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Suburbanizing Nature and Naturalizing Suburbanites: Outdoor-Living Culture and Landscapes Of Growth
ELIZABETH CARNEY
Landscape architects, consumer magazines, and garden clubs promoted an outdoor-living culture in the West that linked the home with the greater outdoors. This analysis of outdoor-living culture from the 1920s into the postwar decades reveals how rapid suburban growth and native-newcomer tensions shaped middle-class environmental sensibilities and a new western sense of place.
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DESCRIBING HIS EXPERIENCE GROWING UP in suburban Southern California in the 1930s, political scientist James Q. Wilson explained that people loved the suburbs "not just in the way one has an attachment to a hometown, any hometown, but the way people love the realization that they have found the right mode of life." By the 1950s, western suburbia epitomized the middle-upper-class good life. Indeed, so many people "found the right mode of life" in the modern West that massive growth became central to the region's increasingly suburban culture. At the same time, the social and environmental costs of sprawl, nation-wide, threatened to undermine the promise of good living. Western good-living proponents attempted to reconcile this tension in a new western culture. As an alternative to the suburban norm, new western culture purportedly offered a more authentic sense of place and the best of all worlds: urban opportunities, natural amenities, and wilderness access.1 |
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At the core of the postwar western good life stood the concept of outdoor living, centered on outdoor leisure in both urban and wild settings. In 1959, one contributor to the Denver-based Golden West: Magazine of High Country Living described outdoor living as fly-fishing on the Frying Pan River, colorful gardens, and golf and tennis "enjoyed within view of snow-capped mountains." Similarly, in 1956, a special Denver issue of House and Garden characterized the city and its residents as people who "like to tend the lawn, dig in the ground and on summer weekends, whose sunshine is singularly beckoning, to drive to the chain of Denver mountain parks on picnic or fishing excursions."2 |
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In addition to Golden West, other regional taste-making magazines, such as Sunset and Arizona Homes, along with landscape architects and garden clubs, promoted western outdoor living and defined a sense of place, especially for newcomers to the West. They presented outdoor living as the great hope for two, sometimes contradictory, pursuits: encouraging growth and defining a comprehensible, commodifiable sense of place for the region. In the 1930s, some regionalists and conservationists saw the potential for outdoor living to maintain an "authentic" western sense of place and even to inspire a conservation-minded political consciousness that could serve as a spoiler against rampant growth, particularly when it threatened wilderness. By the 1950s, the great regional and national popularity of outdoor living accompanied the rise of modern western tourism, an intensified commercialization of nature for leisure, and an insular suburban consumer culture. At the same time, Sunset magazine became the dominant voice for good living in the West. Its definition of outdoor living echoed mid-century suburban values and attempted to reconcile growth and regionalism into a blending of the old and the new, the rustic and the urban. As the effects of growth became more pronounced and became a point of debate in the emerging quality-of-life environmentalism, Sunset approached the issue from within the context of its suburban values. Collectively, this outdoor-living literature offers a view of the ways westerners made sense of the changing region. In addition, because landscape architects and other promoters altered the physical world to reflect outdoor-living values, this history also can be read on the West's domestic landscapes. |
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