The study of landscape and place has become an increasingly fertile realm of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. In this new book of essays, selected from presentations at the first annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Geography, scholars investigate the experiences and meanings that inscribe urban and suburban landscapes. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi bring philosophy and geography into a dialogue with a host of other disciplines to explore a fundamental dialectic: while our collective and personal activity modifies the landscape, in turn, the landscape modifies human identities, and social and environmental relations. Whether proposing a peripatetic politics, conducting a sociological analysis of building security systems, or critically examining the formation of New York City's municipal parks, each essay sheds distinctive light on this fascinating and engaging aspect of contemporary environmental studies.

In Suburban Alchemy: 1960s New Towns and the Transformation of the American Dream, Nicholas Dagen Bloom examines the "new town" movement of the 1960s, which sought to transform the physical and social environments of American suburbs by showing that idealism could be profitable. Bloom offers case studies of three of the movement's more famous examples -- Reston, Virginia; Columbia, Maryland; and Irvine, California -- to flesh out his historical account. In each case, innovative planners mixed land uses and housing types; refined architectural, graphic, and landscape design; offered well-defined village and town centers; and pioneered institutional planning. As Bloom demonstrates, these efforts did not uniformly succeed, and attempts to reshape community life through design notably faltered. However, despite frequent disappointments and compromises, the residents have kept the new town ideals alive for over four decades and produced a vital form of suburban community that is far more complicated and interesting than the early vision promoted by the town planners. Lively chapters illustrate efforts in local politics, civic spirit, social and racial integration, feminist innovations, and cultural sponsorship. Suburban Alchemy should be of interest to scholars of U.S. urban history, planning history, and community development, as well as the general reader interested in the development of alternative communities in the United States.

In this work, Paul Mattingly provides a model for understanding suburban development through his narrative history of Leonia, New Jersey, an early commuter suburb of New York City.

Suburbs deserve a better, more resilient future. June Williamson shows that suburbs aren't destined to remain filled with strip malls and excess parking lots; they can be reinvigorated through inventive design. Today, dead malls, aging office parks, and blighted apartment complexes are being retrofitted into walkable, sustainable communities. Williamson provides a broad vision of suburban reform based on the best schemes submitted in Long Island's highly successful "Build a Better Burb" competition. Many of the design ideas and plans operate at a regional scale, tackling systems such as transit, aquifer protection, and power generation. While some seek to fundamentally transform development patterns, others work with existing infrastructure to create mixed-use, shared networks. Designing Suburban Futures offers concrete but visionary strategies to take the sprawl out of suburbia, creating a vibrant new, suburban form.

Why do the cities of the late twentieth century look as they do? What values do their appearance express and enfold? Their sheer scale and the durability of their materials assure that our cities will inform future generations about our era, in the same way that gothic cathedrals and medieval squares tell us something of the Middle Ages. In the meantime, our urban landscapes can tell us much about ourselves. For E. C. Relph, the urban landscape must be envisioned as a total environment—not just streets and buildings but billboards and parking meters as well. The Modern Urban Landscape traces the developments since 1880 in architecture, technology, planning, and society that have formed the visual context of daily life. Each of these shaping influences is often viewed in isolation, but Relph surveys the ways in which they have operated independently to create what we see when we walk down a street, shop in a mall, or stare through a windshield on an expressway. Two sets of ideas and fashions, Relph argues, have had an especially important impact on urban landscapes in the twentieth century. An "internationalism" made possible by new building technologies and more rapid communications has replaced regional style and custom as the dominant feature of city appearance, while a firm belief in the merits of self-consciousness has imposed logical analysis and technical manipulation on such commonplace objects as curbstones and park benches. "As a result," writes Relph, "the modern urban landscape is both rationalized and artificial, which is another way of saying that it is intensely human."

Introduction: The new suburban history / Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue -- Marketing the free market : state intervention and the politics of prosperity in metropolitan America / David M.P. Freund -- Less than plessy : the inner city, suburbs, and state-sanctioned residential segregation in the age of Brown / Arnold R. Hirsch -- Uncovering the city in the suburb : Cold War politics, scientific elites, and high-tech spaces / Margaret Pugh O'Mara -- How hell moved from the city to the suburbs : urban scholars and changing perceptions of authentic community / Becky Nicolaides -- "The house I live in" : race, class, and African American suburban dreams in the postwar United States / Andrew Wiese -- "Socioeconomic integration" in the suburbs : from reactionary populism to class fairness in metropolitan Charlotte / Matthew D. Lassiter -- Prelude to the tax revolt : the politics of the "tax dollar" in postwar California / Robert O. Self -- Suburban growth and its discontents : the logic and limits of reform on the postwar Northeast corridor / Peter Siskind -- Reshaping the American dream : immigrants, ethnic minorities, and the politics of the new suburbs / Michael Jones-Correa -- The legal technology of exclusion in metropolitan America / Gerald Frug.

In the first book-length scholarly study of the San Fernando Valley--home to one-third of the population of Los Angeles--Laura R. Barraclough combines ambitious historical sweep with an on-theground investigation of contemporary life in this iconic western suburb. She is particularly intrigued by the Valley's many rural elements, such as dirt roads, tack-and-feed stores, horse-keeping districts, citrus groves, and movie ranches. Far from natural or undeveloped spaces, these rural characteristics are, she shows, the result of deliberate urbanplanning decisions that have shaped the Valley over the course of more than a hundred years. The Valley's entwined history of urban development and rural preservation has real ramifications today for patterns of racial and class inequality and especially for the evolving meaning of whiteness. Immersing herself in meetings of homeowners' associations, equestrian organizations, and redistricting committees, Barraclough uncovers the racial biases embedded in rhetoric about "open space" and "western heritage." The Valley's urban cowboys enjoy exclusive, semirural landscapes alongside the opportunities afforded by one of the world's largest cities. Despite this enviable position, they have at their disposal powerful articulations of both white victimization and, with little contradiction, color-blind politics.

How business appropriated the pastoral landscape, as seen in the corporate campus, the corporate estate, and the office park. By the end of the twentieth century, America's suburbs contained more office space than its central cities. Many of these corporate workplaces were surrounded, somewhat incongruously, by verdant vistas of broad lawns and leafy trees. In Pastoral Capitalism, Louise Mozingo describes the evolution of these central (but often ignored) features of postwar urbanism in the context of the modern capitalist enterprise. These new suburban corporate landscapes emerged from a historical moment when corporations reconceived their management structures, the city decentralized and dispersed into low-density, auto-dependent peripheries, and the pastoral—in the form of leafy residential suburbs—triumphed as an American ideal. Greenness, writes Mozingo, was associated with goodness, and pastoral capitalism appropriated the suburb's aesthetics and moral code. Like the lawn-proud suburban homeowner, corporations understood a pastoral landscape's capacity to communicate identity, status, and right-mindedness. Mozingo distinguishes among three forms of corporate landscapes—the corporate campus, the corporate estate, and the office park—and examines suburban corporate landscapes built and inhabited by such companies as Bell Labs, General Motors, Deere & Company, and Microsoft. She also considers the globalization of pastoral capitalism in Europe and the developing world including Singapore, India, and China. Mozingo argues that, even as it is proliferating, pastoral capitalism needs redesign, as do many of our metropolitan forms, for pressing social, cultural, political, and environmental reasons. Future transformations are impossible, however, unless we understand the past. Pastoral Capitalism offers an indispensible chapter in urban history, examining not only the design of corporate landscapes but also the economic, social, and cultural models that determined their form.

A brand-new collection of 32 case studies that further demonstrate the retrofitting of suburbia This amply-illustrated book, second in a series, documents how defunct shopping malls, parking lots, and the past century’s other obsolete suburban development patterns are being retrofitted to address current urgent challenges they weren’t designed for: improving public health, increasing resilience in the face of climate change, leveraging social capital for equity, supporting an aging society, competing for jobs, and disrupting automobile dependence. Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges provides summaries, data, and references on how these challenges manifest in suburbia and discussion of successful urban design strategies to address them in Part I. Part II documents how innovative design strategies are implemented in a range of northern American contexts and market conditions. From modest interventions with big ripple effects to ambitious do-overs, examples of redevelopment, reinhabitation, and regreening of changing suburban places from coast to coast are described in depth in 32 brand new case studies. Written by the authors of the highly influential Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs Demonstrates changes that can and already have been realized in suburbia by focusing on case studies of retrofitted suburban places Illustrated in full-color with photos, maps, plans, and diagrams Full of replicable lessons and creative responses to ongoing problems and potentials with conventional suburban form, Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges is an important book for students and professionals involved in urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, development, civil engineering, public health, public policy, and governance. Most of all, it is intended as a useful guide for anyone who seeks to inspire revitalization, justice, and shared prosperity in places they know and care about.

Definitions of urban entities and urban typologies are changing constantly to reflect the growing physical extent of cities and their hinterlands. These include suburbs, sprawl, edge cities, gated communities, conurbations and networks of places and such transformations cause conflict between central and peripheral areas at a range of spatial scales. This book explores the role of cities, their influence and the transformations they have undertaken in the recent past. Ways in which cities regenerate, how plans change, how they are governed and how they react to the economic realities of the day are all explored. Concepts such as polycentricity are explored to highlight the fact that cities are part of wider regions and the study of urban geography in the future needs to be cognisant of changing relationships within and between cities. Bringing together studies from around the world at different scales, from small town to megacity, this volume captures a snapshot of some of the changes in city centres, suburbs, and the wider urban region. In doing so, it provides a deeper understanding of the evolving form and function of cities and their associated peripheral regions as well as their impact on modern twenty-first century landscapes.