dubrow for their advice on the terms

“landscape” and “built environment.”

1
For a few examples of recent work, see Carol Burns and Andrea Kahn, eds., Site Matters (New

York: Routledge, 2005); John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan, eds., The Power of Place:

Bringing together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations (Winchester, Mass.: Unwin

Hyman, 1989); Anke Ortlepp and Christoph Ribbat, eds., Taking Up Space: New Approaches to

American History (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2004); W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape

and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, rev. ed. 2002), “Goundwork: Space and

Place in American Studies,” American Studies 2005 meeting (www.theasa.net). Smaller

scholarly organizations where these landscape issues are the constant focus of discussion include

Society for American City and Regional Planning History, (SACRPH), Urban History

Association (UHA), and Vernacular Architecture Forum (VAF).

2
There are multiple spatial scales inherent in the study of landscapes, from the body to the room,

the building, the neighborhood, the city, the metropolitan region, on up. For a more detailed

consideration of these issues, see Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as

Public History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).

3
A recent synthesis of social science and history unites all three: Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal

Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 2002.) For a general list of readings on the history of American landscapes, see

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my syllabus for American Studies 207/Architecture 912, American Cultural Landscapes, on line

at http://www.architecture.yale.edu/courses.

4
From about 1980 to 1991, I headed a concentration on the built environment in urban planning

at UCLA, parallel to a natural environment concentration in the same program. Since 1995,

mechanical engineers in corporations making mechanical heating and cooling equipment call

themselves “The International Society of the Built Environment,” formerly Indoor Air

International (www.isbe.demon.co.uk). “Built environment” has been British civil service jargon

for at least thirty-five years. Built environment includes all construction. It is more inclusive than

architecture (buildings by trained architects), physical planning (infrastructure plus everything

requiring a zoning or building permit) and certainly more encompassing than urban design

(which usually means architects engaging in master planning or large scale architecture). But

“built environment” is a curious term because it omits the natural environment, and therefore

seems bounded by construction sites. In 2005, the Commission for Architecture and the Built

Environment is an “Executive, Non-Departmental Public Body” tied to the U.K. Department of

Culture, Media, and Sports, and it promotes higher standards of design (www.cabe.org.uk/). In

Australia, 2004 was the “Year of the Built Environment,” a program devoted to sustainability

and health (www.builtenvironment2004.org.au). The phrase “built environment” has also been

used in education in the UK, Australia, and Canada, often to include Architecture, Landscape,

Planning, Housing, Transport, Construction, Surveying, and Real Estate (for example,

http://cebe.cf.ac.uk). Industries sponsoring research on construction fund a Center for the Built

Environment (CBE) at U.C. Berkeley.

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5
William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of

American History 78 (March 1992): 1347-1376. The American Society for

Environmental History (ASEH) was founded in 1977.

6
In Landscape magazine, between 1951 and the early 1990s, J. B. Jackson hosted practitioners

and academics who wanted plain talk about places. Diverse contributors were welcomed. Jargon

was not. The tone was descriptive, informed, and skeptical. Although contributors did not

usually engage with the political economy directly, the verbal punch of Landscape magazine is

still with us. See John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Landscape in Sight: Looking at America, edited by

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). The push for clear

writing was also in the spirit of George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” (first

published in Horizon, London, April 1946), now on many university websites including

www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm.

7
Landscape Architect Anne Whiston Spirn is currently writing about the landscape photographer

Dorothea Lange and her social concerns. Landscape architect Kenneth Helphand is currently

writing about Defiant Gardens, gardens created in places without much hope, such as Japanese

American internment camps. In Understanding Ordinary Landscape (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1997), editors Todd Bressi (an architect) and Paul Groth (a geographer who

teaches in an architecture school) engage with contested places. Paul Groth and Chris Wilson (an

architectural historian and preservationist), in their edited collection, Everyday America: Cultural

Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003),

recognize multiple strands of investigation coming from the design professions, geography,

14
American studies, and art history, and they note that there is often a political dimension to

landscape studies.

8
Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1994).

9
Don Mitchell, Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (Blackwell, 2000). Mitchell

provides a much more inclusive analysis than the earlier work by Jackson, who rarely mentioned

women, or the endeavors of Marxist geographers such as Edward Soja and David Harvey, who

are also unlikely to take up the analysis of women. Mitchell teaches at Syracuse and was a 1998

MacArthur Fellow.

10
Dolores Hayden, A Field Guide to Sprawl (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).

11
Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000. (New

York: Pantheon, 2003).

12
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911. (New York: Dover, 1993.) Bierce used

ordinary words and defined them sardonically; I am using many slang terms but defining them

straight.

13
See www.smartgrowthamerica.org.

14
For census data see Bruce Katz, and Robert E. Lang, eds., Redefining Urban and Suburban

America: Evidence from Census 2000 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2003); for real estate data,

15
see Robert E. Lang, Edgeless Cities: Exploring the Elusive Metropolis (Washington, D.C.:

Brookings Institution Press, 2004).

15
Some of the linguistic confusion is caused by the many academics and academic practitioners

in architecture and architectural history who embraced theory in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s,

bringing talk of “discourse,” “protocols,” and “problematization.” As architectural journalist

Robert Campbell has complained, many architects adopted half-understood philosophical and

linguistic jargon while ignoring practice, constructing “buzz saw verbiage” that can cripple

students who no longer form coherent sentences. Robert Campbell, “Why Don’t the Rest of Us

Like the Buildings the Architects Like?” Bulletin of the American Academy (Summer 2004): 22-

24. A much more positive account of the widening of architectural history to include more theory

from more disciplines is Nancy Stieber, “Architecture Between Disciplines,’ Journal of the

Society of Architectural Historians 62 (June 2003): 176-177.

16
The 51 slang words come from many sources including slang dictionaries, and technical

sources such as Harvey S. Moskowitz and Carl G. Lindbloom, The New Illustrated Book of

Development Definitions (New Brunswick, N.J.: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1993), as

well as unofficial lexicons such as Bill W. West and Richard L. Dickinson, Street Talk in Real

Estate. (Alameda, CA: Unique Publishing Co., 1987).

17
Many of the federal government’s extensive subsidies for “spreading out carelessly or

awkwardly” have been disguised. Four programs stand out among the many designed to

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encourage employment in the construction industry and promote overall growth by opening up

of raw land to real estate development: Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insurance for

mortgages to home purchasers (1934-present); federal income tax deductions for home mortgage

interest, points, and property taxes (1920-present); federal corporate tax deductions called

accelerated depreciation for greenfield commercial real estate (1954-1986); and federal funding

for highways (1916-present). Combined with state and local subsidies for development, these

federal programs have transformed a nation of cities and small towns into a nation of sprawling

metropolitan regions.

18
On sprawl and race, see Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres, Sprawl

City: Race, Politics, and Planning in Atlanta (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000); Gregory D.

Squires, ed., Urban Sprawl: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Responses, (Washington, D.C.:

The Urban Institute Press, 2002); William W. Goldsmith, “Resisting the Reality of Race: Land

Use, Social Justice, and the Metropolitan Economy,” (Cambridge: Lincoln Institute of Land

Policy, 1999). On line at www.lincolninstitute.edu. For a quantitative analysis see George

Galster, Royce Hanson, Hal Wolman, and Stephen Coleman, “Wrestling Sprawl to the Ground:

Defining and Measuring an Elusive Concept,” working paper (Washington, D.C.: Fannie Mae

Foundation, 2000). Early critiques include Mark Gottdiener, Planned Sprawl: Private and Public

Interests in Suburbia (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1977); Joe R. Feagin and Robert Parker,

Building American Cities: The Urban Real Estate Game. 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:

Prentice Hall, 1990).

17
19
Harvey L Molotch, “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place,”

American Journal of Sociology 82, 2 (1976): 309-332; Harvey L. Molotch and John R. Logan,

Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1987).

20
Mike Davidson and Fay Dolnick, A Glossary of Zoning, Development, and Planning Terms,

Planning Advisory Service document 491-492 (Chicago: American Planning Association, 1999),

203.

21
Bob Herbert, “Ball Pork,” The New York Times (April 19, 1998): A17; Joanna Cagan and Neil

deMause, Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Private

Profit (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999).

22
Dolores Hayden, with photographs by Alex MacLean, “Aerial Photography on the Web: A

New Tool for Community Debates on Land Use,” Lotus 108 (Summer 2001), 118-131. (Italian

and English). For similar projects, see Metropolitan Design Center, University of Minnesota,

www.umn.edu; Julie Campoli, Elizabeth Humstone, and Alex MacLean, Above and Beyond:

Visualizing Change in Small Towns and Rural Areas (Chicago: American Planning Association,

2002); Julie Campoli and Alex MacLean, “Visualizing Density,” working paper (Cambridge:

Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, 2002). For historical background, see Thomas J. Campanella,

Cities from the Sky: An Aerial Portrait of America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press,

2001).

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23
Suburban history provides rich opportunities for new public projects. Greenfield development

on the outskirts of cities has been going on in the US since at least 1820, yet there are few public

history projects dealing with racial segregation in suburbs or with racial and gender

discrimination in federally insured mortgage lending. Analyzing late twentieth century landscape

history more effectively might involve finding better ways to discuss subdivisions and malls

(dead and alive) as an expression of growth fueled by hidden federal subsidies.

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