A Field Guide to Sprawl.(Book Review)

A Field Guide to Sprawl. Dolores Hayden. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.

A Field Guide to Sprawl is one of those rare books that is much deeper than it appears on the surface. Dolores Hayden, who teaches architecture and American studies at Yale University, whimsically riffs off the popular Peterson field guide series devoted to the natural world, but Jim Wark's aerial photographs and Hayden's terse but biting commentary force us to take a deep look at the unnatural world constructed by American developers, realtors, and human inhabitants.

The book's structure is equally deceptive, a seemingly straightforward A-to-Z dictionary format in which each entry is accompanied by one of Wark's photos. Some of her comments are humorous. "Put parsley round the pig," for example, is the term for "landscaping a bad spot or bad project" (86), and comes illustrated with a photo of garish purple flower beds attempting to hide that a poorly designed Palm Desert golf course is in fact an artificial verdant swath in a hellishly hot section of California. Moreover, who can resist her delicious term for billboards, "litter on a stick" (58)? She is equally snarky when informing us that a "tract mansion" is also nicknamed a "twenty-minute house," a handle coined by realtors who show these ostentatious but often poorly constructed super-sized homes quickly so that they can close the sale with social-climbing clients more interested in status than quality or taste.

Common folks also wither under Hayden's steely gaze. The plebian masses contribute to sprawl and deteriorating life quality by allowing "big box" (24) stores to get zoning permits, then shopping at "category killer" (30) monopolies that destroy their downtowns. Overreliance on the automobile creates "car glut" (28), auto graveyards, leads ...