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Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes
346
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 38 (2012) 344e357
scientific themes with analyses of associational cultures, Naylor’s stimulating monograph provides fascinating insights into the scientific experience of one nineteenth-century English county and will inspire parallel studies of other British regions. At a time when Cornish identities are perhaps re-configured and challenged more than ever by everything from tourist invasions to second home buyers pricing out the locals, it is also timely to be reminded of the significance of Cornwall’s contribution to the British sciences. Paul Elliott University of Derby, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2012.05.014
Louise A. Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2011, xii þ 315 pages, US$32.95 hardcover. The history of suburbanization in the USA is now widely documented by geographers, sociologists, urban planners, historians, and landscape architects. This expansive literature chronicles this landscape from its nineteenth-century origins in the pastoral ideal, its twentieth-century mass production, and to its near ubiquity across metropolitan regions today. In the process scholars have addressed the dominant social and physical features of this landscape (i.e., the subdivision, cul-de-sac, and gated community): its race- and gender-based contours; the political, economic, and social forces underpinning its proliferation; and the now heightened sensitivity to its negative environmental impacts. With Louise Mozingo’s Pastoral Capitalism we now have a comprehensive historical account of the corporate office park, a dimension of this sprawling landscape that, as Mozingo observes, has received little scholarly attention. The book chronicles how and why corporate America selected the symbolic pastoral setting of the nation’s bourgeois utopias for its elite officers, research scientists, and upper-level management during the mid-twentieth century. Mozingo reveals this corporate landscape as a deeply emotive social space designed to link the pastoral ideal to the capitalist enterprise. By aligning themselves with the ‘trenchant correlation between greenness and goodness’ (p. 11), these corporations effectively subsumed the ugly realties of industrial production, such as bottom lines, polluting urban factories, and lower-class workers, to the ‘edifying civility of bucolic small towns, technological modernity in service to lifeenhancing progress, and the nuclear family ensconced in material comfort’ (p. 42). In the process, the pastoral ideal served to shelter the conscience of corporate elites from the very real social and environmental consequences of their capitalist actions. It also humanized, sanitized, and glorified the corporate endeavor in the face of a mainstream America that, at the time, had treated the ‘moral ambiguities’ of managerial capitalism with skepticism (p. 136). Chapters one and two take the reader through the pre-second world war origins of the corporation in the suburbs and the impetus for leaving an industrial city center perceived as dirty, congested, and inefficient for the expansionary demands of corporate capital. Corporate offices until this point had been located in downtown skyscrapers or in close proximity to their production facilities. But during the 1940s the pastoral suburb offered an abundance of cheap land for future expansion, local sources of cheap, predominantly female, clerical labor, and the desired physical separation from the increasingly unpleasant realities of the city.
The remainder of the book empirically chronicles what Mozingo identifies as three distinct manifestations of this landscape: the corporate campus, corporate estate, and office park. Chapter three charts the emergence of the corporate campus, pioneered by Bell Labs, General Electric, and General Motors. The corporate campus was modeled to emulate the quadrangle-centered university campus and used the pastoral ideal as a means of enticing ‘scientists habituated to the university atmosphere’ (p. 51) to the private sector. Corporate elites argued that a tranquil setting amid expansive lawns, trees, and lakes was ideally conducive for fostering the kind of efficiency and creative thinking necessary for scientific innovation. The campus also removed research and development e an increasingly important division of the modern corporation e from the noisy, unsuitable atmosphere of the noxious production facility and in the process symbolically integrated this labor force into the upper-ranks of corporate hierarchies. Chapter four chronicles the parallel rise of the corporate estate, pioneered by General Foods, General Life Insurance, and Deere & Company. These estates represented a ‘prestigious alternative to the downtown skyscraper’ (p. 12) for the corporate headquarters. They were also highly publicized and strategically placed near major road ways which, in effect, rendered them ‘show pieces’ for projecting positive, friendly images of corporate America in line with the established sensibilities of a society retreating into the pastoral mainstream. In short both campus and estate development types ultimately proved successful as ‘attractive package[s] for developers,’ as ‘appealing setting[s] to potential employees,’ and as models for ‘forward-looking corporations’ (p. 15). They also bolstered local tax-bases which, in the process, propelled further suburban growth. Chapter five covers the subsequent rise of the office park. Mozingo reveals this formation, unlike the campus and estate models, as the product of speculation by developers who anticipated the growing demand among corporations for costeffectiveness and short-term flexibility. Mozingo spotlights the earliest and most famous of these parks, such as the Stanford Research Park, Boston’s Route 128, and RaleigheDurham’s Research Triangle, and documents how this formation, similarly pastoral, effectively supplanted the logic of the campus and estate during the economically-turbulent 1970s and 1980s. The office park is now the most prolific of these three development types, as the headquarters’ and research campuses of many corporations today, such as Microsoft’s ‘estate-scale’ campus in Redmond, Washington, are typically agglomerations of many office parks. The study is well researched and accessible to a wide audience. As a landscape architect Mozingo places the site plan at the center of analysis. While the descriptive inventories of landscape characteristics may seem superfluous for some readers, its emphasis on the symbolic meanings invested in these spatial configurations will resonate with suburban scholars across disciplinary backgrounds, especially geographers. And while the book primarily focuses on how the original, landmark projects were planned, justified, and executed, each chapter concludes with brief reviews of how each development type has since evolved from the postmodern influence in the 1980s to the more recent and feeble attempts to preserve positive corporate images in eco-friendly design principles. This corporate landscape is now a ubiquitous feature of metropolitan regions across North America. It is in this context that Mozingo argues that the hegemonic persistence of this pastoral site plan inhibits progressive reform of what is now widely perceived as a woefully unsustainable, suburban builtenvironment. But without a drastic re-thinking of this mode of development, as Mozingo forcefully asserts, the consequences will be detrimental to ‘present and future metropolitan regions and
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 38 (2012) 344e357
the global environment as a whole’ (p. 220). This plea should be taken seriously as this ‘sprawling’ pastoral landscape is no longer an American phenomenon but one which increasingly proliferates across the world. Matthew B. Anderson University of Illinois at UrbanaeChampaign, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2012.05.007
Amy Mills, Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance, and National Identity in Istanbul. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2010, xii þ 288 pages, US$24.95 paperback. Although geographies of cities, cultural landscapes, and national identities are topics central to human geography, rarely does one encounter a study that incorporates so thoroughly these fields of research. In Amy Mills’ Streets of Memory we encounter a groundup account of both national and urban identities as contextualized by and interactive with the evolving built environment. Focused on the neighborhood of Kuzguncuk, which is located along the Bosphorus on the Asiatic side of Istanbul, this study reveals the ways in which place-based identities are constructed and transmitted through time. In the book’s opening chapter Mills introduces the neighborhood that she came to research, and she explores several of the major conceptual themes that her study integrates: landscape, city, nation, cosmopolitanism, and memory. Indeed, the emphasis on memory is well placed as it is crucial to observe the selective nature of memory through processes of both remembering and forgetting, how memories are reassembled (and thus reinvented) continually through time, and how memory is both spatially embodied and transformative. In these respects, Mills’ study initiates an inquiry, from the vantage of one particular place, into how Turkish nationalism ‘is lived, remembered, and imagined.[in] shifting and complex ways in which ordinary residents sustain, reinterpret, and unmake nationalist boundaries’ (p. 29). Juxtaposed with the vast majority of works on Turkish nationalism, which until quite recently rarely strayed from focusing solely on the Kemalist state’s own narrative or on the views of a limited number of its critics, Streets of Memory occupies a unique position among scholarly writings in Turkish studies by virtue of both its ground-up perspective and its emphasis on how the nation is not merely dictated (or criticized) but actually lived. In this regard, Mills’ book also contributes to nationality studies that, as the author notes, have begun only recently to acknowledge the diverse elements and dynamics within nations and the alternatives to state-centered analyses of them. Mills’ first chapter grounds her research in terms of historical processes observable both at the larger scale of the city and at the national scale with respect to statist- and nationalist-derived forces and their impacts on the city and its communities. Providing an overview of Istanbul’s urban space and diverse ethno-religious communities during the Ottoman eras, this chapter portrays the critical backgrounds against which subsequent dynamics of Turkification and nostalgic cosmopolitanism were situated and enacted. In each of the chapters that follows e named colorfully after different streets of Kuzguncuk that evoke different themes selected for analysis e Mills examines many of these varied aspects of life and memory as witnessed within this Turkish neighborhood. Chapter two, ‘Uryanizade Street,’ presents the relevance of Kuzguncuk to wider notions of city life in Istanbul, of urban
347
community, and of tradition through lenses of Turkey’s popular media. Mills explores how the neighborhood is the setting for numerous popular television programs. Evoking themes of both tradition and cosmopolitanism, Kuzguncuk came to constitute a near-universal symbol of neighborhood community and identity. Interwoven with these popularized narratives of the neighborhood, however, are actual dynamics of landscape preservation (and, hence, alteration) and, not surprisingly, gentrification. Shifting from this construction of the ideal neighborhood, the third chapter (‘Garden Street’) engages with the politics of historical memory in Kuzguncuk. Interacting with a neighborhood association in their efforts to conserve a market garden as a vital green space within the community, Mills analyzes how the act of preservation was contingent upon the promotion of particular historical narratives concerning the garden and confrontations of ostensibly corrupt and politically-connected stakeholders. Amid this contestation contemporary claims of neighborhood attachment and residency are reaffirmed while the recollections of those dispossessed of the garden through historic processes of property misappropriation from non-Muslims are consigned to vague visions of a once multiethnic community. This theme continues into chapter four, ‘Icadiye Street,’ as Mills confronts the ways in which the neighborhood’s current residents not only wax nostalgic about a calm an idyllic cosmopolitan past but also collectively forget about some of the societal cleavages that may have existed and the tumultuous events, such as the September 1955 stateorganized anti-Greek riots, that compelled many of the neighborhood’s remaining Jews, Greeks, and Armenians to emigrate. This forgotten traumatic breach in community was followed by ethnic emigration but in-migration to the city (and neighborhood) of rural Turks, many of whom now regard themselves as authentic Kuzguncuklus. Progressing beyond nostalgia and forgetting, chapter five (‘New Day Street’) addresses how inclusion and exclusion are enacted through social relations between neighborhood women. Mills writes how remembrance and reproduction of the nation ‘takes place in the tiniest of spaces of daily life; in the living room, around the kitchen table, on the front steps, and through windows overlooking the mahalle [neighborhood] street’ (p. 136). While these interactions reflected much about the personalities of those observed, they were also highly conditioned by factors such as one’s history of residency in Kuzguncuk, socio-economic class, family status, ethnicity, and other variables. Although most women socialized across many of these divides, some of the most pronounced cleavages reflected gentrification and attitudes regarding intermarriage, especially amid minority anxieties over dwindling numbers and assimilation. In her final substantive chapter, ‘Jacob Street,’ Mills engages with the lived dynamics of minority status in Kuzguncuk by focusing on Jewish Turks, their intra- and inter-community relations, and associated spatial dynamics. In various ways, these issues for Istanbul’s Jews intersect with broader questions of modernity, secularism, and national identity, but also with a sense of loss as the neighborhood now represents a site more of memories than ongoing connections. These themes of nostalgia and loss transition into the conclusion as Mills summarizes her observations and engages with the relevance of these placed-based memories of cosmopolitanism in terms of ongoing issues involving Turkish nationalism and the country’s minorities. Throughout the text the intimacy of Mills’ approach and her localized focus contribute to a book that is rich in insight and personalized meaning but also one that the author relates to broader questions that typically have been addressed solely at the scale of the nation-state. In these regards, this study is a significant contribution not only to the fields
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 38 (2012) 344e357
scientific themes with analyses of associational cultures, Naylor’s stimulating monograph provides fascinating insights into the scientific experience of one nineteenth-century English county and will inspire parallel studies of other British regions. At a time when Cornish identities are perhaps re-configured and challenged more than ever by everything from tourist invasions to second home buyers pricing out the locals, it is also timely to be reminded of the significance of Cornwall’s contribution to the British sciences. Paul Elliott University of Derby, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2012.05.014
Louise A. Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2011, xii þ 315 pages, US$32.95 hardcover. The history of suburbanization in the USA is now widely documented by geographers, sociologists, urban planners, historians, and landscape architects. This expansive literature chronicles this landscape from its nineteenth-century origins in the pastoral ideal, its twentieth-century mass production, and to its near ubiquity across metropolitan regions today. In the process scholars have addressed the dominant social and physical features of this landscape (i.e., the subdivision, cul-de-sac, and gated community): its race- and gender-based contours; the political, economic, and social forces underpinning its proliferation; and the now heightened sensitivity to its negative environmental impacts. With Louise Mozingo’s Pastoral Capitalism we now have a comprehensive historical account of the corporate office park, a dimension of this sprawling landscape that, as Mozingo observes, has received little scholarly attention. The book chronicles how and why corporate America selected the symbolic pastoral setting of the nation’s bourgeois utopias for its elite officers, research scientists, and upper-level management during the mid-twentieth century. Mozingo reveals this corporate landscape as a deeply emotive social space designed to link the pastoral ideal to the capitalist enterprise. By aligning themselves with the ‘trenchant correlation between greenness and goodness’ (p. 11), these corporations effectively subsumed the ugly realties of industrial production, such as bottom lines, polluting urban factories, and lower-class workers, to the ‘edifying civility of bucolic small towns, technological modernity in service to lifeenhancing progress, and the nuclear family ensconced in material comfort’ (p. 42). In the process, the pastoral ideal served to shelter the conscience of corporate elites from the very real social and environmental consequences of their capitalist actions. It also humanized, sanitized, and glorified the corporate endeavor in the face of a mainstream America that, at the time, had treated the ‘moral ambiguities’ of managerial capitalism with skepticism (p. 136). Chapters one and two take the reader through the pre-second world war origins of the corporation in the suburbs and the impetus for leaving an industrial city center perceived as dirty, congested, and inefficient for the expansionary demands of corporate capital. Corporate offices until this point had been located in downtown skyscrapers or in close proximity to their production facilities. But during the 1940s the pastoral suburb offered an abundance of cheap land for future expansion, local sources of cheap, predominantly female, clerical labor, and the desired physical separation from the increasingly unpleasant realities of the city.
The remainder of the book empirically chronicles what Mozingo identifies as three distinct manifestations of this landscape: the corporate campus, corporate estate, and office park. Chapter three charts the emergence of the corporate campus, pioneered by Bell Labs, General Electric, and General Motors. The corporate campus was modeled to emulate the quadrangle-centered university campus and used the pastoral ideal as a means of enticing ‘scientists habituated to the university atmosphere’ (p. 51) to the private sector. Corporate elites argued that a tranquil setting amid expansive lawns, trees, and lakes was ideally conducive for fostering the kind of efficiency and creative thinking necessary for scientific innovation. The campus also removed research and development e an increasingly important division of the modern corporation e from the noisy, unsuitable atmosphere of the noxious production facility and in the process symbolically integrated this labor force into the upper-ranks of corporate hierarchies. Chapter four chronicles the parallel rise of the corporate estate, pioneered by General Foods, General Life Insurance, and Deere & Company. These estates represented a ‘prestigious alternative to the downtown skyscraper’ (p. 12) for the corporate headquarters. They were also highly publicized and strategically placed near major road ways which, in effect, rendered them ‘show pieces’ for projecting positive, friendly images of corporate America in line with the established sensibilities of a society retreating into the pastoral mainstream. In short both campus and estate development types ultimately proved successful as ‘attractive package[s] for developers,’ as ‘appealing setting[s] to potential employees,’ and as models for ‘forward-looking corporations’ (p. 15). They also bolstered local tax-bases which, in the process, propelled further suburban growth. Chapter five covers the subsequent rise of the office park. Mozingo reveals this formation, unlike the campus and estate models, as the product of speculation by developers who anticipated the growing demand among corporations for costeffectiveness and short-term flexibility. Mozingo spotlights the earliest and most famous of these parks, such as the Stanford Research Park, Boston’s Route 128, and RaleigheDurham’s Research Triangle, and documents how this formation, similarly pastoral, effectively supplanted the logic of the campus and estate during the economically-turbulent 1970s and 1980s. The office park is now the most prolific of these three development types, as the headquarters’ and research campuses of many corporations today, such as Microsoft’s ‘estate-scale’ campus in Redmond, Washington, are typically agglomerations of many office parks. The study is well researched and accessible to a wide audience. As a landscape architect Mozingo places the site plan at the center of analysis. While the descriptive inventories of landscape characteristics may seem superfluous for some readers, its emphasis on the symbolic meanings invested in these spatial configurations will resonate with suburban scholars across disciplinary backgrounds, especially geographers. And while the book primarily focuses on how the original, landmark projects were planned, justified, and executed, each chapter concludes with brief reviews of how each development type has since evolved from the postmodern influence in the 1980s to the more recent and feeble attempts to preserve positive corporate images in eco-friendly design principles. This corporate landscape is now a ubiquitous feature of metropolitan regions across North America. It is in this context that Mozingo argues that the hegemonic persistence of this pastoral site plan inhibits progressive reform of what is now widely perceived as a woefully unsustainable, suburban builtenvironment. But without a drastic re-thinking of this mode of development, as Mozingo forcefully asserts, the consequences will be detrimental to ‘present and future metropolitan regions and
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 38 (2012) 344e357
the global environment as a whole’ (p. 220). This plea should be taken seriously as this ‘sprawling’ pastoral landscape is no longer an American phenomenon but one which increasingly proliferates across the world. Matthew B. Anderson University of Illinois at UrbanaeChampaign, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2012.05.007
Amy Mills, Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance, and National Identity in Istanbul. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2010, xii þ 288 pages, US$24.95 paperback. Although geographies of cities, cultural landscapes, and national identities are topics central to human geography, rarely does one encounter a study that incorporates so thoroughly these fields of research. In Amy Mills’ Streets of Memory we encounter a groundup account of both national and urban identities as contextualized by and interactive with the evolving built environment. Focused on the neighborhood of Kuzguncuk, which is located along the Bosphorus on the Asiatic side of Istanbul, this study reveals the ways in which place-based identities are constructed and transmitted through time. In the book’s opening chapter Mills introduces the neighborhood that she came to research, and she explores several of the major conceptual themes that her study integrates: landscape, city, nation, cosmopolitanism, and memory. Indeed, the emphasis on memory is well placed as it is crucial to observe the selective nature of memory through processes of both remembering and forgetting, how memories are reassembled (and thus reinvented) continually through time, and how memory is both spatially embodied and transformative. In these respects, Mills’ study initiates an inquiry, from the vantage of one particular place, into how Turkish nationalism ‘is lived, remembered, and imagined.[in] shifting and complex ways in which ordinary residents sustain, reinterpret, and unmake nationalist boundaries’ (p. 29). Juxtaposed with the vast majority of works on Turkish nationalism, which until quite recently rarely strayed from focusing solely on the Kemalist state’s own narrative or on the views of a limited number of its critics, Streets of Memory occupies a unique position among scholarly writings in Turkish studies by virtue of both its ground-up perspective and its emphasis on how the nation is not merely dictated (or criticized) but actually lived. In this regard, Mills’ book also contributes to nationality studies that, as the author notes, have begun only recently to acknowledge the diverse elements and dynamics within nations and the alternatives to state-centered analyses of them. Mills’ first chapter grounds her research in terms of historical processes observable both at the larger scale of the city and at the national scale with respect to statist- and nationalist-derived forces and their impacts on the city and its communities. Providing an overview of Istanbul’s urban space and diverse ethno-religious communities during the Ottoman eras, this chapter portrays the critical backgrounds against which subsequent dynamics of Turkification and nostalgic cosmopolitanism were situated and enacted. In each of the chapters that follows e named colorfully after different streets of Kuzguncuk that evoke different themes selected for analysis e Mills examines many of these varied aspects of life and memory as witnessed within this Turkish neighborhood. Chapter two, ‘Uryanizade Street,’ presents the relevance of Kuzguncuk to wider notions of city life in Istanbul, of urban
347
community, and of tradition through lenses of Turkey’s popular media. Mills explores how the neighborhood is the setting for numerous popular television programs. Evoking themes of both tradition and cosmopolitanism, Kuzguncuk came to constitute a near-universal symbol of neighborhood community and identity. Interwoven with these popularized narratives of the neighborhood, however, are actual dynamics of landscape preservation (and, hence, alteration) and, not surprisingly, gentrification. Shifting from this construction of the ideal neighborhood, the third chapter (‘Garden Street’) engages with the politics of historical memory in Kuzguncuk. Interacting with a neighborhood association in their efforts to conserve a market garden as a vital green space within the community, Mills analyzes how the act of preservation was contingent upon the promotion of particular historical narratives concerning the garden and confrontations of ostensibly corrupt and politically-connected stakeholders. Amid this contestation contemporary claims of neighborhood attachment and residency are reaffirmed while the recollections of those dispossessed of the garden through historic processes of property misappropriation from non-Muslims are consigned to vague visions of a once multiethnic community. This theme continues into chapter four, ‘Icadiye Street,’ as Mills confronts the ways in which the neighborhood’s current residents not only wax nostalgic about a calm an idyllic cosmopolitan past but also collectively forget about some of the societal cleavages that may have existed and the tumultuous events, such as the September 1955 stateorganized anti-Greek riots, that compelled many of the neighborhood’s remaining Jews, Greeks, and Armenians to emigrate. This forgotten traumatic breach in community was followed by ethnic emigration but in-migration to the city (and neighborhood) of rural Turks, many of whom now regard themselves as authentic Kuzguncuklus. Progressing beyond nostalgia and forgetting, chapter five (‘New Day Street’) addresses how inclusion and exclusion are enacted through social relations between neighborhood women. Mills writes how remembrance and reproduction of the nation ‘takes place in the tiniest of spaces of daily life; in the living room, around the kitchen table, on the front steps, and through windows overlooking the mahalle [neighborhood] street’ (p. 136). While these interactions reflected much about the personalities of those observed, they were also highly conditioned by factors such as one’s history of residency in Kuzguncuk, socio-economic class, family status, ethnicity, and other variables. Although most women socialized across many of these divides, some of the most pronounced cleavages reflected gentrification and attitudes regarding intermarriage, especially amid minority anxieties over dwindling numbers and assimilation. In her final substantive chapter, ‘Jacob Street,’ Mills engages with the lived dynamics of minority status in Kuzguncuk by focusing on Jewish Turks, their intra- and inter-community relations, and associated spatial dynamics. In various ways, these issues for Istanbul’s Jews intersect with broader questions of modernity, secularism, and national identity, but also with a sense of loss as the neighborhood now represents a site more of memories than ongoing connections. These themes of nostalgia and loss transition into the conclusion as Mills summarizes her observations and engages with the relevance of these placed-based memories of cosmopolitanism in terms of ongoing issues involving Turkish nationalism and the country’s minorities. Throughout the text the intimacy of Mills’ approach and her localized focus contribute to a book that is rich in insight and personalized meaning but also one that the author relates to broader questions that typically have been addressed solely at the scale of the nation-state. In these regards, this study is a significant contribution not only to the fields