Study Questions: Week Ten: The Landscape of Suburbia, the Shopping Mall, the Theme Park, Historic Preservation, the New Urbanism, and Environmentalism

• Discuss the concept of the middle landscape in relation to the ethos of the pastoral.
• The appearance of the middle landscape is one in which historicity and modernity is fused. Describe these opposite but intertwined forces, relating how technology is obscured or made explicit in landscape and architectural design terms.
• Discuss the effect of the Highway Act of 1956 on the American landscape.
• Compare the interstate highways and the older parkways, which are allied with Benton MacKaye's concept of the "townless highway."
• What were the federal loan programs of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Veterans Administration (VA), and what effect did they have on post-World War II land development in America?
• Consumerism is a dominant social force in 20th- and 21st-century America. How has this been `translated into the appearance of the landscape?
• Focusing on the mass production and sales of cars after World War II, discuss the relationship of the new mobility and regional settlement patterns in America.
• Communications media constitute an important aspect of modern technology. Images of landscape can now be broadcast in various ways, and landscapes based on images of other locales, infused with narratives constituting concepts of place that are both real and imaginary, underlie a good deal of 20th-century landscape design and historic landscape preservation. Discuss.
• The relationship of photography to landscape has become an important one in at least three separate areas: documentation, mimesis, and outdoor advertising. Discuss.
• Analyze the evolution of the shopping center into the regional shopping mall.
• The so-called "malling of America" refers to more than merely the proliferation of shopping malls nation-wide. Discuss how the techniques of mall planners have been used in other contexts.
• Discuss the art of "imagineering" as developed by Walt Disney in terms of the creation of a new kind of middle landscape blending the nostalgically historical and fictional with modern technology.
• What is "forced perspective"? Discuss its application as a design strategy in Disney theme parks.
• Discuss the theme park as an experiential landscape space, comparing it to other kinds of experiential landscapes we have studied, such as the Japanese stroll garden, the 18th-century fermé ornée or estate park, and the 19th-century public park.
• Tourism motivates much of historic landscape preservation nowadays. Discuss the "theming" of place, drawing on several examples worldwide.
• Discuss the evolution of the middle landscape of suburbia into "Spread City," an evolutionary stage of urbanism some consider dystopian in contrast to the utopian visions of early 20th-century regional planners. What happens to the ethos of the pastoral, so strong a component historically in the American imagination, when "middle" becomes dominant over "center" and when it succeeds in annihilating "edge"?
• What is the landscape of leisure? Discuss some of the design forms that fall under this rubric.
• Discuss the post-industrial city in terms of its landscape.
• In Spread City, the system of mental mapping using familiar patterns of movement and local landmarks that is innate to human way-finding is assisted by other kinds of visual cueing based on the display of information in the environment. People grasp the metropolis in terms of message-laden corridors of movement through it. Discuss.
• Discuss the role of photography and digital technology today in fostering what we might term "simulocality," a conflation of virtual and real places within an individual's immediate range of perception and the real-time representation of other people, places, and events within the familiar realm of home and community. How does the plethora of virtual realities deployed by various media effect our perception of real local space and our relationship to the world around us?
• Consumer capitalism has brought many benefits and pleasures to Western societies along with the disquieting alterations of both wilderness and civilization. Discuss how the twin reactions of preservation and conservation have gained force within the context of this form of economy. Attempt to assess the successes and failures of these two movements.
• Discuss the preservation of American old towns as the gentrification of the countryside, a phenomenon stimulated by summer residents and well-to-do natives.
• Discuss the relationship of the New Urbanism to historic preservation.
• Discuss traditional neighborhood development (TND) and transit-oriented development (TOD) as New Urbanist planning strategies.
• Analyze the way in which the planners of New Urbanist communities use older design models based on the Suburban Picturesque and Beaux-Arts neoclassicism.
• Trace the way in which an environmental ethos and an alternate interpretation of the findings of science has exposed the limitations of human confidence in scientific technology. How has this contributed to a revisionist view of modernism?
• Discuss the work of Ian McHarg, Lawrence Halprin, and other landscape architects in terms of their response to issues of landscape conservation and preservation.