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 escapeof Federal Express, technologically mediated communications, global supply chains, and the anonymity of the global marketplaceand where many of the central features of exurbiavery low-density residential land use, monster homes, and conversion of forested or rural land for housingcontribute to the very problems that the social and environmental aesthetic of exurbia attempts to avoid. The volume shows how this contradictionto live in the green landscape, and to protect the green landscape from urbanizationgets caught up and represented in the ideology of nature, and how this ideology, in turn, constitutes and is constituted by the landscapes being urbanized.