ABSTRACT
The essays in this book, Landscape and the Ideology of Nature in Exurbia: Green Sprawl, have, in conversation, taken a critical look at nature-seeking in residential settlement in the United States and Canada. These ten chapters have questioned decentralization in contemporary settlement patterns by focusing on the aspects of green sprawl that people appear to be trying to get to. Self-conscious consideration of the desire to settle in nature, these chapters suggest, has been largely missing in the debate about sprawl, and more importantly, in negotiations of “solutions” that are posited to the problems of sprawl. Using the label “exurbia” to define not only a material place where people live in the countryside while connected through their daily practices to the city, but also a conceptual and ideological space, we have looked at the meaning of nature in green sprawl and sought to highlight discussion about the continuing tendency for increasing numbers of people to seek escape from the city ever further into rural places, in spite of all the planning policies and environmental impact reports that censure such escape.
