the disposable plane
The suburbs and exurbs are permanent destruction of both land and culture. There will be no re-building of the old landscapes, the ranches, farms, groves, swamps, and forests which were replaced by the rotting, cheaply-built stucco-boxes. They will become ghettos and dangerous wastelands and kudzu-covered shells. No land is disposable.
Unlike some other products, the collapse of the market for these overpriced houses will not be followed by a quick “correction” which will make everything right again. The investors who currently own the loans will not be willing to loose half or two-thirds of the value of mortgages which they were not responsible for selling to the homeowners in the first place. Home prices will rise so gradually, that the owners will not live to see the day that the purchase price is recovered. The contractors and real estate agents who built and sold these pieces of garbage were the only winners in this scam.
Now this is the modern and future landscape, geographically, economically and politically; not some ultra-urban, high-density abstraction of New York, Chicago, Berlin or Tokyo. The mega-city is the truth for some people, but certainly not most. The future for most Americans will be the unending expanse of polluted, low-density ghetto.
The problem in the United States has been that we treat land like a concept, an imaginary disposable plane, an infinite supply of ideas, a painting, or rather a collection of paintings that can always be expanded; there are always more canvases and sheets of paper to buy at the store on which we can just keep ruling and scribbling. In places like Europe people know their land is limited; they just have the one canvas to play with, so they don’t go wrecking large portions of it quite as often. One day we will see our land in this way, maybe not, either way we don’t currently treat it that way, only as zones of more or less monetary value. We have not yet completed our manifest destiny of paving over the continent.
Land is our one truly limited and irreplaceable resource. When we run out of oil and coal we may have alternative energy plans. There are no alternative land plans and no renewable land resources.
Helldorado
The first recorded instance of this clever portmanteau word was to describe the town of Tombstone by a late arrival to the gold rush who found himself a dishwasher instead of a wealthy prospector. I find it an apt description of a place to where so many people moved to escape the city that they brought the city with them; late arrivals to a pastoral exurban fantasy they themselves helped destroy in the very act of moving there. In an additional layer of irony, the ease with which they were able to purchase their ugly, faceless houses became the downfall of the American housing bubble in the late 00’s, kicking off the Great Recession to follow. The fantasy of the American dream became its own downfall, played out on the stage of some of Florida’s most scenic landscapes. Desire destroyed its object, so that the land is now placeless, an anywhere and nowhere, and the people who enjoy living in it are anyone and no one, content to have a safe place in which to park their SUV’s after a 90-minute commute from their jobs in the faraway urban center.
InProgress Magazine photos
The Deep Field opening was photographed for InProgress Magazine
