Residual Farmland

R ESI D UAL CLA R E K N EC H T

FA R M LAN D T h e Mi dwes t's relati o ns h ip wit h ag ra r ia nis m a nd the exurb.

Table of Contents 0.0 - Course Description..................................................................6 0.1 - Introduction...............................................................................7 CHAPTER 1: MIDDLE AMERICA 1.1 - Aggressively Average.............................................................10 1.2 - The American Dream ............................................................16 1.3 - Great Lakes Megalopolis ......................................................24 CHAPTER 2: AGROINDUSTRY 2.1 - Overview..................................................................................30 2.2 - Historical Progression............................................................31 2.3 - Get Big or Get Out ................................................................36 CHAPTER 3: JESUS OF EXURBIA 3.1 - Historical Progression ...........................................................48 3.2 - Peripheral Communities........................................................56 CHAPTER 4: LINEAR LANDSCAPE 4.1 - Flyover Country......................................................................64 4.2 - Lines and Exurbs....................................................................68 4.3 - Identifying Trends ..................................................................71 4.3 - Piecemeal Parcels .................................................................82 CHAPTER 5: SITUATED WITHIN 5.1 - Rem’s ‘Countryside’ ...............................................................90 5.2 - Phelp’s ‘Sequel to Suburbia’ ................................................94 5.3 - Pentacost’s ‘Soil-erg’............................................................104 5.4 - Prospective Grab.................................................................106 CHAPTER 6: PROJECTING LANDSCAPES 6.1 - The Story So Far...................................................................110 6.2 - “The Countryside as a City”................................................111 6.3 - Moving Horizontally............................................................120



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INTRO DUCTION

0.0 - COURSE DESCRIPTION

This work was completed in part of Design Research: Methods and Strategies (ARCH7100) in the Spring of 2020 with guidance of Matthew Jull,PhD, and Teaching Instructor, Jonah Pruitt at the University of Virginia.

The intention of this course under the syllabus provided by Jull is to form the basis for graduate students in architecture or landscape who plan to undertake an independent design/thesis studio in the spring semester, or those who are interested in design research in general. Using a hybrid lecture/seminar approach, the course develops a framework for initiating a thesis proposal, methods of research, research resources, representation, documentation strategies and techniques, identification of precedents, design experimentation, and modes of production and presentation.

Emphasis is placed on parsing contemporary cultural discourse, current and historical design culture, cross cutting/merging and hacking of scientific, ecological, economic, political, cultural, technological disciplines, and tailoring of the individual thesis proposal. At the conclusion of the course, a thesis proposal / design research publication is required. This book will serve as a conceptual basis for establishing scale, site, program, methods and terms of critique for the design thesis proposal during the following semester or a stand-alone design research project for those students not planning on undertaking an independent thesis studio. The course will promote a collaborative/collective environment to catalyze critical discussion, analysis, and feedback. All students will present their work in an open exhibition/presentation format at the end of the class.

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0.1 - INTRODUCTION

Residual Farmland examines the evolution and current urban development and subsequent form of the Midwest, with the Great Lakes mega-region being highlighted as an important case study. As the scale of farm operations in the Midwest increases and the number of farms decreases, driven by mechanization and the other technological advances in agriculture geared toward reducing costs of production, families in pursuit of land increasingly encroach upon the hinterlands of these places. With no steak in the land’s production or need for it to work functionally, American’s project their own identity onto the land.

“The framework of growth, however hastily devised, tends to become the permanent structure. For better or for worse, the American suburb is a remarkable and probably lasting achievement.”

– Kenneth Jackson,

Crabgrass Frontier

To skim, follow the text and pages in this color.

INTRO

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MIDDLE AMERICA

1.1 - Aggressively Average

“Modest, self-sufficient, friendly, Protestant, white, normal, average, and boring”: just a few words of description deposited by popular imagination among Midwest American’s neighbors. Midwesterners are proudly ordinary people, who speak dialect-free American English, demonstrate the workings of a democratic culture that embody what many people consider the fulfillment of the American Dream.

In the same breath, it is seen as “flyover country”, a place where God smites us through painted billboards, and the amber waves of grain are replaced with browntipped miles of corn.

[Image 1] Travis Yoesting’s photogrpah depicting hiWhere do confedghway-side propaganda in Ohio. erate-flag-painted barns find solace among the “American Dream”? Maybe those figures are the anomalies - that which stick out and distract from the average-smothered back drop of middle-America life.

The significance of these states lies in-between those miles of corn, past each post-industrialized city, along interstates that turn off into country-song-worthy back roads.

The interstitial spaces of a place are that which hold it together - what do America’s look like?

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The following documentation of the Midwest throughout this chapter is piecemeal taken from “The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia” with author additions.

Most Americans have an ambiguous sense of regional identity. If asked to explain who they are, few would think first of regionalism – an expression of imagined identity with people who inhabit a perceived common landscape. Ethnicity, race, gender, religion, and state, among other things, would probably matter more.

Yet the Midwest and the Heartland are common and frequent referents in political commentary and in the public imagination as a distinct, if unclear bounded, geographic entity that harbors distinctive ways of life. The Midwest has always been in the middle, and not just geographically. It is, and was, a place of both industry and agriculture, large and small cities and even smaller towns, massive corporations, and powerful labor unions, artistic creativity and cultural repression. Politically, it has two centuries been a place of close elections, iconoclastic leaders, and egalitarian movements. It is complicated and unpredictable region whose familiar landscapes consists of gleaming silos and white houses amid endless green fields of corn linking by meandering streams and asphalts highways to rectangular towns dominated by stores, banks, and offices along Main Streets surrounded by frame homes with wide porches decorated with hanging pots full of geraniums and suffused with the aroma of fresh-baked bread. Railroads and expressways join towns to the vertical skylines, cavernous business districts, and sprawling factories and suburban office buildings of St. Louis, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Cincinnati, Columbus, Omaha, Wichita, Minneapolis, Detroit, and Chicago.

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Whatever the Midwest lacks in flamboyance or precision, it gains in significance. The conquest, settlement, and development is one of the most important events in the past quarter millennium of human history. In the nineteenth century, millions of people entered this interior region, forcibly displaced thousands of American Indians, and established a society that dominated North America and much of the globe throughout the twentieth century. This breathtaking transformation amounts to one of the most all-encompassing and significant revolutions. No other place besides the American Midwest better reflects the combined impact of the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century and the transportation, communication, and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century. Perhaps we tend to slight the significance of the Midwest because

...its history is largely a narrative of the accumulation of ordinary events into large-scale change rather than a story of dramatic turning points.

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[Image 2] Vector Stock Image ID: 25489856, Map delineating the Midwest

The Midwest means different things to different people. Its shape and contours shift dramatically, depending on where you are standing. From Ohio, the Missouri river looks like a distant boundary in a different kind of place. Form Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin – part farm country and part forested lake terrain, imbued with the ideas and symbols of northern latitudes and defined in part by the Canadian boundary – the Ohio River that marks the southern edge of the Old Northwest looks more like the norther border of the South.

It is categorized by the United States Census as the 12 states shown in Image 2: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

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The Midwest is the average of America.

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P O P U L AT I O N Northeast: 64,178,669 Midwest: 68,179,351 West: 77,257,329 South: 123,542,189

AREA (SQ. MI.)

Northeast: Midwest: South: West:

173,628 750,522 1,124,796 1,751,053

DENSITY (PER SQ. MI.)

West: South: Midwest: Northeast:

42 150 200 370

[Image 3] Self Created, Data from Wikipedia.

Truly the middle - even statistically, the Midwest does not push limits, or exceed its own. It’s history proves a slow rolling salute to progress without calling attention to itself and is a reflection of America.

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1.2 - The American Dream

Economists even study the bizarre trends of the Midwest as an American anomaly stating that it is inherently “more equal than the rest of the country�. (Quartz Publication)

There is an ethic dimension to the egalitarian ethos of the Midwest. Modern cultural and socioeconomic patterns often have deep historical roots, after all. The culture of the Midwest has maintained the old American ideals of access to education and opportunity for all; instead of succumbing to the hyper competitive winner takes all mentality of the other regions. Midwestern society focuses on education and maintaining a social safety net while encouraging rugged individualism and the value of hard work. There are good reasons why so many Fortune 500 companies are based in the Midwest.

However, the Midwest has been left behind by the surge toward a knowledge economy. Just try scouring the empty plains between Ohio and Wyoming for a giant cluster of Internet startups or massive engines of innovation - you will not find it, These knowledge-based economies, as harbored in Silicon Valley or Austin, are a radically more unequal animal than anything that has come before it, which may explain the differences in income. (Quartz Publication). Knowledge-Based Economies are the hot topic of progress in which innovation and experimentation are necessities to survival rather than modes of security, as could be seen in the Midwest.

Income inequality is rising everywhere in the US, but something else immediately stands out about the charts to the left: there is a prominent and persistent gap between the Midwest and the other regions. Real income growth by the Economic Policy Institute shows the Midwest has the slowest income growth among the top 1% of earners for 3+ decades.

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[Image 4] Quartz Publication

Contrary to the lowest earnings for the 1%, the Median Family Income in the Midwest, is a direct reflection of the countries median at about $63,000 returning us back to the concept of Middle America as the middle of America.

REGION United States Northeast West Midwest South MIDDLE

2017 $62,626 $67,192 $68,593 $62,613 $57,134

2018 $63,179 $70,113 $69,520 $64,069 $57,299

[Image 5] United States Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2018 and 2019 Annual Social and Economic Supplements.

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There are obvious upsides and downsides when it comes to being the average, especially when it comes to household income. But the Midwest proudly boasts a steady growing market and a dollar that stretches farther than any other region, especially when it comes to real estate. For example, according to the 2018 United States Census data, Minnesota enjoyed a median household income of only $5,000 less than that of California, however, the median home price in California is more than $250,000 higher. Both Ohio and Indiana have median household incomes higher than those found in Florida, however, the Midwestern states enjoy more than $100,000 lower median home prices than the sunshine state. The results of this are seen across many individual cities in these states.

On top of these gaps...

The Midwest has the fastest appreciating and growing housing market in the country.

Possibly one of the largest reasons for growth, according to the Radian HPI, and much of the reason for the region’s bolstering appeal, is this relative affordability of the Midwestern markets combined with solid employment numbers.

Data from the Radian HPI has shown the Midwest pulling ahead of the pack, ranking first for housing price growth between 2018 and 2020, with an 8.6% year-on-year gain in 2019. Four state sin aprticular helped propel the Midwest region forward: Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Ohio.

These areas - peppered with smaller metros with reasonably priced homes - claim almost half the markets in the top 20.

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1. For Wayne, IN 3. Columbus, OH 6. Lafayette, IN 7. Janesville, WI 9. Springfield, OH 10. Topeka, KS 13. Canton, OH 14. Dayton, OH 20. Milwaukee, WI [Image 6] “The 20 Hottest Markets in Real Estate, October 2019: Why Ohio?” realtor. com(R) (Nov. 7, 2019)

The best places to buy real estate for cash flow and equity growth often have three things in common: job growth, population growth and affordability. When you find a market that has all three of these factors, you’ll probably be able to find good investment opportunities and the Midwest has no shortage.

Although historically set through statistics the Midwest has consistently lost its population to the sun belt, projections show that the tides may change as several beacons of hope have shed lite on the Midwest, specifically Ohio, Iowa, and Wisconsin. According to Site Selection Inc. they are: 1. Deliberate and innovative talent attraction strategies.

2. Sustained quality-of-place initiatives.

3. Increased demand for degreed professionals and technical workers.

4. Affordability.

5. Absence of woes plaguing established tech hubs.

6. Research 1 universities that act as talent factories.

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The significance of this data is that it all points to how the Midwest makes the American Dream tangible:

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OPPOR TUNITY

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An article by Adam Barone, an economics writer, tells us about the way Americans see this ‘Dream”.

The American Dream is the belief that anyone, regardless of where they were born or what class they were born into, can attain their own version of success in a society where upward mobility is possible for everyone. The American Dream is achieved through sacrifice, risk-taking, and hard work, rather than by chance.

The term “The American Dream” was coined by writer and historian James Truslow Adams in his best-selling 1931 book “Epic of America.” He described it as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” Adams went on to explain, “It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

The idea of the American Dream has much Adeeper roots. Its tenets can be found in the Declaration of Independence, which states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Achieving the American Dream requires political and economic freedom, as well as rules of law and private property rights. Without them, individuals cannot make the choices that will permit them to attain success, nor can they have confidence that their achievements will not be taken away from them through arbitrary force.

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Today, home ownership is frequently cited as an example of attaining the American Dream. It is a symbol of financial success and independence, and it means the ability to control one’s own dwelling place instead of being subject to the whims of a landlord.

As income inequality has increased substantially since the 1970s, the American Dream has begun to seem less attainable for those who aren’t already affluent or born into affluence. According to U.S. Census family income data, real family income began to grow much more among the top income group than among other segments of American society.3 For example, the Federal Reserve’s 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances shows that the top 10% of the income distribution earned roughly a quarter of all income and held more than three-quarters of all wealth.4

These realities, however, do not diminish the luster of the American Dream as an ideal and a beacon to all nations.

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1.3 - Great Lakes Megalopolis

The mega region of the Great Lakes consists of the group of metropolitan areas in North America largely surrounding the Great Lakes and along the Saint Lawrence Seaway. Although it includes some eastern region states not included in the Midwest registry, these states are known as the original Midwest as they were settled first. It is the most populated and largest megalopolis in North America. (Wiki)

A map and categorization of the 10 major American mega-regions as defined by the regional planning association expose more difference than resemblance, alluding to the specific methodology that should be structured in order to address urbanism in each. (Arizona Report).

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Area (sq miles)

Perimeter (miles)

Road Network (miles)

Great Lakes 194,981

Gulf Coast 3,833

Great Lakes 59,216

NE Corridor 62,934

Great Lakes 3,722

Northeast 35,107

Piedmont Atlan.

61,390

NE Corridor 2,653

Piedmont Atlan.

35,107

Gulf Coast 44,787

Cascadia 2,100

Gulf Coast 12,551

Florida 40,540

Piedmont Atlan.

1,650

Florida 9,569

Texas Triangle 42,085

S. California 1,435

Texas Triangle 8,388

Southern California 40,154

N. California 1,404

Cascadia 5,847

Cascadia 33,976

Texas Triangle 1,328

S. California 5,548

N. California 22,278

Florida 1,043

N. California 4,026

Sun Belt 15,019

Sun Belt 695

Sun Belt 1,292

[Image 7] Arizona Report: Frameworks for a Well-Tempered Ubranism...

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This mapping shows not just where people gather with density, but where design projects and research are oriented. The large expanses of non-catego-

rization, which encompass the vast majority of land and people in America, are left to their own devices.

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Calling out the Midwest’s own hub of urbanism is; however, an important step in deciphering a case study of development through identifying trends of how the changing landscape is being absorbed into suburbia and the common metro as farmland is released.

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2.1 - Overview In this chapter we will explore the previous claim of farmland being released into metro areas and how a change in industrialization and technology is shaping farming as well as the landscape of development. The following telling of agro-industry is piecemeal subtracted from The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia.

The most fundamental and enduring image of the Midwest is that of agricultural productivity. It is inseparable from the Corn Belt, the heartland of agriculture that stretches from Ohio to the Great Plains.

The breadbasket is more than a simply a production system; essential to it are the social and settlement systems that support production. Midwestern farms in the American imagination are operated by families who are dedicated to their land and to farming as a way of life.

The Jeffersonian ideal – the yeoman farmer who operate in a specific context – small, vibrant family farms are set in a landscape of picturesque small towns. The Midwest is envisioned as a rural environment, despite the historic role of the region’s cities and the key role of its major metropolitan regions to this day.

[Image 8] Grant Wood’s American Gothic The idealized image, representing self-sufficiency and self-reliance, individualism and independence, and traditional family and community structures, may be descended from the yeoman’s farms found in the Midwest during the nineteenth century.

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2.2 - Historical Progression

In the nineteenth century the growing agricultural economy of the Midwest and the emerging industrial growth of our nation’s Rustbelt were intricately intertwined. As Midwestern farm numbers increased, manufacturing enterprises moved westward to the emerging urban system of the region to produce farm implements and other needs, as well as to process the expanding production of the region’s farms.

The growth in nearly every city in the region was based on either production of agricultural inputs or processing of farm products.

The cities could not have existed without farmers to buy their goods and provide them with raw material for refinement.

It was this interdependence of farm and city, or raw material and fabricator/processor that became the hallmark of the Midwestern breadbasket.

In truth, the Midwestern farm was never the bucolic, self-contained enterprise that has dominated the pastoral image of the Midwest. The very productivity of farmers depended on the technology supplied by industry, the transportation technology to move massive harvests to markets, and the factories that converted resources into marketable commodities.

The farm depended on the city as well.

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So, too, did the exploding Midwestern metropolises depend upon the farmers. Farm residents were the customers for urban goods and the suppliers of sustenance for cities.

Likewise, smaller cities and towns existed in a symbiotic relationship with their rural hinterlands.

Into the twentieth century, the Midwest remained the nation’s foremost producer of agricultural commodities. Approximately 41% of the nation’s agricultural product sales originate in these twelve states. The top ten states in corn acreage are all Midwestern. Only two of the top ten states in number of farms with annual sales of over a hundred thousand dollars are not found in the Midwest. In 1997, the twelve Midwestern states contained half the value of U.S. farm machinery. They accounted for 42% of cattle sold, two-thirds of hogs sold, and six of every seven bushels of corn harvested.

Agriculture in the Midwest had been undergoing structural changes that reflect agricultural transformations in the nation.

During the second half of the twenty first century, these changes were associated primarily with the growing size of farms and the rise of industrial agriculture.

At the turn of the twenty first century, farm ownership patterns have changed dramatically.

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Family farmers living on their land often do not own much of the land they operate, and they increasingly depend on non-farm sources of income.

Relatively little land is farmed by full owners. In Illinois, less than 20 percent of farmland is operated by full owners. Driven by the need to acquire more farmland so they can maintain an adequate income, farmers have turned to part ownership-some land is owned, quite a bit more is rented or leased. This is the dominant pattern in nearly all of the region.

In the Iowa-Illinois core of the region, 30 percent of farmers report more than two hundred days of off-farm work each year. That figure rises to around 40 percent in Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio, where there are greater opportunities for wage labor in urban areas. In just a handful of counties is the figure under 20 percent.

[Image 9] Percent of U.S. Farmland Rented or Leased, USDA NASS, Census of Agriculture AGRO

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In the post-World-War II era, agriculture became increasingly reliant on the standardization and specialization characteristic of manufacturing enterprises. Most important, consumption of energy skyrocketed as farmers substituted fossil fuels for most human and animal inputs – especially labor, fuel, and fertilizer.

[Image 10] U.S. Energy Information Administration

[Image 11] Three Decades of Consolidation in U.S. Agriculture, USDA from Inside Cliamte News 34

Larger farms meant fewer farms, so rural population decline became continuous after about 1935. Fewer farms led directly to declining populations in the small towns that provided services to farmers.

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In effect, farmers learned how to make corn from petroleum.

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2.3 - Get Big or Get Out

By the 1980s those who could not get big, got out of agriculture. At this point agriculture became agro-industrial.

Mass production rather than mass diversification became the goal.

Most of the smaller family-owned parcels have been gobbled up by larger farms and ranchers and by speculators from places away. People no longer rely on driving to their local market to sell eggs, chicken or cream; nor do they come to buy socks, shoes, or invisible tape. The fascination with the automobile has led to the obsession with driving twenty-five minutes each way, many times a week. This weekly, if not daily, ritual is mirrored by the daily commute of inhabitants to and from work, by school buses traveling over and across wide expanses of land to pick up a handful of kids, and by the winds blustering through tassels of corn.

Two thirds of the Midwest is farmland, a 17% decline since 1950. This change occurred because many marginal lands were shifted to other uses such as forestry or recreation, some were flooded for reservoirs or were converted to highways and urban developments. The Midwest accounts for 21% of the nation’s land area, 29% of its farmland, and a disproportionate 47% of the nation’s crop land, but the region produces only 36% of the agricultural market of national product sold because most mid-western farmers grow relatively low value crops such as corn and soybeans.

The key to the early growth of mid-western cities was the size and richest of the agricultural resource space.

Throughout the evolution of the present pattern of Midwest urbanization, two factors – great migrations and major changes in transportation technology – have exercise major influences on the location of the metropolitan areas.

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This next section is a part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog.

There are two major inputs which heavily effect the changing market of agriculture which have significantly decreased over time: land and labor. Between 1982 and 2007, land used in agriculture dropped from 54 to 51% of total U.S. land area, while farming used 30% less hired labor and 40% less operator labor. Yet farmers managed to increase output by nearly 50%. The reason: increases in productivity from the adoption of new technologies, more intensive use of manufactured inputs, such as fertilizers, and the efficiencies gained as farm production shifted to larger, more specialized operations.

Agricultural production is a major use of land, accounting for roughly 52 percent of the U.S. land base.) Land use and land-use changes have important economic and environmental implications for commodity production and trade, open space, soil and water conservation, air quality and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, and other areas of policy relevance.

With a value of $2.51 trillion in 2018, the value of farm real estate (land and structures) accounted for over 80 percent of the total value of U.S. farm sector total assets. (See more on farm assets and debt, including real estate.) Because real estate comprises such a significant portion of the balance sheet of U.S. farms, farmland and real estate values are critical barometers of the farm sector’s financial performance. Changes in farmland values also affect the financial well-being of agricultural producers because farm real estate is the largest single component in a typical farmer’s investment portfolio and it serves as the principal source of collateral for farm loans.

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Is it this extreme money making machine that draws in larger corporations which take over the working class’s generations of practice in farming. The following exposition by Chris McGreal in The Guardian from March 2019 shares the details of a dying family trade in rural Iowa.

When the vast expanse of rural Iowa was carved up for settlers in the 19th century, it was often divided into 160-acre lots. Four farms made a square mile, with a crisscross of dead-straight roads marking the boundaries like a sprawling chess board. Within each square, generations of families tended pigs and cattle, grew oats and raised children, with the sons most likely to take over the farm. That is how Barb Kalbach saw the future when she left her family’s land to marry and begin farming with her husband, Jim, 47 years ago.

“When we very first were married, we had cattle and calves,” she says. “We raised hogs from farrow to finish, and we had corn, beans, hay and oats.

So did everyone around us.”

Half a century later, Kalbach surveys the destruction within the section of chessboard she shared with other farms near Dexter in southwestern Iowa.

Barb and Jim are the last family still working the land, after their neighbors were picked off by waves of collapsing commodity prices and the rise of factory farming.

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With that came a vast transfer in wealth as farm profits funneled into corporations or the diminishing number of families that own an increasing share of the land. Rural communities have been hollowed out.

And while the Kalbachs have hung on to their farm, they long ago abandoned livestock and mixed arable farming for the only thing they can make money at any more – growing corn and soya beans to sell to corporate buyers as feed for animals crammed by the thousands into the huge semi-automated sheds that now dominate farming, and the landscape, in large parts of Iowa.

[Image 12] Barb Kalbach on the land she and her husband farm.

Photograph: Scott Morgan/The Observer AGRO

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Kalbach comes from five generations of farmers and suspects she may be the last. As she drives the roads around her farmhouse, she ticks off the disappearances.

“That’s the Shoesmiths’ place,” she said.

“Two years ago, it had cattle, pigs and pasture.”

Now the land is rented out and is all given over to corn. A little further along, the Watts family’s farmhouse stands empty, its roof falling in. There are a few relics of the old farm at the place that used to be owned by the Williamses – an abandoned hen house and a bit of machinery – but the land is all corn and soya beans. The Denning house, on Walnut Avenue, was bulldozed after the land was sold and rolled into a bigger operation.

“They’re all gone now. My county has 11 small towns, and it’s almost like I could look back in slow motion and just see the businesses change and disappear. We’ve become poorer. Our communities are basically shattered and in more than just an economic way – in a social way too.”

[Image 13] Across the state, farmhouses where generations grew up lie abandoned.

Photograph: Scott Morgan/The Observe 40

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This collapse has in good part been driven by the rise of concentrated animal feeding operations, or Cafos. In these industrial farming units, pigs, cows and chickens are crammed by the thousand into rows of barns. Many units are semi-automated, with feeding run by computer and the animals watched by video, with periodic visits by workers who drive between several operations.

In the early 1970s, US agriculture secretary Earl Butz pushed the idea of large-scale farming with the mantra “get big or get out”. He wanted to see farmers embrace what he regarded as a more efficient strategy of growing commodity crops, such as corn and soya beans.

Some farmers invested heavily in buying land and new machinery to increase production – taking on large amounts of debt to do so.

A decade later, the farm crisis hit as overproduction, the US grain embargo against the Soviet Union and high interest rates dramatically drove up costs and debt for family farms.

Land prices collapsed and foreclosures escalated.

“Every blow to independent farming made it more of an opportunity for large corporations to come in,” said Partridge.

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In 1990, small and medium-sized farms accounted for nearly half of all agricultural production in the US. Now it is less than a quarter.

As the medium-sized family farms retreated, the businesses they helped support disappeared.

Local seed and equipment suppliers shut up shop because corporations went straight to wholesalers or manufacturers. Demand for local vets collapsed. As those businesses packed up and left, communities shrank. Shops, restaurants and doctors’ surgeries closed. People found they had to drive for an hour or more for medical treatment. Towns and counties began to share ambulances.

As factory farms spread, their demands dictated the workings of slaughterhouses. Smaller abattoirs, which offered choice and competitive prices to family farmers, disappeared, to be replaced by huge operations that were further away and imposed lower prices on small-scale breeders such as the Kalbachs.

[Image 14] Communities are seeing business and services close down. Photograph: Scott Morgan/The Observer

“By the time you paid to transport the extra distance, they were paying you less than they paid the corporations because you weren’t bringing the big numbers,” says Kalbach.

The buying power of the Cafos also helps drive farmers’ decisions on which crops to grow.

With no livestock, the Kalbachs were forced into growing corn and soya beans to sell to factory farms as animal feed or to corporations for ethanol.

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[Image 15] Map from orginal article highlighting locations discussions in reading.

Iowa is not alone. Missouri, to the south, had 23,000 independent pig farmers in 1985. Today it has just over 2,000.

The number of independent cattle farms has fallen by 40% over the same period.

Tim Gibbons of Missouri Rural Crisis Center, a support group for family farmers set up during the 1980s farm crisis, says the cycle of...

economic shocks has blended with government policies to create a “monopolization of the livestock industry, where a few multinational corporations control a majority of the livestock�.

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Gibbons explains: “They are vertically integrated, from animal genetics to grocery store. What they charge isn’t based on what it costs to produce, or even supply and demand - they know what they need to profit.

What they have done, through government support and taxpayer support, is to intentionally overproduce so that the price stays low, sometimes below the cost of production. That kicks their competition out of the market. Then they become the only player in town.

“Over time, it has extracted wealth and power from communities. We can see how that has impacted rural main streets. You can see the boarded-up storefronts. You can see the lack of economic opportunity.”

Gibbons says that corporations game the system by obtaining low-interest, federally guaranteed loans to build Cafos that then overproduce. But they know the government will buy up the surplus to stabilize prices.

“The system has been set up for the benefit of the factory farm corporations and their shareholders at the expense of family farmers, the real people, our environment, our food system,” he adds.

“The thing that is really pervasive about it is that they control the rules of the game because they control the democratic process. It’s a blueprint. We’re paying for our own demise.

“It would be a different argument if it was just based upon inevitability or based on competition. But it’s not based upon competition: it’s based upon squelching competition.”

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Yet few of the economic benefits spill down to the communities around them. Workers are often poorly paid; many are bussed in. That they often include immigrants has sharpened the criticism from men like Nick Schutt, who used to work at Iowa Select, driving pigs in livestock trucks and handling sows. He says he earned $23,000 a year for 12-hour days and no overtime.

Barb Kalbach is not optimistic about the future. Her son will not be taking over the farm. She hopes the land will stay in the family for at least another generation, but expects it to be rented out and subsumed into some larger operation.

But Kalbach fears something bigger than the loss of her own farm. Farmers are ageing and their children either have little interest in working the land or cannot afford the sophisticated equipment needed to compete with corporations.

“Investors buy the land, and they have tractors and combines that you can run by computer,” she said. “They’ll hire somebody to sit in a little office somewhere and run that stuff off the computer and farm the land that way. Now what you’ve done is you have lost the innate knowledge of how to grow food and raise animals. You’ve lost a whole generation of it, probably two. Now we are going to rely on a few corporations to decide who is going to eat and who isn’t. We’re one generation away from that picture right now.”

In Williams, Schutt says he’s seeing a community of owners become workers and relates it to being like Russia with serfs.

If you want to work on a farm, you’ll have to work for them.

Kalbach agrees. “I think [small farms] are done,” she said.

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3.1 - Historical Progression Excerpts taken from Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wieses’ publication called “Suburbanization in the United States after 1945” is used to preface the significance of suburbia.

Mass migration to suburban areas was a defining feature of American life after 1945. Before World War II, just 13% of Americans lived in suburbs. By 2010, however, suburbia was home to more than half of the U.S. population. The nation’s economy, politics, and society suburbanized in important ways.

Suburbia shaped habits of car dependency and commuting, patterns of spending and saving, and experiences with issues as diverse as race and taxes, energy and nature, privacy and community. The owner occupied, single-family home, surrounded by a yard, and set in a neighborhood outside the urban core came to define everyday experience for most American households, and in the world of popular culture and the imagination, suburbia was the setting for the American dream.

[Image 15] Pioneer mass-builder Fritz Burns developed Westchester in the late 1930s, devising many of the mass-production techniques adopted by postwar suburban builders through the United States.

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Postwar suburbia was built upon a prewar metropolitan landscape characterized by “segregated diversity,” a heterogeneous mix of landscapes, functions, and populations that emerged in the late 19th century. Prewar commuter suburbs with lush landscaping and large houses abutted farms and orchards, modest streetcar suburbs, and Main Street shopping districts. Elsewhere, smokestacks broke the rural skyline alongside worker housing. As geographers Richard Harris and Robert Lewis conclude, “Prewar suburbs were as socially diverse as the cities that they surrounded.”1 Ironically, this heterogeneous landscape, and especially the open spaces lying between and beyond it, was the setting for a massive wave of postwar suburbanization that was characterized by similarity and standardization.

This history originated in the chaotic transition to peacetime society after 1945. World War II migrations, military deployment, and demobilization compounded a housing shortage that dated back to the Depression. In 1945, experts estimated a shortage of 5 million homes nationwide. Veterans returned to “no vacancy” signs and high rents. As late as 1947, one-third were still living doubled up with relatives, friends, and strangers. American family life was on hold.

The solution to the housing crisis emerged from a partnership between government and private enterprise that exemplified the mixed Keynesian political economy of the postwar era JESUS OF

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The Federal government provided a critical stimulus to suburbanization through policies that revolutionized home building and lending, subsidized home ownership, and built critical suburban infrastructure, such as the new interstate highway system. Private enterprise, for its part, applied new mass production techniques and technologies tested during the war to ramp up home building. Key to this partnership was a New Deal–era agency, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).

At the heart of FHA policy was a mortgage insurance program that took the risk out of home lending and made the long-term (25–30 years), low-interest home mortgage the national standard. The FHA also granted low-interest construction loans to builders and established basic construction guidelines that set new nationwide building standards. Along with a companion program in the Veterans’ Administration (VA) created by the 1944 GI Bill, the FHA stimulated a flood of new construction that brought the price of home ownership within the reach of millions of families. “Quite simply,” concludes historian Kenneth Jackson, “it often became cheaper to buy than to rent.” Jackson also notes that these programs had a pro-suburban bias. FHA and VA requirements for standard setbacks, building materials, lot sizes, and other features ruled out loans to large sections of urban America while giving preference to new homes on the suburban fringe. By the 1950s, as many as one-third of home buyers in the United States received support from the FHA and VA programs, and home ownership rates rose from four in ten U.S. households in 1940 to more than six in ten by the 1960s.

The vast majority of these new homes were in the suburbs.

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Equally important to the postwar boom was a revolution in construction. In response to pent-up demand and new federal supports, a cohort of builder-developers modernized home building to achieve mass production. The new builders were young, bold, and creative; many were the children of immigrants. Using techniques pioneered by prewar builders, such as Fritz Burns of Los Angeles, and refined through work on large war construction projects, contractors streamlined home building, employing standardized parts and floor-plans, subassembly of doors and windows, and subdivision of labor to minimize the need for skilled or unionized workers. The scale of building took off. Whereas “large builders” in prewar America might have built 25 homes per year, by the late 1940s, large firms were building several hundred homes per year.

Annual housing starts leaped upward from 142,000 in 1944 to an average of 1.5 million per year in the 1950s.

The media hailed developers like Levitt as “community builders” because they not only subdivided land and built houses but created whole communities from scratch. Despite these accolades, historian Dolores Hayden points out that the drive for profit pushed community planning to the back burner in much of postwar suburbia. Developers often set aside space for civic facilities, but local taxpayers were responsible for the cost of parks, playgrounds, libraries, and other public amenities. . Levittown, Long Island, for example, was built without public sewers or even adequate septic tanks, forcing home

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-owner/taxpayers to make expensive upgrades after the Levitts moved on. Smaller builders were often even more frugal.

Thus, for many new suburbanites, the companion to low housing prices was a high tax bill. The ongoing struggle of many suburbanites to build a sense of community in the unfinished civic landscape of mass suburbia was a legacy of this era.

New residential suburbs represented just one element of the postwar suburban trend. By the early 1950s, commercial developers, corporate headquarters, big retailers and other businesses, were also migrating to the suburban fringe, setting the stage for a wholesale reorganization of metropolitan economies by the end of the century. Aided by federal tax policies such as accelerated depreciation that subsidized new buildings over the maintenance of existing ones, retailers like Macy’s and Allied Stores opened new suburban branches to capture consumer dollars that traditionally flowed to their downtown stores. Architect-developers like Victor Gruen—who designed many early suburban shopping centers, including the nation’s first indoor shopping mall, the Southdale Center in suburban Minneapolis, 1956—evangelized the new shopping center as a modern civic center, a privately-built “public” space that would replace the traditional downtown. Corporate headquarters, and other offices also began a slow shift to suburban locations.

Attracted by the prestige value of elite suburbia, Fortune 500 companies such as General Foods, Reader’s Digest and Connecticut General Life Insurance built landscaped campus “estates” in suburbs such as Westchester County, New York, and Bloomfield, Connecticut, during the 1950s, signaling a trend that peaked in the 1980s. In the Washington, D.C., area, government agencies also shifted to suburbia, led by the Central Intelligence Agency, which broke ground on its new campus headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in 1957.

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In recent years, the suburbs came under a new round of criticism, this time perhaps the harshest yet. While bands like Green Day and Arcade Fire wailed on the suburbs for killing youthful freedom and joy... echoing generations of suburban critics, writers like Fortune Magazine’s Leigh Gallagher took it a step further by declaring “The End of the Suburbs” in her 2013 best-selling book. The alarm was justifiably stoked by the Great Recession of 2007– 2009, which devastated millions of American families who lost their homes to foreclosure, or saw their suburban home values plummet. MThese concerns, along with worries over sprawl’s negative impacts on climate change and millennials’ desires for more urban styles of living, fueled a back-to-the-city movement. Writers like Gallagher contended this was the end of the line for the suburbs. Americans were finally turning their backs on the form, reversing a long history of sprawling development.

“Speaking simply,” she wrote, “more and more Americans don’t want to live there anymore.” Yet, different trends suggest otherwise.

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Immigrants, young families, seniors emotionally attached to their homes, and others continued gravitating toward suburban homeplaces, for a host of reasons—whether good schools, nostalgia, ethnic familiarity, jobs, or few good alternatives.

Recent data suggests a return of suburban growth, after a post-recession slowdown.

[Image 16] Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 Census,

In turn, contemporary suburbia is showing signs of change, adaptation, and stasis—all at once. As Manuel Pastor noted at a recent roundtable discussion on Suburban Crisis, Suburban Regeneration “the suburbs have a future, but the future ain’t what it used to be.” Some suburbs have transformed into ethnoburbs that support the values and needs of new immigrants, some have spawned social justice movements, others are adapting to aging populations through innovative retrofitting, while still others persist seemingly untouched, clinging to deeply entrenched traditions. The discourse of suburbia’s demise may have attracted much public attention, but it masks the fascinating ways that the nation’s suburbs continue to claim a central, dynamic place in American life.

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Urban Neighborhood c. 1750-1850

Urban Neighborhood c. 1860 Railway Suburbs Urban Neighborhood c. 1920 Streetcar Suburbs

Urban Neighborhood c. 1940 Automobile Suburbs

Urban Neighborhood c. 1970 Suburbia

Urban Neighborhood

Exurbia

c. 2000 - current

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3.2 - Peripheral Communities In this section, an article from Forbes magazine explains how the optimism for “the death of the suburb” is no longer as Americans look to develop even farther outside the metropolitan areas in what they call the exurb or ‘peripheral communities’.

With the aging of the millennial generation, growing interest from minorities and immigrants, and land outside the metropolitan hitting all times lows, exurbs are getting a fresh infusion of residents looking for child-friendly, affordable, lower-density living.

A noticeable takeoff in suburban growth started in 2013, following a stall-out in the Great Recession. This year research from Brookings confirms that peripheral communities..

[Image 17] Suburban sprawl adjacent to farmland as featured on Daily Yonder.

the newly minted suburbs of the 1990s and early 2000s -- are growing more rapidly than denser, inner ring areas.

Peripheral, recent suburbs accounted for roughly 43% of all U.S. residences in 2010. Between July 2013 and July 2014, core urban communities lost a net 363,000 people overall, Brookings demographer Bill Frey reports, as migration increased to suburban and exurban counties. The biggest growth was in exurban areas, or the “suburbiest” places on the periphery.

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Annual Growth Rates for Urban and Suburban Counties

[Image 18] William H. Fry analysis of US population estimates

Urban Core

Emerging Suburb

Mature Suburb

Exurb

How could this be? If you read most major newspapers, or listened to NPR or PBS, you would think that the bulk of American job and housing growth was occurring closer to the inner core. Yet more than 80% of employment growth from 2007 to 2013 was in the newer suburbs and exurbs. Between 2012 and 2015, as the economy improved, occupied suburban office space rose from 75% of the market to 76.7%, according to the real estate consultancy Costar.

These same trends can be seen in older cities as well as the Sun Belt. Cities such as Indianapolis and Kansas City have seen stronger growth in the suburbs than in the core.

In 2011, new urbanist pundit Chris Leinberger suggested outer ring suburbs were destined to become “wastelands” or, as another cheerily described them, “slumburbs” inhabited by the poor and struggling minorities chased out of the gentrifying city.

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In this worldview, “peak oil” was among the things destined to drive people out of the exurbs . So convinced of the exurbs decline that some new urbanists were already fantasizing that suburban three-car garages would be “subdivided into rental units with street front cafés, shops, and other local businesses,” while abandoned pools would become skateboard parks.

This perspective naturally appeals to people who write most of our urban coverage from such high-density hot spots as Brooklyn, Manhattan, Washington, D.C., or San Francisco.

And to be sure, all these places continue to attract bright people and money from around the world.

Yet for the vast majority, particularly families, such cities are too expensive, congested and often lack decent public schools.

For those who can’t afford super-expensive houses and the cost of private education, the suburbs, particularly the exurbs, remain a better alternative.

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Potentially, the greatest source of exurban and peripheral revival lies with the maturation of the millennial generation.

Millennials -- born between 1982 and 2002 -- are widely portrayed as dedicated city dwellers. That a cohort of young educated, affluent people should gravitate to urban living is nothing new. The roughly 20% who, according to an analysis by demographer Wendell Cox, live in urban cores may be brighter, and certainly more loquacious, than their smaller town counterparts, dominating media coverage of millennials. But the vast majority of millennials live elsewhere.

According to U.S. Census Bureau data released last month, 529,000 Americans ages 25 to 29 moved from cities out to the suburbs in 2014 while 426,000 moved in the other direction. Among younger millennials, those in their early 20s, the trend was even starker: 721,000 moved out of the city, compared with 554,000 who moved in.

This may well reflect rising cost pressures, as well as lower priced housing many millennials can afford. Three-quarters, according to one recent survey, want a single-family house, which is affordable most often in the further out periphery .

Future trends are likely to be shaped by an overlooked fact: as people age, they change their priorities. As the economist Jed Kolko has pointed out, the proclivity for urban living peaks in the mid to late 20s and drops notably later. Over 25% of people in their mid-20s, he found, live in urban neighborhoods; but by the time they move into their mid-30s, it drops to 18% or lower. In 2018, according to Census estimates, the number of millennials entering their 30s will be larger than those in their 20s, and the trend will only get stronger as the generation ages.

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Roughly 90% of communities’ population growth that can be attributed to millennials since 2000 has taken place outside of the urban core.

To be sure, millennials are moving to the suburbs from the city at a lower rate than past generations , but this is more a reflection of slower maturation and wealth accumulation.

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When millennials move they seem likely to not move to the nice old suburbs, or the deteriorating one, but those more far-flung suburban communities that offer larger and more affordable housing, good schools, parks and lower crime rates.

Among the research that confirms this is a study released this year by the Urban Land Institute, historically hostile to suburbs, which found that some 80% of current millennial homeowners live in single-family houses and 70% of the entire generation expects to be living in one by 2020.

The future of exurbia is far from dead; it’s barely begun.

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4.1 - Flyover Country

Looking from the window seat on a long plane flight, you might have noticed that large swaths of the United States are divided into a latticework of farms, towns and forests. The cells of that grid, each one mile to a side, are the visible result of a land planning system first proposed by Thomas Jefferson more than two centuries ago. It is briefly defined using Wikipedia’s entry for the Land Ordinance of 1785.

The Public Land Survey System (PLSS) is the surveying method developed and used in the United States to plat, or divide, real property for sale and settling. Also known as the Rectangular Survey System, it was created by the Land Ordinance of 1785 to survey land ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Paris in 1783, following the end of the American Revolution. Beginning with the Seven Ranges, in present-day Ohio, the PLSS has been used as the primary survey method in the United States.

After the Revolutionary War and as the United States expanded westward, the country needed a systematic way to divide its newly acquired lands. The original colonies were surveyed using the British system of “metes and bounds,” with parcels delineated using local geography and cataloged with riveting language: “Beginning at corner No. 1, a hemlock post, 4 in. square, 24 in. above ground, located on the Takotna Highway about 1/4 mile southeasterly from its intersection with the left bank of Kuskokwim River…”

That approach doesn’t scale very well, and Jefferson, an ambitious politician who would become president about two decades later, was made chairman of a committee to find an alternative. He proposed to slice the young United States into gridded plots of land that would support his ideal country of “yeoman farmers” who would form the backbone of American democracy.

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[Image 19] Images from @the.jerfferson.grid initiated by Shabtai Pinchevsky

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[Image 20] Diagram showing how the method of subdivision can be applied from the scale of the country down to the scale of a single lot. (Wiki)

[Image 21] Example of road system in a PLSS area; Nebraska(Wiki)

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[Image 22] Kent County, Michigan in 1885 as a PLSS example, showing 24 named townships and sectional subdivisions. (Wiki) LINEAR

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4.2 - Lines and Exurbs RURAL compact village center surrounded by open field and small farms greatly varied lot sized blocks often irregular particularly in pre-railroad towns daily shopping typically in small grouping of Main Street storefronts URBAN - EARLY CORE located near waterfront or early manufacturing mixture of house sizes and of use within a block face rectilinear plans most common

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short blocks typical daily shopping typical in large market building or grouping of small storefront often with nearby area for open stalls.

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SUBURBAN - STREETCAR located along streetcar lines forming narrow linear “spokes” out from city center rectilinear plans most common

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uniform lot size with short block daily shopping typically at trolley stops in city center SUBURBAN - EARLY AUTOMOBILE located between (and beyond) “spokes” formed by street car lines curvilinear or rectilinear plans longer block typical blocks restricted to large houses or small houses close together daily shopping typically in early small-scale shopping center, major shopping centers in center of city LINEAR

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SUBURBAN - POST-WORLD WAR II subdivisions often on large tracts located near arterial streets or freeways curvilinear plans with longer block lengths loop roads within neighborhood with houses of similar sizes bordering into cul-de-sacs and gated communities daily shopping in neighborhood shopping centers on arterial streets; major shopping downtown first and then moves to suburban locations and malls POST SUBURBAN - SLUG small subdivisions may be scattered among rural areas zoning can require large lot size or large homes curvilinear plans with long block lengths subdivisions with similar house sizes and price range daily shopping often not nearby and may be in big-box stores, major shopping in malls or big-box “power centers�

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EXURB - RESIDUAL FARMLAND the beginnings of post suburban development piecemeal lot development in between suburbs and farmland zoning can require large lot size or large homes long block lengths and found sparsely along major connectors daily shopping is not nearby and will be in big-box stores, major shopping in malls or big-box “power centers�

4.3 - Identifying Trends

So far this form of development over rural land that is released through industrialization has gone by many names.

- Exurb

- Peripheral Development

- SLUG (Spread-out, Low-density, Unguided Growth)

- Post-Suburban

- Post-Modern

- Unincorporated Land

- Residual Farmland The list goes on. But how do we identify this landscape and what does it look like? The following section will show a series of case studies in the Midwest Mega region, primarily focusing on the outskirts of Columbus Ohio and how residential development is happening in my own backyard.

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All of the following landscapes pictured were taken within a 3 mile radius of the classified metropolitan area surrounding the Midwest city of Columbus, Ohio. In this specific example (scales vary) the end of the suburbs, pictured on the right, measure 3 miles to the periphery of the page on the left. Take note that this is one cohesive image of sprawl into residual farmland on this spread.

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40.017926, -83.191328 LINEAR

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40.187756, -83.630087 LINEAR

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40.181684, -82653856 LINEAR

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40.260153, -83.431349 LINEAR

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4.3 - Piecemeal Parcels

In the early stages of development, settlers most desired practice when planning their estate is to scour areas on the outskirts of the city for affordable property that has been released by farmers or parceled off from leases of developers.

Then, an axillary structure, the barn, is built for beginning to farm the land, move livestock or pets, or as shelter and storage as they prepare to build the house. In the final step shown, an addition can be made for temporary living quarters as they begin to work the land or bring in infrastructure.

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Eventually, a permanent house is built. Following its bloom, additional axillary structures are typically added as the settlers begin to expand into the land and are built as needed, piecemeal like the steps before and after. As the children move out, the parents get older and can no longer manage such a property by themselves. Fewer and fewer people are holding onto land for their children and they therefore sell a large chunk to make it more manageable and prepare for retirement.

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First development happens slow, mimicking the pattern as seen previously. Then as the primary settlers pass on, and urbanization expands into this domain, the land is released in mass and attracts new buyers - even developers for suburbs thus creating either the new exurb, or a full of suburbia.

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5.1 - Rem’s ‘Countryside’ “This show has nothing to do with art, nothing to do with architecture.

It’s a show about sociality, anthropology and politics.”

-Rem Koolhaas on his exhibition at the Guggenheim

Countryside, The Future opened February 20th, 2020 and was on show for six months at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The following information was gathered from Dezeen’s coverage of the event as well as the Guggenheim’s web page.

A central thesis of the exhibition is that the current form of urban life has necessitated the organization, abstraction, and automation of the countryside at an unprecedented scale. Data storage, fulfillment centers, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, robotic automation, economic innovation, worker migration, and the private purchase of land for ecological preservation are in many cases more actively explored and experimented with in the countryside than the city.

“In the past decade, I have noticed that while much of our energies and intelligence have been focused on the urban areas of the world, the countryside has changed dramatically under the influence of global warming, the market economy, American tech companies, African and European initiatives, Chinese politics, and other forces. This story is largely untold, and it is particularly meaningful for AMO to present it in one of the world’s great museums in one of the world’s densest cities.”

-Rem Koolhaas

The exhibition begins the way the accompanying book ends: with a tapestry of questions, almost a thousand in total, that simultaneously declare the thoroughness of the investigation and a still-unsated curiosity for the countryside, or what Rem Koolhaas calls an ‘ignored realm.’ Ignored by whom? Rem, for one. The declaration isn’t hubris, it’s a challenge for us all, countryside inhabitants and experts included, to think anew about what may seem foreign or familiar.”

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[Image 22] The Guggeheim exhibtion of Countryside, The Future (Dezeen)

As the exhibition unfolds, it addresses questions about the development and role of the countryside over time: What was the countryside historically, what did the major political figures of the twentieth century prepare for us, what is the current condition, what needs to be done for the future, and in what ways could this take shape?

“Semiotics Column,� created by journalist Niklas Maak with students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in which one of the few vertical elements of the Guggenheim Museum building is plastered with a matrix of images from advertisements, fashion campaigns, toys, and country music to illustrate fantasies and stereotypes of rural life.

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[Image 23] The Guggeheim exhibtion of Countryside, The Future (Dezeen) 92

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Level 3: Political Redesign Through a series of eight case studies focused on the twentieth century, this section provides representative examples of “political redesign,” the application of political will and vision to the transformation of the countryside at territorial scale. Such acts, proposed and effected by various political regimes, are profiled, from dictatorship to democracy.

Level 4: (Re-)Population This section considers the countryside as a frontier for experimentation. A carousel of photographic evidence, paired with firsthand texts and stories by and from locals, As Koolhaas notes in the exhibition text: What we collect here is evidence of new thinking—in China, in Kenya, in Germany, France, and Italy, in the US:

As soon as we leave the urban condition behind us, we confront newness and the profoundly unfamiliar. new ways of planning, new ways of exploring, new ways of acting with media, new ways of owning, paying, renting, new ways of welcoming, new ways in which the countryside is inhabited today.”

Level 6: Cartesianism The street grid, an imposition of mathematical abstraction on varied terrains and unruly human affairs, has been seen as the hallmark of urban rationalism S I T U AT E D

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5.2 - Phelp’s ‘Sequel to Suburbia’ Sequel to Suburbia: Glimpses of America’s Post Suburban Future is an interest in politics and planning of suburban transformation which the author, Nicholas A. Phelps, found interest in the Joel Garreau’s term “edge city”. The excerpts taken from the book beyond are stemmed form this work as well as “Governing Post-Suburban Growth”, the prequel which was written in 2008.

The Midwest does not appear to offer an auspicious vantage point from which to reconsider aspects of existing urban theory. It is somewhere and something destined to be overtaken by some other urban form as the urban frontier left it behind.

However, living in the region prompts me to question elements of existing urban theories. In particular, the modern ideal of the suburban and its specific relation and outlining of the American Dream.

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In particular, is it surprising to find that the sprawl outlining Midwest cities is that of third or more iterations of development.

This begs the question about the land development process and whether it was all of one piece. This inquiry could lead to something bigger in the research agenda concerning what may come after suburbia.

This agenda certainly includes questions about the character of settlements that could be considered post-suburban. It also includes the question of what post-suburban politics might consists of, specifically regarding the development of agricultural industry and technology.

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In the years after World War II, American people and businesses of all sorts moved out of cities or approached them by way of the housing tracts, malls, and campus industry and office developments that steadily coalesced into a distinct and expansive new ring of outer suburbs around the major cities of the United States. They came to form a nearly contiguous conglomeration or matrix of elements in an outward expansion of America’s major cities.

However like the urban extensions of European towns and cities, they were, from the start, more diverse in their origins in complexions and we had come to believe: sometimes home to the sorts of major employers that attracted subsequent residential development, sometimes representing bedroom communities that demanded shopping malls and employment opportunities, sometimes coalescing further around railroad station towns but at other times stuck out instead in vast expanses crisscrossed it bounded by major highways.

Although there are some reasons to dub the outer suburbs a “geometry of nowhere”, to introduce James Howard Kunstler’s term, there is little doubt that they have come to represent a distinct place of residence and way of life, and the site of much new economic opportunity.

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Indeed, as Richard a walker contended sometime ago, it is hard to conceive of success of postwar America capitalism without these new suburbs. They represented a propitious “spatial fix” (or geographical embodiment of) for the peculiar strengths of American capitalism during the time and help to generate the profits being produced by American businesses of all sorts during this time. They were the embodiment of America’s fortis mass production mass conception economy.

During the 1950s and 60s, government articulated a national interest in central city revitalization, while at the same time promoting massive redistribution of population in capital investment from central cities to suburbs. The benefits of employment decentralization to the outer suburbs clearly accrue to the federal government in terms of national economic performance. It hardly seems credible that the federal government was not aware of the fact, and it clearly was complicit in encouraging a process. Federal and state investments in major new route infrastructure, incentives in the form of mortgage relief, a growth machine politics, and the fledgling, and permissive, planning control of rule counties created something of a tabula rasa for development on unincorporated land.

This is at times fairly limited markets for development so local banks, insurance companies, real estate brokers, and land speculators, developers, and House builders grow international business entities.

The development of outer suburbia became a national business.

The business of producing the built environment - what David Harvey terms the secondary circuit of capital may yet become America’s primary international business.

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Although suburbanization was not confined to the United States the mass suburbanization of single-family detached houses, front yards, shopping malls, auto-mobile dependent lifestyle, and low density sprawl was peculiar to it.

Suburbs have overwhelmed the centers of cities, creating metropolitan regions largely for formed of suburban parts. So much were cities overwhelmed that at the end of the 20th century it was possible to regard the outer suburbs of America cities as a little short of a new urbanity.

Are the outer suburbs instead by now the urbanity of an older, first modernity. They were the ultimate logical expression of the sorts of personal mobility and the attendant organization of land use promised by the motor car as early as the first decade of the 20th century, and expression of bureaucratic, organized capitalism, and the rational special configuration best suited to fighting late modernities Cold War. 98

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Once a spatial fix allowing American capitalism to flourish, suburbia has now become a barrier to for the accumulation in the United States. These contradictions, it can be suggested, were latent in the format of an outer suburban development in the web of interest that stimulated such development.

Some of the barriers that suburbs themselves now represent to future accumulation are registered and present interests such as transit oriented development, smart growth, the retrofitting or repairing of suburbia, and new urbanism, each of which has embedded in it and explicit critique of the interest end of a development for men that are considered to have produce suburban sprawl.

For Ulrich Beck, a politics of a secondary modernity has emerged as a result of the unintended consequences of a first modernity. Modern capitalism produced a set of significant environmental and social side effects. These have been as much product of the state as the private sector – S I T U AT E D

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after all, the private and public sectors became barely distinguishable in what John Kenneth Galbraith memorably turned the techno structure of society in late modernity. Though what people have in mind when they refer to suburban sprawl is something natural or spontaneous it should be remembered that sprawl has been thoroughly planned.

The contradictions of the first modernity are literally seen in concrete in the outer suburbs themselves, and the vast concrete and tarmac expenses of parking lots and structures and building setbacks from curvilinear road patterns. They are registered in the separation of land uses and all that at this entails in terms of the daily commute, not just back-and-forth from home to work but also between home and any number of amenities in services, such as schools, sports, entertainment, and health facilities. They are [Image 24] seen in the low densiThe cover of the book Sequel to Suburbia ty housing and its occupants, which present a formidable political barrier to infill and a greater density of residential development.

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It is apparent that the contradictions also represent enormous opportunities.

The estimated 6,000,000 acres of land in suburban corridors, which are developed at around 0.25 floor to area ratio as a result of being 75% devoted to parking, would supply 2/3 of the projected growth and housing needs and 3/4 of employment growth over the period 2010 to 2030.

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The glimpses of post suburban America presented here underline the difficulties of effecting the sort of systemic change that would be needed for such a transformation of the suburbs to occur. However, they also provide evidence here and there of something altered in the popular desire for and experience of the suburban way of life, the political will that can exist not just in incorporated communities but also in surrounding major re-development opportunities on unincorporated land and even partial examples of intergovernmental cooperation that hint at the revival of metropolitan regional scale governance.

In and of themselves, suburbs are rarely the focal point of academic theory building. Only very recently have the subjects of suburbia and suburbanization submitted to significant revision and the recognition of a greater historical and present variation in suburbs and their complexion than was previously acknowledged.

Yet a cohesive field of suburban studies has yet to emerge from the fragmented approaches to understanding the suburbs foundation, for example, planning, sociology, architecture and urban design, urban morphology, post modern urban theory, and urban and historical geography.

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Commentators have been vague about how to define post suburban communities in geographic terms, with Robert E Lang’s “edgeless cities” sprawling from inner suburban to exurban locations, while Robert Fishman’s “technoburbs” and Rob Kling and colleagues “post-suburbs” have been defined at an urban and regional scale.

I argue that post suburban communities in their politics can and should be positioned within Weidner Metropolitan urban systems. That is, post suburbs take their place among a range of different settlement types across Metro regions, and their dynamics are as worthy of study as are, for example, the decline of industrial suburbs or the gentrification of inner cities.

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5.3 - Pentacost’s ‘Soil-erg’

Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer whose work titled Soil-Erg first premiered in a dOCUMENTA(13) exhibition in 2012. Her words about the project are as follows.

[She] was invited to participate in dOCUMENTA(13) specifically for a section of the exhibition organized under the idea of the seed. One can look at seeds as a material form of collective knowledge. Seeds constitute the largest, longest running open source system in history, making them an essential part of the human commons. Because the seed is such a compact, portable package, it is easily commodifiable. I wanted to think beyond the seed. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson wrote: “Darwin proposed a theory of natural selection and evolution in which the unit of survival was either the family line or the species or subspecies or something of the sort. But today it is quite obvious that this is not the unit of survival in the real biological world. The unit of survival is organism plus environment. In this view, soil is the other half of seeds, the organism plus, the context in which they come alive and reproduce, the locus of their survival and the determination of their potential. Soil is another part of the commons we have all inherited but it is rapidly being destroyed, eroded, depleted and not replenished.

Is s oi l com m odi f i ab le?

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If we leave aside the question of real estate for a moment, soil is not in fact convenient to commodify. How have corporations dealt with this? In a move typical of capitalism they have reduced soil to components that can be circulated as products.

These include synthetic fertilizers as well as pesticides and herbicides: “inputs� which purportedly replace the labor of maintaining good soil. (Labor must be reduced by technology to increase the profit margin of production.) The significance of genetically modified seeds, the privatized fetish form of the seed, is that they work as part of a package comprised of the seed, the synthetic fertilizer and the herbicide which the seed has been designed to tolerate. GM seeds are actually sowing the entire corporatized system of industrial agriculture. In the end this system destroys healthy soil.

G o o d soil i s a l i ve : s t r u c tu rally and b i o l o g i c al ly i t i s a l i v i n g sys tem. W h e n the s o i l i s m a i nt ained in a n e co l o gi c al ly s e nsi t i ve way it n ot o nly nu r t u re s p lant s , it a l so h e l p s p rote c t a g ai n s t weeds a n d pe s ts . B u t i t req uire s a co nt i nu al ly evo lv i ng , s i te-sp eci f ic k now l e d g e a s well as s ust a i n ed l a b o r. G o o d s o i l is t h e re su l t of a s u s t a i ne d pract i ce an d a p ra c t i ce t hat i s s o c i al as m u ch a s i t i s bi o l o gi c al.

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5.4 - Prospective Grab

These were sources in theory that I did not get the chance to delve into but would like to continue, given the chance. Prospective sources for foundational theory practice.

Architecture without Architects Bernard Rudofsky (1964)

Heterotopia Michel Foucault (1966)

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We Have Never Been Modern Bruno Latour (1991)

Bunker Archaeology Paul Virilio (1967)

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PROJECTING LANDSCAPES

6.1 - The Story So Far

The goal up until this point so far is to establish a trend in Midwest beliefs, history, and economy that establishes a consistent and ripe for picking location for developing trends in real estate, specifically residential, with increased urbanization as a means to project the future of the landscape into rural developments.

We have established that there are pressures for development from each side of the outer ring - industrialization freeing up farmland as small scale farming ventures are absorbed and released and millennial and minorities in search of affordable land that is still commutable to the major metropolitan. We have identified the moving trends of suburbs through America’s history and come to the conclusion that things are not in fact strictly urbanizing and densifying, but the want for land and property to make into each own’s is a popular trend in homeownership and is continuing to rise.

Then we established what this preliminary development looks like in terms of the landscape, parallelization, and piecemeal construction methods with acknowledgment of the Jeffersonian grid. Identifying both the causes of residual farmland then the effects of it as seen from above. Finally, we call into play the work of other’s in order to situate the argument within a larger context and allude to foundations in theory that would be expanded upon in future iterations.

All caught up?

Now what?

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6.2 - “The Countryside as a City” Projected Landscapes, a proposal for a studio with completion drawn from The Taiqian Studio’s M.Arch program from 2015 at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design shows methods in maintaining the countryside and allowing infrastructure to guide where developments happen in semi rural areas, rather than the proximity to cities.

The studio prompt is based on a typological approach to the problem of the city. An investigation into and redefinition of the city reveals its persistent architectures, or dominant types. Any attempt to define type is an attempt to define what is typical; what is most typical is common to all. Thus type is an effective heuristic device through which to locate commonalities. The goal of a search for what is common in architecture is not formal or tectonic similitude but a commonly held idea that invests architecture with a social and political role.

The design task for the studio was to conceive of the restructured villages as a common framework that would allow housing culture in communal facilities and work spaces to cultivate an economy alongside the existing agricultural base.

Indeed, the title ‘Countryside as a City’ is a provocation that leads to the rethinking of the age-old division between rural and urban, between countryside and city. In order for these new towns to exist as small cities and to reify the idea of the city as a plural and diverse space of coexistence, it must offer a sense of familiarity and community as well as the possibility for surprise and anonymity.

The following proposals, again completed by the

M.Arch class at Harvard in the Taigian Studio, are examples of this testament and exercises in establishing “The Countryside as a City”.

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WITHIN THE FRAME Carly Augustine, MArch II, 2015 Nicolas Lee, MArch II, 2015

[Image 25] Satellite view. Villages are consolidated in a single structure that frames different landscapes.

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[Image 26] Bands of housing, industry, and commerical buildings form a square.

[Image 27] Fragment plan. Frames within frames generating the new town.

[Image 28] Ground-floor plan. Dwellings consist of solid-void spaces moving from private to public areas

[Image 29] Model. Housing forms a field of individual pavilions that almost touch.

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COMMON FIELDS Feng Shen, MUAD, 2015 Zhhenhuan Xu, MArch II, 2015

[Image 30] Satellite view. The new village is a delicate field laid over the countryside.

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[Image 31] Plan detail. Even grid of structure is adapted to form a variety of building types

[Image 32] Model. Public buildings and amenities are places under table structures.

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[Image 33] Closeness to nature in the village heightens the experience of seasonal variation.

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NON-URBAN APPARATUS Shaoliang Hua, MArch II, 2015 Jyri Eskola, MArch II, 2015 Radhya Adityavarman, MLA, 2015

[Image 34] Satellite view. Cores of existing villages are linked to form two linear towns.

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[Image 35] Plan detail. Linking elements are thin bands of apartments, schools, industry, and amenities.

[Image 37] Site plan. The land of the existing village is rehabiltated into agricultural land by the houses/farms.

PROJECTING

[Image 36] The new town forms a line in the landscape.

[Image 38] Apartment interior.

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6.3 - Moving Horizontally

In a short tenure of American culture on its landscape, a legacy of linear association – horizontal thinking – has evolved. The linear is a manifest in landscape arrangement where all country roads, town streets, property lines and the relatively few trees resemble a straight edge, by perfect design.

The people, the methods, the industries, and us, the designers, have thought too long of it as linear - that which lies directly and inevitably in front. But as we ask ourselves issues as to what does this landscape look like tomorrow, how do Americans project themselves onto the landscape, and what does the politics and planning have in store for the Midwest’s future - I hope designers begin to see what the American Dream intended: opportunity.

In a perfect world, the projects presented in the previous section, “Countryside as the City”, would be practiced on our own landscapes. Studied and documented to present potential outcomes for design of residual farmland. Speaking for ourselves as tenants of the land, rather than waiting for another expansion around the periphery of upcoming cities.

Allowing the countryside to remain in tact while still infiltrating it with infrastructure and opportunity could bring the Midwest into the post-modern translation of the American Dream.

Dedicated to The Barn, whose journey throughout history is ingrained in piecemeal construction and residual farmland and holds the bucolic landscapes of mixed farming that may survive only as nostalgia.

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R ES I DUAL FA R M LA ND

Residual Farmland examines the evolution and current urban development and subsequent form of the Midwest, with the Great Lakes mega-region being highlighted as an important case study. As the scale of farm operations in the Midwest increases and the number of farms decreases, driven by mechanization and the other technological advances in agriculture geared toward reducing costs of production, families in pursuit of land increasingly encroach upon the hinterlands of these places. With no steak in the land’s production or need for it to work functionally, American’s project their own identity onto the land.

“The framework of growth, however hastily devised, tends to become the permanent structure. For better or for worse, the American suburb is a remarkable and probably lasting achievement.”

– Kenneth Jackson,

Crabgrass Frontier

This work was completed by Clare Knecht, a first year M.Arch student, in part of Design Research: Methods and Strategies (ARCH7100) in the Spring of 2020 with guidance of Matthew Jull, PhD, and Teaching Instructor, Jonah Pruitt at the University of Virginia.