Product Description

James and Nancy Duncan look at how the aesthetics of physical landscapes are fully enmeshed in producing the American class system. Focusing on an archetypal upper class American suburb--Bedford in Westchester County, NY--they show how the physical presentation of a place carries with it a range of markers of inclusion and exclusion.
Genuinely innovative, Landscapes of Privilege is one of the first books to apply critical landscape theory to the social production of American elites.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #126676 in eBooks
• Published on: 2007-03-14
• Released on: 2007-03-14
• Format: Kindle Book
• Number of items: 1

Review
...the authors support a well-framed, strong central arguement with abundant empirical evidence in a clearly organized format and with engaging, eloquent text. It is worth careful reading and reflection..
–Journal of Cultural Geography, Kelly S, Draper, University of Colorado

I think that this book will make quite a stir: not just in the suburb under study...but in the wider academic community where its transcendence.will generate much commentary and not a little jealousy.
–John Agnew, author of Geopolitics (Routledge)

Studying elites is an interesting subject, and this book makes the most of the topic using critical landscape theory..
No.1, Vol.71; Pg.105
–Journal of the American Planning Association-Landscape of Privilege: The Politic of the Aesthetics in an American Suburb, January 1, 2005

About the Author
James Duncan is a University Lecturer in Geography at Cambridge University, and Nancy Duncan is Affiliated Lecturer of Geography at Cambridge University.

Customer Reviews

Great Exposition on Politics, Class, Place, and Identity
In this book, Nancy and James Duncan probe deeply into the landscape of the affluent town of Bedford Village, New York to expose its role in the production and "performance" of the townspeople's identity and the attendant social ramifications. The authors assert that class and status are at the heart of a series of struggles for control of Bedford Village's landscape. By insisting upon the retention of a particular aesthetic for the town, enforced through laws, zoning, advisory boards, and social pressure, the people of Bedford Village are for the most part able to successfully cloak class, race, and power struggles in aesthetic terms that are less volatile and seemingly apolitical. By this they manage to create and sustain a place-based identity that isn't always savory, although--and this is an important point--this would surprise the residents of Bedford as much as it would surprise many others who took such a hard look at where and how they live.

The Duncans rightly place class at the center of Bedford's issues and, with almost equal force, money. This seems right as it pertains to Bedford, where houses cost up to millions of dollars and yet where there are long-time residents who, while living much more modestly, engage just as strenuously in the pressure to sustain the particular pastoral character of the town's landscape. But maintaining the "look" of the land masks other issues. In Chapter Two the Duncans assert that "[i]n capitalist societies...where identity is linked to possessions, the aesthetic often plays an important role in depoliticizing class relations" (p. 25). The residents of Bedford cling tightly to a vision of their town as a rural, historic, Colonial town and landscape, drawing from it all the symbolic force of the New England Village (cf Meinig) from which they claim to descend and using it as the primary locus and signifier of their identity. They resist at nearly every turn the pressures of development and modernization while taking full advantage of the amenities of the modern world just beyond the borders. To a great extent Bedford Village still looks rural, still has its pastoral charm and its romantic vistas. It even has dirt roads (maintained at great expense). This is (of course/ironically) what makes Bedford the perfect place to live. Its perfection _for a certain category of people_ is confirmed in the language of the real estate ads that amount to coded appeals to Anglo sensibilities, 19th-century English nostalgia, and an invented historicism. In sum, the web of issues that surround the production and sustenance of Bedford's landscape constitutes an aestheticized view of the world and is so powerful and pervasive it seems simply natural, without malice, "uncontestable" (p. ? --sorry).

When class relations are centered on aesthetics, other consequences that reach into arenas beyond landscape and beyond the town are hidden even if they are unintended. Residents of Bedford frame the most important issues in terms of protecting the environment, protecting the rural character of the town, or protecting its historic structures, trees, and greenspaces; arguments typically accepted (here, in the U.S.) as benign, even noble. While the Duncans don't go so far as to say that they never are, it is fascinating to follow them as they probe how this framework obscures an inherent hegemony of class and, worse, can lead to a latent racism against "Guatemalans" in Chapter Eight. Bedford was largely built on exploited labor and is increasingly maintained by it, even if both facts are equally inadmissible to the dominant sensibility. Although "popping Bedford's bubble" wasn't the direct aim of the authors, by the end of the book I was convinced that nearly everything about Bedford was artificial in some way, the result of a complex interweaving of class and social forces that go mostly unnoticed. I especially like the authors' use of the term "performance" to describe the interplay of these forces and their materialization on and production through the landscape. It seems to strike squarely at how Bedford is more than just a place; it is the resulting effect of many individual "actors" including people, the land, the market, the immigrants, the history, the buildings, class relations, etc. In combination these constitute the thing that is "Bedford." In this way, every place is artificial (i.e., "denaturalized") if you want to think of it that way.

The Duncans write clearly and forcefully and for the most part, jargon-free. They strive (as professional geographers at Cambridge) to retain an objective viewpoint. This book is not meant to tattle or to reduce people to sets of selfish causes. I imagine other places could have served as well, but in this book Bedford Village is taken as a case study upon which to build the theoretical argument that aesthetic claims serve as convenient and effective codes for political and cultural issues.