-ville: Not Rural but Micropolitan America: The Pedagogical Case of East and West Texas

Young, instant and radically small, the american town operates as an extreme condition of minimal complexity and minimum urbanity. If America is the original version of modernity according to Baudrillard¹, then the extremities of that vast internal American territory- understood here as a sequence of Greysvilles, Crossvilles, Maryvilles but also Moscows, Paris, Florences spread out in Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana or Arizona- offer us an insight to an accelerated end state of that modernity.‘-ville: not rural but micropolitan America’ produces an alternative understanding of urbanism that studies the American town as an instant and autonomous urban setup, one that is simple enough to be broken down in primary and identifiable elements. The towns are seen through a lens of radical remoteness as sprawled, diluted and scattered nodes of a network that strives to conquer a vast territory producing a contemporary reading of the internal fringes of the United States by carving a mute-scaler, cross country section through the rural, micropolitan American territory, radically positioned on only one colour of the post-election map.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.108.117

Volume Editors

ISBN
978-1-944214-26-5