Exurbia

Landscape and the Ideology of Nature in Exurbia

This book explores the role of the ideology of nature in producing urban and exurban sprawl. It examines the ironies of residential development on the metropolitan fringe, where the search for “nature” brings residents deeper into the world from which they are imagining their escape—of Federal Express, technologically mediated communications, global supply chains, and the anonymity of the global marketplace—and where many of the central features of exurbia—very low-density residential land use, monster homes, and conversion of forested or rural land for housing—contribute to the very problems that the social and environmental aesthetic of exurbia attempts to avoid. The volume shows how this contradiction—to live in the green landscape, and to protect the green landscape from urbanization—gets caught up and represented in the ideology of nature, and how this ideology, in turn, constitutes and is constituted by the landscapes being urbanized.

Exurbia

Exurbia

A compelling and clear-eyed novel about teenagers living in the margins of Reagan's America Los Angeles, 1985: Reagan is a few months into his second term, and the economy is booming; but the increasing stand-off between the superpowers threatens to wipe out the world, AIDS is a growing epidemic, and 50% of marriages end in divorce. Ed Valencia is 17 and he and his crew, the Rats, are marked by their mohawks as troublemakers—but it's the punk scene that has given them ideals, beliefs, and a grasp of a world beyond Yum Yum Donuts and TV reruns. Lise Anderson is 13, and desperate to be cool. She loves the mall, hot pink lipstick, and dangerous-looking boys, but her girlfriends seem to be privy to secrets—about fashion, about sex—that no one will tell her. And then there is Voyd, at 14 a frontline warrior for the revolutionary right. While his parents jet across the country, Voyd, alone in a house filled with everything he wants and not one thing he needs, has devoted himself to the cause of keeping the nation white. This is the story of three lost souls and the ultimately violent collision of their lives. In haunting, angry, and beautiful prose, Molly McGrann explores the margins of 1980s America, and asks questions not only about where we are going, but about how we got here in the first place.