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Crossing the Expendable Landscape

Name: Crossing the Expendable Landscape
Author: Bettina Drew
ISBN: 9781555972790

by Bettina Drew

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Overview

"This is a lively book, leavening moral indignation with cool appraisal. It is a frightening book too, in terms of American democracy. The horrors of Stamford and the complacent rot of Hilton Head are no joke. Bettina Drew does not hesitate to denounce these things, and she begins at least to value the attempts of The New Urbanism to change them." Vincent Scully

"Bettina Drew's Crossing the Expendable Landscape is a sad and angry book, a melancholy contemporary travelogue sustained by acerbity and wit. Its theme is how wealth and power heartlessly condition our surroundings, leaving those of us without those resources to make our lives on the periphery or in the ruins of transient corporate empires. Ms. Drew's clear, balanced prose eloquently demonstrates that American capitalism is the most fearsome revolutionary force ever let loose on the planet and that, unchecked by the public interest, it grows less socially responsible every day." Robert Stone

Noted essayist Bettina Drew takes the reader on an in-depth exploration of several American cities-- Stamford, Hilton Head, Las Vegas, Dallas, Celebration-- to examine the consequences of built environments that fail to reflect regional, historic, aesthetic, and social values. Drew talks to the everyday people who live in these cities, along with the urban planners and developers who created them, about the cultural impact of big-business-inspired living. She concludes with an overview of the ways in which some architects and planners are now working to humanize American landscape development. Always searching for the impact of physical environment on human happiness, Drew focuses on what has gone so wrong with mass architectureand reflects on the possibilities for built environments in the future.

Bettina Drew is the author of the critically acclaimed Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side, nominated for Book of the Year by the Chicago Sun-Times. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

About the Author, Bettina Drew

Bettina Drew is the author of the critically acclaimed Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side, nominated for Book of the Year by the Chicago Sun-Times. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

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Editorials

James Ryan

Read Crossing the Expendable Landscape if you're concerned about where we're heading as a civilized society and if you harken to clear, well-organized exposition. Drew's book has passion, an anger even. That's one of the many things good about.
— American Book Review

Library Journal

Having traveled to such places as Stamford, Branson, Dallas, Hilton Head, and Las Vegas to explore urban development and lifestyles, Drew (Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side, LJ 10/15/89) laments the overdevelopment, impersonal suburbs, strip malls, and homogeneous planned communities she found. Each chapter includes a well-researched description of the history of the city and its recent growth as well as quotes from developers, politicians, and residents. However, the majority of the book contains her observations, and though her ideas are important and need to be voiced and debated, her indignation eventually becomes tiresome. The closing section, in which she describes the New Urbanism, a more humanistic approach to development, does not quite offset the bitter tone of the rest of the book. Nonetheless, there aren't any better essays on this important subject. Recommended for larger public and academic libraries. [Drew is a former LJ reviewer.--Ed.]--Kathleen A. Shanahan, American Univ. Lib., Kensington, MD

Kirkus Reviews

Social criticism meets travelogue in an uncomplimentary tour of the American metropolis. Essayist Drew (Nelson Algren: A Walk on the Wild Side, 1989) is no fan of capitalism, at least the kind of capitalism that has produced the endless conurbations of Dallas, New York, and Los Angeles. The turn of the last century, she writes, may have been the age of the robber barons, but those guilty millionaires bestowed great public libraries, parks, and promenades on the people, þarchitectures that suggested the public had something to do with their leisure time besides spend money.þ By contrast, she writes, todayþs public architecture bespeaks nothing but marketing, with no eye toward the spiritual or even the social. Traveling from Stamford, Conn., with its gutted urban core, she looks at other centerless cities, built and renewed and rebuilt not to follow ideals of places where people might come together, but to capture real-estate booms and housing trends. Casting a jaundiced eye on the trends of our own day, on mega-malls and gated communities, on retirement complexes and enclaves for the rich where the street signs are etched in gold, Drew finds little to cheer about in the modern national landscape. Her criticism is sharp-edged, to the point, and nearly inarguable. Drew, like past urban-design critics such as Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, offers a program for making just those livable places, although that program is too briefly presented in her pages; the architects of the so-called New Urbanist approach she champions accept þthe physical constraints of mountain and riverþ and þencourage authentic regional building differences and energy-efficient,nonpolluting construction,þ as the builders of most American towns evidently do not. A solid, well-argued, and sometimes radical plea for a better-built environment.