Dolores Hayden
Excerpts from an interview with Yale School of Architecture professor Dolores Hayden. Hayden is also the author of A Field Guide to Sprawl, published in 2004 by W.W. Norton & Company. Interview conducted with Paul Kiel and originally aired on WKCR 89.9 fm as part of Commons Radio 5.
Q: What was the impetus behind your book A Field Guide to Sprawl?
DH: I think we live in a time when few Americans can decode the landscapes that we build. Words like city, suburb and countryside don’t describe our metropolitan regions anymore. We mostly get lost in places that layered in tracts and strip malls, office parks and highways. Even if you’re in a place like Williamsburg, if you venture our here, you see some of that on the way.
So there’s a bad product which is what I would say we think of as sprawl. But more than that, there’s a bad process. And sprawl is not just this product that we think of as six shopping centers or subdivisions next to a roaring highway. The process is one of discarding existing city neighborhoods and older suburbs and discarding the infrastructure that has been built there such as roads and schools and sewers, in favor of constant Greenfield construction. So the outer edge of a metropolis is often the place where you find affluent people, new subdivisions, new stores and a demand for new schools. And back in those older areas that may have been built 100 years ago, 60 years ago, maybe even 40 years ago, people are struggling and they’re hearing constantly from their public officials that nobody can afford the good schools or the childcare centers or the maintenance or the other facilities that they require. And this means that we have a huge problem. We’re building incoherent, negative places, at the same time that we’re giving up on older places that people have made a substantial social and economic investment in. You asked me before, what is it American’s don’t understand about space? They don’t understand that we have a kind of dynamic obsolescence working here, which was a phrase of the car designers of the 1950’s. The people who made the fins on the Cadillacs, different every year, really wanted people to constantly say: alright, that’s last year’s car, I’ve got to get a new one. And they’d say that after a very short amount of time. We’re basically saying that’s last year’s city, that’s last year’s neighborhood, we’ve got to get a new one. And developers are interested in doing this because it’s frequently most profitable to be building on raw land on an outer edge of a metropolitan region – fewer restrictions, cheaper land, more money to be made. And this is the process which encompasses the political economy and everyone who’s involved in land use. Construction involves many, many people in our economy, but it is not a rational way to proceed. We use up a lot of land, we use up a lot of energy, and it’s not a strategy for having a successful country. It’s not a strategy for having any kind of social or economic equality.
So, the reason that I wrote the Field Guide to Sprawl was to come at some of the very unattractive building patterns which are spotted everywhere in the landscape, and for which most of us don’t have very good names. And I decided I’d organize it as a dictionary. It goes from alligator to zoomburb, and I have 51 bad building patterns in there. So it’s a kind of devil’s dictionary. Ambrose Bierce produced the first devil’s dictionary in 1911. He took perfectly ordinary words and defined them sarcastically; I’m taking jargon from developers, builders architects and planners – the jargon may be sarcastic, but I’m defining these things in a pretty straightforward way. And the showing people what they really look like by having about 70 color arial photographs by Jim Wark in the book so people can see it and begin to say, alright, that’s a category-killer, that’s a big box, or that’s a sitcom suburb. I’m beginning to take some of these pieces of the built environment and say, now I see what it is and I understand why it’s there.
Q: What response do you get from readers?
DH: I get a lot of email from readers. People sometimes send me new words or they sometimes send me pictures saying, “I want you to see this particular category killer.” I had somebody who came to see me last week, and she said, “I wanted to tell you about the Lunar Landers.” I said, “The Lunar Landers? That’s not in my book.” The Lunar Landers is a particular kind of fast food place in a particular part of the MidWest. So I get requests to identify things. I also get new things for perhaps a later editions. Sometimes people are sending me European terms that would fit very well with the rest of it. So I’ve got quite a file of it.
The book within about three weeks of coming out, got added to a syllabus of an AP human geography. So high school students have been reading this and I think, indeed, you could probably work to count certain kinds of building, identify certain kinds of buildings – you could probably do it with elementary school students. And I’m working with some New Haven teachers now in a program about sense of place where maybe we’ll get to test a little bit of that out.
Q: Are you worried about insulting the residents of sprawl?
DH: Well, I’m always careful to say that people do not have a lot of choices, especially people who are looking for affordable housing, people who are looking for public transportation – this country has not provided these things in reasonable quantities. So that a critique of minimal housing, say, a critique of manufactured housing, is not a critique of the people who can only afford to live in manufactured housing because it’s the cheapest they can find. It’s a critique of people who permitted that kind of site planning. The site planning frequently being very, very minimal around manufactured housing. Not always.
In the same way, a critique of something which is commercial space – for example a drive-through, which is one of those buildings where you have to drive inside or around it to get the product, whether it’s a drive-in bank or a drive-in drugstore or drive-thru at McDonalds. I mean that is really a critique of all the pedestrian space that disappears and the sidewalks that disappear when you make buildings on that model. It means that everything has to be in scale with the automobile, which is moving at a certain speed, not at the scale of a person who might be walking down the sidewalk.
When you get to something more like a starter castle or a mansion subsidy, then my critique is not so much of the people who live in the mansion but of government policy that says that we spend 100 billion dollars a year in this country sending our housing subsidies to the wrong end of the economic spectrum. People are deducting from their taxable income the interest on mortgages for some very, very substantial houses. And at the same time we’re doing that, we’re not really building affordable, multi-family housing, we’re not housing the homeless. So it’s a critique of a much larger system – not just of the conspicuous consumption that might come at one end of it. And I ask, you know, why as a society would we want to subsidize Mcmansions and provide incentives for people to build bigger and bigger houses, second homes, large lots, if we know that we have an energy problem and we have a housing problem.
And I hope that people take this in pretty good spirit and say, why do we do this? You know, as opposed to saying, was that my trailer you had in mind when you critiqued manufactured housing.
Q: Can you talk about the photography in the book?
DH: Some people have said that Jim Wark’s pictures are so interesting that they feel I’ve aestheticized a political problem. I mean he’s a very skilled photographer. There are some wonderful images there. I chose the big box in the snow, for example, or the tire dump, as absolutely stunning images of wasted land or wasted resources, but they’re also quite fascinating to look at. And I think that keeps people exploring the subject a little more. I’m not just aestheticizing this and saying there is no other issue. I’m not just saying here, take a look at the great contrast of whites and blacks in this image. I would really like people to study it and come away knowing how many used tires there are in landfills in the US, or how many countries we’ve exported these big box stores to, as well as savoring the image.
We’ve frequently been satisfied with very cheap construction in this country, maybe because people feel it’s going to turn over, and this issue of obsolescence. What is the life of a tract house? What’s the life of a big box store? It gets shorter all the time. And it’s certainly thought to be less than the life of a building in the 19th century. When you look at those big box stores, probably the thing that is the most troubling about them is the scale. They’re designed for the trucks that are delivering the merchandise. They are not designed for the ordinary people who might like to spend an hour shopping. It’s basically a large, cheap warehouse in which you will find goods that have been delivered in trucks from the freeway nearby. So as long as you understand that people are trying to cross over these gigantic parking lots that might be the size of ten football fields and get inside, in order to acquire something – you know you get a feeling for the discomfort that comes with the scale. And an aerial photograph can show you the scale better than anything that’s taken at ground level.
But that’s kind of a technical critique. If I put that in a book that was addressed to architects, that would come across as a certain sort of technical critique with certain sorts of illustrations. But I tried to put that in a book for ordinary people to read, who don’t necessarily read technical literature, to say, oh that’s why I felt so uncomfortable there. They really made that place for the trucks, not for me.
And I think now you’d find that there are many people who are rather critical of how the USA has handled issues like housing, conservation of the natural environment, conservation of energy. And that’s where it seems to me that people like David Brooks or other advocates of what he calls Patioman, you know, the guy who just got his grill and he’s producing the patio. I mean, they’re taking this in a very one-dimensional way, and they’re just looking at the end product, rather the process of how the United States got to this particular place. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with living in suburbs or having a patio. Most people would like to have some kind of affordable housing, some kind of connection to nature, and some sense of community. And what’s wrong, though, is to have a federal government that hands so many subsidies off to road building and tract building and mall building, but does it in a very underhanded way so that most American couldn’t say what happened. If you say, what happened in 1954, no one will tell you that the accelerated depreciation for malls and fast food franchises came through, even though it should be in every history textbook. Instead you probably get a couple of sentences saying that people discovered they liked to drive. And that’s not a real analysis of public policy. And I think if Field Guide to Sprawl forces people to look harder at public policy around land use, I’ll be very happy. My book before Field Guide to Sprawl, which is called Building Suburbia, tackles the history of suburban development over seven eras. And had I not spent, oh maybe six or seven years working on that long scholarly history of suburbs, I probably wouldn’t have felt free to take out certain bullet points and put them in the Field Guide to Sprawl. And those books really belong together, in a way. Every one of these short, dictionary definitions has chapters of history of a more extended kind behind it, from my other book.