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Sprawling Places
by David Kolb
David Kolb takes issue with those who dismiss the suburbs and their landscape of sprawl as banal, boring and socially insular. While he says he dislikes the word “postmodern,” his intellectual heritage is clear enough, and he insists that “universal claims … are all overgeneralized.” But his own discussion of places, which to him are “spatialized landscape[s] of social possibilities,” is for the most part generalized and abstract, with almost no reference to specific locales. Rejecting the valorization of the central, hierarchical, authentic, dense city, he contends that complexity is the key measure of a place’s success, and that the suburbs are more complex than is usually recognized. Moreover, he says, they are inevitable, because people like them and because many suburbs have already been built and cannot easily be fundamentally re-formed. Kolb does admit suburbs are usually “thin” and aesthetically lacking. The book briefly comes down to earth to embrace the ideas of New Urbanism as means to increase suburbanites’ self-awareness of complexity, which he seems to think will help alleviate social inequalities and environmental problems. For the most part, though, he writes of places as if they were parts of a giant website, describing a strip development, for example, as a “list with links,” and argues that twenty-first century communications make spatial relations unimportant. The “sprawling places” Kolb defends and aims to modestly improve seem disembodied, and more than influencing actual decisions affecting them he appears to be striking a blow against aesthetic judgements and Heideggerian ideas of “dwelling” and “thingness.”
Retail price: $22.95
[Buy from Amazon.com]
PublisherThe University of Georgia Press |
Available as:book
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