ABSTRACT
This book is about the role of nature in the production of sprawl. Nature is everywhere in cities, but often does not feel as present in the city as it does in “natural” landscapes of woods, hills, beaches, or grasslands outside of the city. A home in natural settings like these, somewhere beyond the city, has many quality of life advantages. But a collection of many such homes—sprawl—is highly problematic for reasons of environmental and social justice. This book explores ways that sprawl is a product (i.e. literally produced by) the ideology of nature. The ideology of nature, the taken-for-granted notion that escaping to nature is a good thing, is one of the reasons why sprawl is so typical of contemporary urbanization, particularly in the United States and Canada. The chapters in this book decode the landscape of sprawl, drawing on several different perspectives—including urban design and landscape planning, geography, history, literature, and journalism—to explore what an examination of the effects of ideologies of nature can tell us about sprawl.
