ABSTRACT
Manufacturers of construction materials, from lumber to metals to concrete, are among the world’s largest corporations and offer an unlimited banquet of options, detached from locality. Materials – the soil mixes, seeds, aggregates, boards, blocks, and nursery stock – are the primary units of landscape construction, specified, acquired, and assembled into new forms. They range from abiotic to biotic, from raw to highly processed, from locally handcrafted to industrially produced and shipped around the globe. While construction materials may appear to be fixed commodities, they are anything but fixed in time, space, or form. Materials change shape as they travel from geological deposit or forest to factory and design project to land-fill, passing through human hands and tools. As the city became a global financial center in the late nineteenth century, crowded streets and broken pavements interfered with the smooth flow of capital and goods. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
