City Dreams, Country Schemes

Community and Identity in the American West

Kathleen A. Brosnan, Amy L. Scott, Kathleen A. Brosnan, Amy L. Scott

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780874178647
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

The American West, from the beginning of Euro-American settlement, has been shaped by diverse ideas about how to utilize physical space and natural environments to create cohesive, sometimes exclusive community identities. When westerners developed their towns, they constructed spaces and cultural identities that reflected alternative understandings of modern urbanity. The essays in City Dreams, Country Schemes utilize an interdisciplinary approach to explore the ways that westerners conceptualized, built, and inhabited urban, suburban, and exurban spaces in the twentieth century.

The contributors examine such topics as the attractions of open space and rural gentrification in shaping urban development; the role of tourism in developing national parks, historical sites, and California's Napa Valley; and the roles of public art, gender, and ethnicity in shaping urban centers. City Dreams, CountrySchemes reveals the values and expectations that have shaped the West and the lives of the people who inhabit it.

Part I

THE METROPOLITAN RETREAT TO THE ECO-URBAN

In the twentieth century community development in the West was often a synthetic response aimed at balancing residents' desires for culturally rich urban living, stable community life, and access to nature. In Irvine, California, as Stephanie Kolberg explains, planners rejected the chaotic sprawl that defined Greater Los Angeles. Inspired by Ebenezer Howard's garden-city model, Irvine's master planner, William Pereira, organized the city around multiple centers, or villages, which included residences, schools, and small shopping venues. Like many of the earlier utopian efforts described by Findlay, Irvine required a top-down plan that detailed land uses and architectural styles. Although the master-planned community afforded middle-class consumers access to the leisure-based lifestyle of Southern California, Kolberg concludes that the company's quest to provide residents with familiarity, order, and security resulted in racial and class exclusivity.

Boulder, Colorado, another university city, traces its origins to the nineteenth-century Colorado gold rush. Boulder's early planning history was marked by the mutual desire of boosters and environmental preservationists to protect and capitalize on the natural beauty of nearby forests and mountains. As Amy Scott describes, a grassroots movement emerged after World War II to control urban expansion through the preservation of open space. While activists simultaneously tried to protect an urban way of life that was defined by interactions with the natural environs, they developed an ecological planning tradition in Boulder. In both Irvine and Boulder, planners and residents acknowledged the connections among the urban economy, the environment, and postindustrial, leisure-centered consumer lifestyles. In these university towns, planning, both at the corporate level and through public activism, has played a significant role in shaping the cityscape and the communities that emerged.

Westerners increasingly exploded the traditional triumvirate of city, suburb, and country, hoping to create urban spaces that embodied the most desired characteristics of all three community models. In these efforts to create new urban forms suited to the region, nature became, as Matt Klingle observes, “an instrument to define and enforce the idea of community.” After World War II developers built exurban community clusters on unincorporated land in the foothills and ridges near Park City, Utah, and Missoula, Montana, attracting middle- and upper-class migrants from the nation's larger cities. These migrants were not content with temporary scenic grandeur; rather, as essays by Lincoln Bramwell and Rina Ghose demonstrate, they expected permanent suburban amenities in the wilderness. Bramwell's essay discusses the emergence of “wilderburbs,” privately financed clusters of homes in the rural valleys and along the mountain slopes of the Rocky Mountain West. Wilderburbs are neither wild nor suburban, but instead offer residents an opportunity to be closer to nature while enjoying the security and cultural amenities associated with cities. As Ghose demonstrates, the Rocky Mountain region has experienced significant urban and suburban population growth in the past decade, caused mainly by in-migration, which has changed the region's land use, housing, resource allocation, economy, and public policies. Focusing on recent migration to Missoula, Montana, Ghose analyzes the demographic characteristics and migration motivations of newcomers, arguing that the consumption patterns of middle-class amenity migrants have resulted in increasingly rural gentrification in western Montana. With rising housing prices and a new emphasis on social amenities, powerful new expressions of localism and self-interest reshaped community and landscape in the Rocky Mountains. Bramwell and Ghose reveal the economic and environmental limitations that occurred as the lines between country and city were blurred. “Place making,” as Matt Klingle writes, “is neither disinterested nor innocent.”¹

Note

1. Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), xii, 4.

Crafting the Good Life in Irvine, California

STEPHANIE KOLBERG

Amid the seemingly undifferentiated post–World War II sprawl of Southern California, a private company put forth plans for a brave new city, plans that aimed to foster a heightened sense of community through “village life” and through the integrated presence of nature. The new city would provide a respite from the perceived monotony of the faceless Southern California suburb by blending architectural diversity, extensive greenery and open space, and differentiated neighborhood centers, culminating in a master-planned California Dream land for the contemporary consumer. Carefully landscaped pods of industry and commerce would dot the city, and the unique personalities of each neighborhood would inspire feelings of belonging and security not thought possible in the larger, more disconnected metropolis. The entire city was to be developed under the aegis of a single entity, the Irvine Company, which offered to impart a more centralized method of development than the piecemeal approaches found in other parts of the region. Through a model that offered a unified design of neighborhood differentiation, and by utilizing marketing imagery that promised cohesion and balance, Irvine's community builders wove their own version of the new twentieth-century city, a city banking on the allure of a tidily planned future in the face of mid-twentieth-century disaffection and alienation.¹ The American habit of “starting over” had, yet again, been simply too hard to resist.

Given the long tradition of antiurbanism in the United States, and coming on the heels of postwar suburban discontent, Irvine's plan appeared poised to provide (upper-middle-class) Americans with the kind of city they had been tacitly asking for for decades: a quiet, “tasteful” landscape designed to minimize conflict and maximize comfort, privately financed by a corporation in order to lower uncertainty.² This chapter will examine the transformation of Irvine as it evolved from frontier ranch lands to future-oriented new city and will explore those promotional images of Irvine that forged its initial mediated identity. The discussion will conclude with a current look at one of the key recreationally oriented Irvine villages—the Village of Woodbridge. From the selection of Irvine in 1959 as a site for a new University of California (UC) campus to the first few years following its incorporation in 1971, the narrative of the new city evokes the stubbornly persistent garden-city ideal that is forever reemerging from the wastelands of the steel and concrete metropolis—or, in this case, from the threat of the “faceless, shapeless everything-in-a-row suburbs.” With the new city of Irvine, once slated to become “the largest planned city on the North American Continent,” the suburban dream could emerge triumphant, this time stocked with many of the accoutrements of a full-scale city.³

Whereas some have viewed master-planned communities as attempts to retreat from modern life, Irvine's marketers frequently touted the advantages of modernity and the progressive nature of development, as the new city was to utilize the best-available tools of contemporary society in order to create a more nature-infused, rational order.⁴ In this way, Irvine's marketed narrative embodies the apex of the modernist creed: an unwavering faith in large-scale order and rationality, with a premium placed on comfort and smooth efficiency. Although occasionally drawing from Irvine's ranching past to create a sense of continuity and intrigue, Irvine's image makers had to convince consumers that their “city of the future” would be a bourgeois paradise in which comfort, cultivated nature, and exaltation of “the plan” would culminate in an island of calm amid the Southern California population barrage. The story of Irvine's marketed image is the apotheosis of a California Dream that exalted consumer pleasures and a recreationally themed lifestyle, all wrapped up in a tidy city of familiars, the city as product, a story that, in a way, embodies antimodernist fears of an increasingly comfort-obsessed public.⁵

From Feedlots to Swimming Pools

The master-planned city of Irvine, California, gained its roots in agricultural beginnings when, in 1864, James Irvine and partners purchased the land that was to become the Irvine Ranch. The original 120,000-acre swath of land (now 93,000 acres) forty miles south of Los Angeles was composed of Spanish and Mexican land grants that included Rancho San Joaquin, Rancho Lomas de Santiago, and a portion of Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana.⁶ In 1876 Irvine bought out his partners to become the sole owner of the ranch and ultimately shifted the land use from sheep grazing to cattle raising. Upon Irvine's death in 1886, his son, James Irvine II, inherited the ranch, and with the establishment of the new County of Orange in 1891, Irvine II formed the Irvine Company in 1894 as a cohesive body to manage ranch operations. The ranch then took an agricultural turn as it moved into the cultivation of corn, beans, and barley and eventually entered the citrus market in the 1910s and 1920s.⁷

James Irvine II formed the James Irvine Foundation in 1937 in order to keep the ranch lands together.⁸ When Irvine II died in 1947, he left control of the Irvine Company to the foundation, and his son, Myford Irvine, became the president of the Irvine Company. Because of mounting pressures to urbanize, Myford developed several housing enclaves on the ranch lands, complete with community centers and other recreational facilities. The booming Orange County population, which grew from 220,000 in 1950 to 704,000 in 1960, put increasing pressure on the Irvine Company to develop its land. In addition to this massive population influx, the wheels of urbanization had further accelerated when the University of California regents selected Irvine as the site for a new UC campus in 1959.

The regents enlisted the help of renowned architect William Pereira in selecting the site for the future university. Not only was Pereira an accomplished architect, but he also had a keen interest in the workings and design of cities. Based on Pereira's recommendation, the UC regents selected Irvine for the new campus because its vast undeveloped space presented a chance to build an entirely new community around the university.⁹ Once the site was confirmed, the Irvine Company gifted one thousand acres to the new university, and the school subsequently purchased an additional five hundred adjoining acres.

Commissioned to develop the master plan for the new university and its surroundings, Pereira, in 1960, revealed his plan for “a university-oriented community to be organized along the lines of the venerable garden-city model.”¹⁰ Englishman Ebenezer Howard first proposed the garden-city model in his 1898 book To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. Howard's plan was to combine the best features of the town and the country by incorporating a series of small, dense villages separated by green space and grouped around a vibrant, urban center. As Lewis Mumford noted, “The Garden City, as Howard defined it, is not a suburb but the antithesis of a suburb; not a mere rural retreat, but a more integrated foundation for an effective urban life.”¹¹ Similarly, Pereira's plan for Irvine was for a fully functioning new city—a city interconnected with the larger region, but definitely not a bedroom-community suburb.

Pereira was far from the first to adapt elements of Howard's garden-city plan, and that model is in fact seen as one of the strongest influencers of American suburban design. The greenbelt towns of the 1930s Resettlement Administration were among the first American developments influenced by Howard's model, and in the 1960s American developers—some funded by the government—again turned to the garden-city model in search of a palliative to the growing urban crisis and proliferating sense of suburban ennui, leading to the development of a string of “New Towns.” Of the government-funded New Towns of the 1960s and 1970s, only the Woodlands, just outside of Houston, Texas, continues to thrive today. The most well known of the New Towns—Reston, Virginia, and Columbia, Maryland—were both privately financed.

In paralleling the New Town project of creating entirely new cities, Pereira originally conceived of Irvine as a ten thousand–acre university-centered town, with a proposed population of one hundred thousand. The resulting community was, in Pereira's words, to embody “a real link between town and gown, a place intimately connected with the center of learning.” The new community would resemble classic American and European college towns and was to have an intimate pedestrian-oriented design with densely grouped offices, shops, residences, and restaurants situated near the campus. “These communities will not be dominated by the auto,” explained Pereira. “They will be walking communities where women can stroll to the shops with their children just as their grandmothers did.” Pereira's desire for a walking community can be seen as a revolt against the environmental degradation that had resulted from the proliferating car centrism of late-1950s Southern California.¹²

Pereira's Irvine plan was also informed by alternate models of urbanism, as Pereira had spent a great deal of time analyzing what worked best in the great cities of the world, though, referring back to an American model, he noted that his plan was intended to “revitalize the basic meaning of a community, somewhat on the pattern of a colonial New England town with political and civic interests taking the place of religious ties.” The Irvine Company embraced Pereira's design and, believing the entirety of the Irvine Ranch would ultimately be developed in the future, commissioned him to draw up a plan for the rest of the Irvine Ranch. The Irvine Ranch plan allowed Pereira to integrate his many ideas of what the ideal city should look like, and it has been reported that the master plan for Irvine became Pereira's favorite project.¹³

With a comprehensive plan in place, the Irvine Ranch barreled forward along the road to urbanization, and in 1965 UC-Irvine (UCI) opened, as did its adjoining residential center, University Park Village. The village of Turtle Rock was completed in 1967, and in 1968 University Park Center became Irvine's first neighborhood retail hub.¹⁴ Bolstered by California's burgeoning cold war defense industry, Irvine had, by the 1960s, attracted an array of aerospace and electronics research firms, creating a large high-tech income base for the amenity-rich new city. The area's rapid rise to prosperity and the recreationally themed lifestyle that followed led some to view the new city as an almost impossibly idyllic and successful example of new community design. As former Irvine official Charles E. Thomas said of the embryonic city in 1964: “[It] is the kind of place that people have only been able to dream about up until now…. Picture a community where children can walk to school without ever crossing a street, where a family can walk barefooted over lawns to their neighborhood swimming pool. Picture a community where a man with a low-medium income can live in an apartment building overlooking a golf course.”¹⁵ Such utopian language betrays an ambitious and distinct vision for the new city, a vision that placed a premium on a sense of security made possible by a carefully laid plan unfolding against a backdrop of meticulously manicured nature. This new dream city, which had been slated as a massive experiment in community design, would craft an image steeped in Edenic simplicity and, in this example at least, the promise of the California Dream for all.

Countless commentators expressed a vast sense of hope toward the new community, and in a 1967 article titled “The Making of a City,” author Myron Roberts described Irvine as representing the dawn of a great Southern California cultural jackpot. “If this were the time of the Renaissance,” ventured Roberts, “and California were Italy, one could predict—without much exaggeration—that very soon the Irvine Ranch will be a city as rich as Genoa, as well educated as Florence, as luxurious as Venice.” The careful planning of Irvine would presumably prevent the haphazard growth embodied by other California cities: “Thus, hopefully, Irvine will not be merely another clean, comfortable California suburb where people can enjoy their swimming poo...