| Summary: | If there was ever a question about the subject of this work, I had
only to return to the landscape. There was a strangness, a newness,
an inevitability to those urban spaces around the city that insisted on
my attention. Those landscape, often called suburban, of subdivision
homes, strip plazas, malls and big box stores, of arterial roadways and
parking lots, ascendant since the middle of the twentieth century, have
overwhelmed their host cities and now claimed urban dominance in
North America.
My interest in the sprawl landscapes started with the homes
that occupy them. Sprawl is made up mostly of housing. The essence
of this circumferential city of sprawling growth is the home. If there
is a unifying element in the wildly-different suburbs built over the
last two centuries, it is that they are wrought on the foundation of the
suburban home. The idea of the home as centre of the suburb didn’t
take root until after the war, when the lack of affordable housing
became a matter of national concern. In Redesigning the American
Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life, Dolores
Hayden argued that by the 1950s, the American suburban house had
become a private utopia. The home -- something separate from its
neighbours and separate from its community, an ideal in and of itself
- is both the beginning and the essence of sprawl. In 1950 the average
size of a new home was 800 square feet, 1,500 in 1970, 2,190 in
19981. The home as a symbol of the American, Canadian, indeed the
industrialized dream, took hold in the-postwar environment and bore
the offspring we call sprawl.
Although the sprawl landscape is inextricably connected to
the single family home, it has evolved into a post industrial cityscape,
a place that is in fact, but not in feel, urban. What is the nature of this
strange place? How and why does it differ from the industrial urban
landscape? And what are the phenomena that propel the building of
this place.
I set out to understand this landscape by looking for its proponents,
but in the end couldn’t fi nd any. I didn’t talk to anyone - see, hear,
or read anything - that explained the changes in the landscape as a
function of an urban ideology or even a choice. Duany Plater-Zyberk
argue that “[w]e live today in cities and suburbs whose form andcharacter we did not choose. They were imposed upon us, by federal
policy, local zoning laws, and the demands of the automobile2”. Most
of the literature - books, websites, government and non government
studies - bemoan the expansion of the sprawl landscape, and criticize
our inability to plan our way out of it. The sprawl landscape, the
landscape characterized in large part by the subdivided tract homes is,
virtually, without a social or cultural advocate. It is a place that seems
to have been built for everyone, without anyone advocating on its
behalf.
From homes to highways, the landscape, whose photographs make
up this work, was for me, the discovery of a place with which I was
almost too familiar to see. The images bear witness to the changing
urban condition; they are a documentation of our rural spaces as they
are annexed by the sprawl that, like a wave, has rolled over virtually
every major city in North America.
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