|
|
|
Book Review
| Desert Cities: The Environmental History of Phoenix and Tucson. By Michael F. Logan. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. x + 228 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth, $29.85.
|
| Michael Logan seamlessly integrates environmental, urban, and western history in a provocative story about the rivalry between Arizona's cities. Logan discusses the entrepreneurial initiative that typically defines urban histories, but highlights other factors that explain divergent growth trajectories: the natural environment and the communities' cultural and ethnic compositions. Phoenix benefits from the Salt River, which flows at a rate four times greater than Tucson's Santa Cruz River. Tucson lacks a dam site similar to the ones Phoenicians enjoy and relies on groundwater. Moreover, "during a critical juncture in the cities' development at the turn of the twentieth century, the Hispanic nature of Tucson contrasted with the Anglo nature of Phoenix" (p. 5). |
1
|
|
The ancient, agriculturally based Hohokam culture settled near present-day Phoenix with a peripheral population in the Santa Cruz Valley, but there were no permanent Indian settlements on the Salt River when the Spanish arrived. Consequently, they stayed at Tucson and aligned themselves, against the Apaches, with the Pima Indians who lived there. With the Gadsden Purchase, Tucson became more connected to American commerce, but remained a multicultural town. In the 1860s, Anglo settlers moved into the Phoenix basin. Both towns were tied to farming, but Phoenix benefited from its proximity to the mines and military posts, its central location, and the intersection of wagon roads. |
2
|
|
Promoting its Anglo identity, Phoenix grew faster and overcame Tucson in population by 1920, but Logan contends that the 1930s made the difference. Both cities used New Deal programs to enhance municipal water systems, but needed tourism to advance their economies. While Tucson advertised its desert character, Phoenix more successfully celebrated its resorts' sophisticated management of the desert. World War II offered new opportunities. "Defense industries, also attracted to the region by the climate and open spaces, followed the military bases to the desert" (p. 141). Air conditioning made the oppressive heat a mere nuisance for the thousands who followed during and after the war. Tucson shared in the industrial expansion but to a lesser extent than Phoenix. |
3
|
|
The cities developed different environmental ethos. Rather than curtail usage, Phoenix turned to federally sponsored projects to feed the insatiable water demands of a growing population that ignored its physical reality. "The bipolar relationship with the desert continued in Phoenix" (p. 167). The tourist industry promoted the desert, but Phoenicians pushed it to the margins with low-density, sprawling developments. Concerned with overdrafts of scarce groundwater during the postwar boom, Tucson officials incorporated conservation into their municipal regimen and advocated slow growth and infill to minimize the impact on the environs. Tucson found only partial solutions to water problems, but did preserve desert landscapes. |
4
|
|
Logan does not offer an environmentally deterministic explanation of city development, but in a book that will appeal to both scholars and a general audience, he effectively suggests that humans cannot ignore their complex relations with their environments. "[N]ature sets parameters. What societies do with the parameters depends on their political, social and cultural guidelines, as well as on their mechanical abilities" (p. 11). |
5
|
|
Kathleen Brosnan, an associate professor of history at the University of Houston, is the author of Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law, and Environmental Change Along the Front Range (New Mexico, 2002) and editor of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of American Environmental History. |
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|