It does not take Joel Garreau or even David Brooks to see this for the caricature that it is; but analysis of more recent suburban development as a locus of identity and as a vector of more then mere retail power is beyond the scope of this review.
2.
The economic-geography literature on this subject is vast; a bearable survey of the field is Andrew E. G. Jonas and David Wilson, eds., The Urban Growth Machine: Critical Perspectives, Two Decades Later (Albany, 1999).
3.
Unfortunately, Hardwick does not discuss Victor Gruen's slightly earlier master plan for a built-from-scratch town in the Washington, D.C., suburbs.
4.
Given that Bloom shows that Rouse's motive force was his political beliefs, this book might be more profitably considered as part of the discourse on cold-war culture.
5.
Victor Gruen, Morris Lapidus, and other influential store designers of the 1940s also actively sought homogeneous Modernist solutions, which Lapidus called no less than a “truly national architectural expression” (quoted in Hardwick, p. 55).
6.
For his part, Gruen loudly lamented the fact that shopping centers came to be seen as only economic engines and investments, rather than as tools for social reorganization and the development of new forms of community (see Hardwick, p. 217).
7.
See Gruen's lecture “Cityscape and Landscape,” printed in Arts and Architecture, September 1955. Bloom memorably describes Rouse's intention to use festival marketplaces in the pursuit of this same ideal: “The festival marketplace thus became the Trojan horse of the suburban reentry into the center city” (p. 158).
8.
A representative sample of this narrow genre is Leonie Sandercock, Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities (New York , 1998).
9.
Gruen seemed to hold an especially strong belief in Americans' communal decorousness, with one early mall featuring a shoppers' lounge that was “equipped with fireplace, arm chairs, and tables, open for all shoppers for rest, recreation, and club activities” (p. 84).
10.
An important corrective can be found in “How to Get a Shopping-center Site for Nothing,” The Architectural Forum, March 1953.
11.
To judge from a boosterish history of the city, this was an affectionate nickname Fort Worth elites used for the city. Robert H. Talbert, Cowtown Metropolis: Case Study of a City's Growth and Structure (Fort Worth, 1956).
12.
Trevor J. Barnes, Logics of Dislocation: Models, Metaphors, and Meanings of Economic Space (New York, 1996), 7; emphasis in original.
13.
In one harsh passage, Hardwick snipes that Gruen's work for the Shah of Iran—“the client Gruen had long wanted . . . a dictator capable of giving Gruen the land, power, and means to control every facet of the environment”—was luckily forestalled by the fundamentalist revolution of 1979, which he characterizes as “the will of the Iranian people” (p. 221).
14.
Interestingly, Gruen saw his suburban centers as similar refuges from a threatening world, both as potential bomb shelters and as places that could help “relieve the intense nervous strain under which we all live” (p. 104).
15.
This claim seems to pass over the great bulk of work investigating geographies of post-Fordist labor (such as that generated by Andrew Herod, Don Mitchell, and many others), as well as work typified by Eugene J. McCann, “ The Cultural Politics of Local Economic Development: Meaning-Making, Place-Making, and the Urban Policy Process,” Geoforum33 (2002): 385—98.
