Crossing the Expendable Landscape

“Crossing the Expendable Landscape is a wise and often witty set of essays dealing with the American cultural landscape, the physical forms of our cities and towns, the unstated assumptions built into our housing patterns and public life. As she takes the reader around the country, Drew reveals losses and creativities at work in complex places, both old and new. In Stamford, Connecticut, a nineteenth century “Lock City,” target of urban renewal, and now a pedestrian nightmare, she walks, or tries to. In Celebration, Florida, an uncompleted new town, she interviews Disney’s bland imagineers. At Hilton Head, she finds street signs etched in twenty-four carat gold. She’s been to Las Vegas and Dallas. Both general readers and specialists in architecture, planning, and American Studies will enjoy this book.” —Dolores Hayden, Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies, Yale University, author of The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History

“This is a lively book, leavening moral indignation with cool appraisal. It is a frightening book too, in terms of American democracy. The horrors of Stamford and the complacent rot of Hilton Head are no joke. Bettina Drew does not hesitate to denounce these things, and she begins at least to value the attempts of The New Urbanism to change them.” —Vincent Scully