Product Description

America's cities are being rapidly transformed by a sinister and homogenous design. A new Kind of urbanism--manipulative, dispersed, and hostile to traditional public space--is emerging both at the heart and at the edge of town in megamalls, corporate enclaves, gentrified zones, and psuedo-historic marketplaces. If anything can be described as a paradigm for these places, it's the theme park, an apparently benign environment in which all is structured to achieve maximum control and in which the idea of authentic interaction among citizens has been thoroughly purged. In this bold collection, eight of our leading urbanists and architectural critics explore the emblematic sites of this new cityscape--from Silicon Valley to Epcot Center, South Street Seaport to downtown Los Angeles--and reveal their disturbing implications for American public life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #228779 in Books
• Published on: 1992-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 252 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Eight essays by architects and academics criticize as elitist and alienating such contemporary urban and extra-urban phenomena as mega-malls, historical re-creations and gentrification. Margaret Crawford uses Canada's West Edmonton Mall as a paradigm of the consumption-oriented pleasure dome. Langdon Winner offers a chilling analysis of Silicon Valley ("a vast suburb with no central city to give it meaning"), while Neil Smith discusses the greed and injustices that accompany the gentrification of New York's Lower East Side. And M. Christine Boyer dissects New York's South Street Seaport as an example of "historicized, commodifed, and privatized places." Nearly all the writers take easy aim at yuppies, as both perpetrators of inequality and victims of consumerist illusions, who care little about the poor and homeless excluded from these havens of affluence. In much softer focus, though, are the governments that have so tragically failed our cities. This bias detracts from an overall thought-provoking collection on our urban malaise. Sorkin is former architecture critic of the Village Voice.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This book offers eight leading architectural critics' views of the sameness that invades our public architecture and public space. Whether we live in California or Boston, shopping malls, office complexes, and other forms of construction offer, according to these essays, an astounding lack of individuality. What does this say about us, the recipients of and dwellers in these spaces? What does it say about our cultural differences that are being sacrificed? Cases in point are given: Montreal's Place Ville Marie, Manhattan's Lower East Side, Houston's The Gallerie shopping center, and others illustrate the placelessness of architecture today. Good reading. For public and special collections.
- Carol Spielman Lezak, General Learning Corp., Northbrook, Ill.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
What's in store for American cities? The eight authors of the essays written for this powerful cautionary volume have seen the future--and it's worse than you think. According to project-leader Sorkin, the Disney theme parks have been insidious models for today's alarmingly sanitized, security-obsessed, simulated places. Margaret Crawford (Southern California Institute of Architecture) describes the world's largest shopping mall in Edmonton, Alberta, a prime example of the prevailing controlled-fantasy urbanism; though the wares duplicate those sold in other malls, the mall's theme-settings purport to bring the world, in a developer's words, ``all here for you in one place.'' Edward W. Soja (Urban Planning/UCLA) examines the hyperreal exopolis of Orange County, where people work, play, live, shop, and attend college in artificial ``total environments'' that simulate themselves when not simulating somewhere else. Langden Winner (Political Theory/Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) looks at California's Silicon Valley as a socially parasitic work-centered community without a physical center. Neil Smith (Geography/Rutgers) shows how the real-estate and art industries employ a frontier metaphor to justify their, to him, disruptive gentrification of N.Y.C.'s Lower East Side. All these contrived environments, the authors find, work to exclude the variety, spontaneity, grit--and less-privileged people--found in real cities, as do the other phenomena considered here: the parallel noncities built under Montreal and (in bridges between high buildings) over Calgary, Minneapolis, and elsewhere; the high walls and police barricades of L.A.; the historic tableau of N.Y.C.'s South Street Seaport; and the fast-growing and truly placeless electronic city of computerland. It all adds up to a trend that, as surveyed in this wide- angled collection--which offers a more penetrating view than did Joel Garreau's Edge City (p. 837)--seems disturbingly pervasive. The corrective, though, may not be to have more humane architecture or pedestrian pathways that rub middle-class noses in urban filth, poverty, misery, and violence--but to address these miseries directly. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

The Critics' Contempt for Simulated Spaces
This is a very thoughtful and provocative collection of eight essays on various simulated spaces which have infiltrated the American landscape. The book's overall thesis is that public space and "authentic" urban life increasingly has been replaced by simulations of urban life, usually as spaces of commodification (e.g. malls, gentrified districts, theme parks). In this process of replacing public space, aspects of American public life--open space for assembly, the interaction of different people, concern for communities--also get erased. While simulated spaces may seem to improve public space and public life, they do so at a cost, one that the critics seem to suggest is the loss of real public space and perhaps even of democracy.

The purpose of this book is not only to describe these spaces, but to oppose them. Each of the authors point to the negative effects of simulated space. In many cases, the essays' implications jump right out of the page and into your neighborhood. Margaret Crawford's essay on the Edmonton shopping mall could be applied to any mall in Anytown, USA. Neil Smith's essay on gentrification points out the high price that comes with "revitalization"; one is reminded of many similiar projects outside his NYC example: Philadelphia, Detroit, Seattle,and so forth. Edward Soja and Trevor Boddy both contribute well-written essays which demonstrate growing chasm between the "haves" and the "have-nots." With these essays, extended and local comparisons with dying urban areas and suburbia, sprawl, gated communities, and so forth are appropriate. Michael Sorkin's own essay on Disneyland turns a well-wrought phrase, and gives the Disney Studies scholar much to think about. (NOTE: Those interested in Disney should read this article if nothing else in the collection, although many of the essays are applicable to the study of Disney.) Of the essays, it is perhaps the one least obviously applicable to "real" life. But then again, Sorkin notes the distance between the simulated environment of the theme park and the reality of the city is decreasing.

Of course, the scholars' analyses are dark and even depressing. And more than once, the authors manage to sound like angry young critics filled with more agenda than action. More than once, extended discussion of the issues raised in the essays would have helped--although many of these authors do have full-length treatments elsewhere--or perhaps alternative perspectives which would have varied the collection's tone and helped sustain readers' interest. And like any collection some of the essays are stronger than others. Overall, though, the collection makes a reader stop and think. Many readers will end up carefully reconsidering 1) the state of American life and its public space and 2) one's participation in these developments. Variations deserves recognition for addressing these issues.

Very comprehensive
This book enlists many different authors, who all have an amazing point of view on the built environment. From gated communities to Disneyland, every chapter expresses concerns of fast-changing developed environments. Our cities are quickly becoming cold, enclosed enclaves. This book helped me realize how our society has snubbed the utilizaton of public space. This is definitely a book for every person interested in city planning, urban studies,or sociology. Whether a student or leisure reader, this book will open your minds to what is really taking place in our cities, suburbs, resorts, and recreational facilities. Any place in which society is forced to interact with one another is referred to in "Variations on a Theme Park". Read it. It will open your mind!