Landscape and the Ideology of Nature in Exurbia

Green Sprawl

K. Valentine Cadieux, Laura Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415637152
• eBook ISBN: 9781136193842
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book explores the role of the ideology of nature in producing urban and exurban sprawl. It examines the ironies of residential development on the metropolitan fringe, where the search for "nature" brings residents deeper into the world from which they are imagining their escape—of Federal Express, technologically mediated communications, global supply chains, and the anonymity of the global marketplace—and where many of the central features of exurbia—very low-density residential land use, monster homes, and conversion of forested or rural land for housing—contribute to the very problems that the social and environmental aesthetic of exurbia attempts to avoid. The volume shows how this contradiction—to live in the green landscape, and to protect the green landscape from urbanization—gets caught up and represented in the ideology of nature, and how this ideology, in turn, constitutes and is constituted by the landscapes being urbanized.

1 Introduction

Sprawl and the Ideology of Nature

Laura Taylor and Kirsten Valentine Cadieux

This book is about the role of nature in the production of sprawl. Nature is everywhere in cities, but often does not feel as present in the city as it does in “natural” landscapes of woods, hills, beaches, or grasslands outside of the city. A home in natural settings like these, somewhere beyond the city, has many quality of life advantages. But a collection of many such homes—sprawl—is highly problematic for reasons of environmental and social justice. This book explores ways that sprawl is a product (i.e. literally produced by) the ideology of nature. The ideology of nature, the taken-for-granted notion that escaping to nature is a good thing, is one of the reasons why sprawl is so typical of contemporary urbanization, particularly in the United States and Canada. The chapters in this book decode the landscape of sprawl, drawing on several different perspectives—including urban design and landscape planning, geography, history, literature, and journalism—to explore what an examination of the effects of ideologies of nature can tell us about sprawl.

The desire to live in daily contact with nature, far away from the cares of the modern city, is a familiar trope in Western culture. Just look to the glossy pages of lifestyle magazines promoting home renovation and travel to see how powerful the promise of a home in nature is. In a recent televised lottery ad, a man and woman are shown happily walking through a forest path, following the flight of a small bird. At the end of the path, they arrive home to their house surrounded by palm trees. The camera pans out and shows that the house is on a secluded island, intimating that this is a private retreat available to those who buy a ticket and win big. Similarly, newspaper ads show “artists’ concepts” of new homes surrounded by trees, illustrating what is essentially a lie about the actual cheek-by-jowl subdivision in which the house will sit. These images provide examples of the premise of this book, calling into question why such fantastical natural settings are the symbolic markers of the best lifestyles imaginable, and exploring the implications of this problematic fantasy, which we see as a challenge impeding engagement with urban ecologies.

“Green sprawl” is our label for exurban residential development. We explore how important the ideology of nature is (and has been) in producing sprawl—where the ideology of nature is a recognized, yet understudied part of the culture and production of cities. Although the idea that many people make their residential choices based on proximity to natural areas is widely, if implicitly, accepted, why this is the case has not been critically explored. Unmasking the cultural preference for a home life in nature seems to us a necessary step in addressing the contemporary crisis of sprawl.

Each of the following chapters uses different case studies or objects of analysis to explore how landscapes like “exurbia,” where homes are set in nature beyond the edge of the city, have become a social norm signifying the achievement of high quality of life. The social segregation and environmental impact that are masked by these landscapes seem particularly important at a time when more people than ever before live in cities—and while new attention is being paid to cultivating urban ecologies to better meet residents’ goals.

Relating Sprawl and Nature in Exurbia

Technically, “sprawl” is defined as unplanned, unorganized development leap-frogging into the countryside. However, in popular use the term has come to refer to the dispersed metropolitan structure that North Americans love to hate, but where most of them live. In spite of valiant efforts over the last century, urban planning policy has not ended sprawl, despite fostering a widespread discomfort with sprawl, and perhaps with urban expansion in general—a problematic stance as the proportion of people living in cities continues to grow.¹ This failure to successfully address sprawl—the urban form that planners have branded as unequivocally “bad”— suggests that we may not be asking the right questions about how sprawl is a problem. Popular uses of the term “sprawl” have come to point to everything negative about urban expansion, a whole litany of problems that urban expansion creates for individuals, municipalities, agriculture, and the environment. At the same time, the term “exurbia” evokes the good qualities of residential living at the expanding metropolitan edge. In the large homes out in the peace of the countryside, the problems of the world, and particularly of urban modernity, are imagined to take place at a comfortable remove. This book delves into the relationship between nature and residential land use that helps explain this paradoxical contrast between sprawl as bad and exurbia as good by exploring the way that the ideology of nature produces the cultural landscape of exurbia as the attractive face of sprawl.

Exurbia illustrates the role that ideals of nature play in the process of sprawl. We call exurbia “green sprawl” because it is so recognizable as a landscape of housing set in a matrix of vegetation—“nature”—that is different from urban greenspace, which is usually vegetation and other “nature” set in a matrix of the built environment.

Built in opposition to planning policy and philosophy in most places it exists, exurbia is a particularly sprawling and resource-intensive residential settlement pattern, predicatedpartly on a desire for contact with nature and all that nature represents. Attempting to reconcile this desire for authentic experience of the natural environment with the modern, fundamentally urban living habits of North Americans, exurban residential environments, particularly in the housing boom of the 1990s and 2000s, became North America’s most rapidly growing land use.

In this expanded exurbia, more people than ever before are able to live surrounded by fields and forest, birds and wildlife, seemingly far from the stresses and cares of work and society, but with all the modern conveniences, access to services, and connections to the city that modern life seems to require. These promises of simultaneous connection with nature and with the city are ones that the landscapes of exurbia seem to make. On one hand, North American culture sustains the dream of owning a home outside the city; on the other, sprawl symbolizes urbanization gone awry on a number of social, cultural, philosophical, environmental, and even ethical levels. Despite the centrality of this paradoxical promised experience of exurban landscape to debates around planning and the future of contemporary city-regions, the experience of landscape and exurban landscape expectations are seriously understudied and underacknowledged in planning discourse.

As the most sprawling form of settlement in North America, the exurbs are logically the target of urban planning policies against sprawl. Yet sprawl is the specter against which the exurbs themselves are conceived. The idea of sprawl as a scourge on the landscape that needs to be stopped is at odds with the ideals of a nature that is imagined to be found only outside of the city—ideals that motivate choices about where to live. The incursion of homes and infrastructure into farmland, rangeland, forests, or mountains can be seen in many places, often prompting the perception that the scenic countryside is no longer as boundless as it once was, and uneasiness about the finite nature of areas not developed for urban uses. Planners and decision-makers have responded by devising and implementing “smart growth” policies, and by promoting “new urbanism”—encouraging compact, mixed-use urban areas, intensification of existing urban areas, and the development of walkable and transit-oriented communities to reduce reliance on the automobile—all of which are supposed to preserve he environment at the city’s edge by limiting the acres of countryside needed for urbanization.

In spite of efforts in communities across North America, urban growth has not been contained, and recent studies have concluded that growth outside of existing metropolitan areas is increasing, not decreasing as planners would like.² In this book, we explore the effect of the ideology of nature on residential settlement patterns as an understudied cause of sprawl. Normative definitions of sprawl, smart growth, and “good” planning policy tend not to consider the important role that landscape ideology plays in the kind of decision making that leads to exurbanization. Instead, they are based on theories and models of settlement that do not engage with the complexities of motivation and behavior. In spite of the attractiveness of nature imagined in the idealized countryside, urban planning definitions and spatial policies often do not capture the public imagination when it comes to making choices about where and how to live. This disconnect between public policy and household-level action leads to significant problems in negotiating in broader society what should be done in response to the challenges of urban growth. Landscape approaches may help address these land-use management problems: people seem to know about and have a lot more to say about their experience of landscape and of what they expect landscapes to include and to provide than they do about “environmental process” or planning requirements. This makes landscape a useful and promising bridge between people’s experience and the kind of participation in discourse expected in collaborative environmental management processes.

Understanding how influential the lure of nature is in the reproduction of exurban landscapes enables a new view of the problem of sprawl. Sprawl is not merely about poor land-use planning or making the wrong infrastructure decisions, but is a major symptom of a societal understanding of modern urban landscapes focused on perceptions of lightning speed and immediacy, crowding and uncertainty, and loss of connection to nature. A central theme of society-environment scholarship over the past three decades is the idealization of nature as an effect of modernity on contemporary urban society. Much of this scholarship suggests convincingly that the distancing from nature within everyday life in the city results in the desire for the protection of a pristine nature, that allows one to escape the city, but that has the effect of further distancing nature instead of bringing it into everyday life.³

For one thing, the idea of nature, at least in modern Western culture, usually means an idea of an authentic physical world without human intervention.⁴ The desirability of such nature is often not questioned. Critics of such a “naturalized” nature point out, however, the problematic ways that nature is used to motivate consumption, entrench social injustice, and falsely construct a world view where nature is at its best only where humans are excluded, or perhaps more accurately, only where other humans are excluded. Within the discipline of human geography, particularly, the concept of nature has been the subject of much analysis and discussion. The main thrust of the discussion considers the way that nature is socially constructed and the importance of understanding how society imagines and, as a result, behaves toward (or, rather, within) the natural world. Much discussion has taken place about how the social construction of nature produces particular kinds of space that are organized in large part by particular ideologies, spaces such as national wilderness parks—and the city itself.⁵ Our interest is in extending this discussion about the ideology of nature to thinking about sprawl. Our focus is on the way that the ideology of nature motivates the people and institutional actors who produce and maintain the landscapes that constitute sprawl, exemplified by exurbia. The chapters concentrate on actions and work motivated by natural ideals, and on the embodiments of those ideals in material landscapes. Nature, as a theme, is itself naturalized in exurbia, as part of the tendency to respond to aversive aspects of the modern humanized city via recourse to an appealing, if unconsidered, nature. Many North Americans sympathetic to the environment are familiar with the sentiment, at least, of Henry David Thoreau’s commonly repeated phrase “In Wildness is the preservation of the world.”⁶ Usually used to emphasize the need for preservation of literal wilderness, rather than cultural wildness, this phrase’s play with literal and literary nature helps make more apparent the experiences and politics bound up in the multiple and competing expectations associated with nature.

The material form that the idealization of nature takes can be understood by examining the way that people escape from the city to nature as a major component of sprawl. This focus also highlights the kinds of decisions that people make in their everyday lives in relation to that idealization of nature—decisions that have very material effects on the landscape. Seen through the lens of a green and peaceful landscape, exurbia has a lot of popular appeal; understanding exurbia as a cultural landscape might help people concerned with sprawl figure out how to popularize their analyses of the problems of exurbia and sprawl, particularly those related to social and environmental themes. Understanding the influence of nature in the cultural landscape of exurbia may help to link public concerns with professional and academic planners’ thinking about sprawl in a way that helpfully addresses the feeling that much North American urban containment is, at best, a parody. Even when urban boundaries are considered successful within their jurisdictional boundaries, sprawl often continues in the less regulated county next door. As many North American communities struggle to figure out how to reconcile urban dispersion with environmental and social (especially servicing) impacts, a productive space for discussion of these issues may be opened by considering the influence of the ideology of nature.

Beyond addressing the obvious paradox of continued conventional patterns of urban dispersion despite conventional concerns about sprawl, understanding the ideology of nature may also help address the obstacles faced by land-use planners and decision-makers, obstacles presented by fear and avoidance of significant contemporary social problems related to urbanization. Urban growth is complex and answers to problems of climate change, income disparity, and racism are not going to be definitively solved in the land-use planning process; after all, sprawl is a “wicked” problem.⁷ Although natural landscapes may provide aesthetic buffers, the social and spatial challenges and diffi culties of living a modern life (as discussed in Chapters 4 [Blum], 5 [Donahue], and 9 [Looker]) are as present today as they were in the early nineteenth century when Thoreau and his contemporaries were dealing with the specter of the early trains’ effects on their rural residential environments. Popular discomfort with modern urban life is arguably worse, not better, today. Despite improvements in the material environments of the urban global North, the cumulative effects of traffi c, air and water pollution, noise, and financialization have fanned alarmist strands of anti-urbanism. Anti-urban se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Sprawl and the Ideology of Nature
• 2 Bridges in the Cultural Landscape: Crossing Nature in Exurbia
• 3 Exurbia Meets Nature: Environmental Ideals for a Rootless Society
• 4 Airworld, the Genius Loci of Exurbia
• 5 Rewilding Walden Woods and Reworking Exurban Woodlands: Higher Uses in Thoreau Country
• 6 Sojourning in Nature: The Second-Home Exurban Landscapes of Ontario's Near North
• 7 Design and Conservation in Québec's Rural-Urban Fringe: The Case of Lac-Beauport
• 8 Time, Place, and Structure: Typo-Morphological Analysis of Three Calgary Neighborhoods
• 9 The Imagined Landscape: Language, Metaphor, and the Environmental Movement
• 10 The Mortality of Trees in Exurbia's Pastoral Modernity: Challenging Conservation Practices to Move beyond Deferring Dialogue about the Meanings and Values of Environments
• Editors' Epilogue: An Agenda for Addressing Green Sprawl
• Contributors
• Index