If there was ever a question about the subject of this work, I hadonly to return to the landscape. There was a strangness, a newness,an inevitability to those urban spaces around the city that insisted onmy attention. Those landscape, often called suburban, of subdivisionhomes, strip plazas, malls and big box stores, of arterial roadways andparking lots, ascendant since the middle of the twentieth century, haveoverwhelmed their host cities and now claimed urban dominance inNorth America.My interest in the sprawl landscapes started with the homesthat occupy them. Sprawl is made up mostly of housing. The essenceof this circumferential city of sprawling growth is the home. If thereis a unifying element in the wildly-different suburbs built over thelast two centuries, it is that they are wrought on the foundation of thesuburban home. The idea of the home as centre of the suburb didn’ttake root until after the war, when the lack of affordable housingbecame a matter of national concern. In Redesigning the AmericanDream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life, DoloresHayden argued that by the 1950s, the American suburban house hadbecome a private utopia. The home -- something separate from itsneighbours and separate from its community, an ideal in and of itself- is both the beginning and the essence of sprawl. In 1950 the averagesize of a new home was 800 square feet, 1,500 in 1970, 2,190 in19981. The home as a symbol of the American, Canadian, indeed theindustrialized dream, took hold in the-postwar environment and borethe offspring we call sprawl.Although the sprawl landscape is inextricably connected tothe single family home, it has evolved into a post industrial cityscape,a place that is in fact, but not in feel, urban. What is the nature of thisstrange place? How and why does it differ from the industrial urbanlandscape? And what are the phenomena that propel the building ofthis place.I set out to understand this landscape by looking for its proponents,but in the end couldn’t fi nd any. I didn’t talk to anyone - see, hear,or read anything - that explained the changes in the landscape as afunction of an urban ideology or even a choice. Duany Plater-Zyberkargue that ;;[w]e live today in cities and suburbs whose form andcharacter we did not choose. They were imposed upon us, by federalpolicy, local zoning laws, and the demands of the automobile2”. Mostof the literature - books, websites, government and non governmentstudies - bemoan the expansion of the sprawl landscape, and criticizeour inability to plan our way out of it. The sprawl landscape, thelandscape characterized in large part by the subdivided tract homes is,virtually, without a social or cultural advocate. It is a place that seemsto have been built for everyone, without anyone advocating on itsbehalf.From homes to highways, the landscape, whose photographs makeup this work, was for me, the discovery of a place with which I wasalmost too familiar to see. The images bear witness to the changingurban condition; they are a documentation of our rural spaces as theyare annexed by the sprawl that, like a wave, has rolled over virtuallyevery major city in North America.
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