Crossing the Expendable Landscape

Essayist Bettina Drew takes the reader on an in-depth exploration of several American cities - Stamford, Hilton Head, Las Vegas, Dallas, Celebration - to examine the consequences of built environments that fail to reflect regional, historic, aesthetic, and social values. Drew talks to the everyday people who live in these cities, along with the urban planners and developers who created them, about the cultural impact of big-business-inspired living. She concludes with an overview of the ways in which some architects and planners are now working to humanize American landscape development. Always searching for the impact of physical environment on human happiness, Drew focuses on what has gone so wrong with mass architecture and reflects on the possibilities for built environments in the future.