Suburbanizing Nature and Naturalizing Suburbanites: Outdoor-Living Culture and Landscapes of Growth

Plastic Flowers: Overlooking Resource Scarcity in Postwar America

“…As she writes in an important intervention, trends begun in the 1930s had ensured that by the 1950s ‘western suburbia epitomized the middle-upper-class good life. Indeed, so many people found the “right mode of life” in the modern West that massive growth became central to the region’s increasingly suburban culture’ (Carney, 2007: 477). However, specters of dispossession, racism, and environmental damage stalked this growth narrative, which proponents of the good life in the West had to constantly shake off.…”

“…Carney’s essay is worth attending to in some detail because she supplies another historical anchor for many of the tensions discussed in works on postwar domesticity. Her analysis of lifestyle magazines like Golden West , House and Garden , and Arizona Homes demonstrates how outdoor living encapsulated a ‘great hope for two, sometimes contradictory, pursuits: encouraging growth and defining a comprehensible, commodifiable sense of place for the region’ (Carney, 2007: 478).…”

“…Built spaces, highways, agricultural valleys, orchards, and wilderness were all summoned in the service of selling a space where the marvels of modern economic life could coexist with the affordances of a rustic, nostalgic past. This ideology endured well into the late-1950s, promising inhabitants that ‘the undeveloped nature that suburbanites encountered in the mountains (usually on public lands near urban centers) not only constituted something “out there,” but also represented a part of homemaking: home was both indoors and out-of-doors’ (Carney, 2007: 480). The rhetoric of psychological and mental development and renewal followed close at the heels in the propagation of such visions.…”

“…Aesthetically, arguments were put forward for gardens – including ones with decorative rock sculptures – as miniaturized replicas or copies of natural space. Tensions between native and nonnative plants was one clear flashpoint in debates about the organization of domestic outdoor space (Carney, 2007: 480–3).…”

Changing patters of water consumption in the suburban Barcelona: lifestiles and welfare as explanatory factors

“…In North America suburban lifestyle has been considered the "right mode of life" (Carney, 2007). Although suburban types have grown and are far more complex that the stereotypes of mono-functionality and family-based environments, middle and high class North American suburban landscapes with lawns are still mainly produced in association with social matter such as family, community and connections to the environment (Robbins and Sharp, 2003).…”