Pushing the Flat City: An Inquiry into Methods for Representing Exurbia

Contemporary exurbia is the most common example of a built environment that provides numerous interpretations and encounters of collective myths that have driven Anglo-American culture since the mid eighteenth century. The relationships between the representation of open landscape and middleclass cultural identity is acknowledged and theorized by numerous scholars and practitioners. Different attitudes about the subject lead to varying, and often idiosyncratic, methods for representing exurbia and the infrastructures that create exurban sites. it is arguably useful and theoretically relevant to develop a “rough and ready,” and hopefully widely applied, method for graphically comparing various exurban terrains. This paper and affiliated illustrations are an attempt by the author to address the problem of drawing exurbia by delineating a set of common issues and their effects on four different pre-World War II suburban communities.

Volume Editors
David Covo & Gabriel Mérigo Basurto

ISBN
0-935502-57-2