Everything happening to America today is happening here, and it's far removed from the cookie-cutter suburbanization of life a generation ago. The Orlando region has become Exhibit A for the ascendant power of our cities' exurbs: blobby coalescences of look-alike, overnight, amoeba-like concentrations of population far from city centers. These huge, sprawling communities are where more and more Americans choose to be, the place where job growth is fastest, home building is briskest, and malls and megachurches are multiplying as newcomers keep on coming. Who are all these people? They're you, they're me, and increasingly, they are nothing like the blue-eyed "Dick and Jane" of mythical suburban America.
[snip]
All over Orlando you see forces at work that are changing America from Fairbanks to Little Rock. This, truly, is a 21st-century paradigm: It is growth built on consumption, not production; a society founded not on natural resources, but upon the dissipation of capital accumulated elsewhere; a place of infinite possibilities, somehow held together, to the extent it is held together at all, by a shared recognition of highway signs, brand names, TV shows, and personalities, rather than any shared history. Nowhere else is the juxtaposition of what America actually is and the conventional idea of what America should be more vivid and revealing.
Welcome to the theme-park nation.
The Geography of Nowhere. Shoot me now. Actually, the piece is neither critical nor celebratory, just a great collection of observations and reflections about Orlando, Walt Disney, and how both shape the landscape of contemporary American life. And it has the kind of quote journalists live for. Linda Chapin, a former county commissioner and an official largely responsible for turning the place into one giant strip mall, tries to stay positive, in that oh-so-American way: "Just because we've ruined 90 percent of everything doesn't mean we can't do wonderful things with the remaining ten percent!"
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James Kunstler's article on Las Vegas makes some interesting points about this: "Las Vegas - Utopia of Clowns" from "The City in Mind" http://www.kunstler.com/excerpt_lasvegas.html
Great article, Mark!
That was a good article, Matt. My husband and I have been to Vegas a couple of times and it just seemed so unreal (or maybe hyper-real). We were watching a travel show on PBS the other day and it was showing the Trevi Fountain in Rome. My comment was that it didn't even look real---there was probably a bigger, better one in Vegas or Disney World.
Not that that's a good thing...Just shows how my perceptions have been warped...
I only wish Kunstler weren't so crass with his "ClusterF" title. I can't forward the link to everyone that should be reading his stuff! Another interesting point Kunstler makes about Disneyland in one of his books ("Geography of Nowhere", I believe) is about the failure of the Parisian Disneyland. The urban environment of France (at least the part of it built before WWII) already has the quality, charm, and "community gravitas" that Disneyland strives so hard to emulate. Because American sprawl represents aesthetic and architectural poverty, some of us make our semi-yearly pilgrimage to Disnelyand for our fix of everything lacking in our environment.
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