ABSTRACT
In this chapter we analyse the role played by the landscape in the aestheticization of the suburban politics of exclusion. The empirical material we have based this chapter on is drawn from a long-term research project conducted in Westchester County, a suburban area outside New York City. We have been studying Westchester on and off for twenty years (J. Duncan 1973; Duncan and Duncan 1984; N. Duncan 1986; Duncan and Duncan forthcoming). We have family living there and Nancy was born and raised there. We will focus primary attention on Bedford Village, which is among the most affluent towns in the county 1 and whose landscape is maintained by some of the most exclusionary zoning practices anywhere in the United States. Approximately 80 per cent of the town is zoned for single-family houses on a minimum of four acres, approximately 95 per cent for houses on one or more acres, and less than 1 per cent for two-family dwellings or apartments. Furthermore, unusually stringent subdivision regulations make the subdivision of very large properties into legal lots of four or more acres, in most cases, prohibitively expensive. The town’s zoning thus effectively shifts the burden of providing housing for the county on to other less affluent and politically less well organized communities. 2
