building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

island is so out of control that it is closed from the outside and transformed in a
giant penitentiary” 111 .
Furthermore, Ilardi highlights the fact that one of the most widespread town
planning models in the U.S.A. in the last decades is the CID, Common Interest
development. “A series of agency put in touch a group of citizens with the same age,
the same taste or who simply share the same idea of dwelling […] at that point they
buy a plot of land and they privatise it” 112 . The idea of the Promised Land is
reflected over time with more immediate and materialistic versions. These
attempts establish a behaviour, which has to be interpreted as the umpteenth
effort to repeat the utopian experiments of the nineteenth century, typical of the
frontier era.
However, together with the particular development model recalled by Ilardi, we
have to remember those planning activities called CDP, census‐designated places,
namely the radicalization and the establishment of the dream of equality. This
generated models to organise urban space which, in reality, incorporated all the
defects of the town, creating places that simply refused social dialectical skills by
fancifully abolishing the problem. The urban shapes created by such settlements are
limited to a few stereotyped, sometimes closed and militarized variations, very
often dystopic, landscapes of the psyche and of the market more than of nature.
The phenomenon of American antiurbanism is related to these contradictions in the
relationship man‐nature‐city: it is not a simply opposition to urbanism but suggests
particular forms of association and Weltanschauung.
In his researches Michael J. Thompson shows how “antiurbanism is, then, a product
not only of certain political and economic interests, it is also a product of certain
forms of consciousness” 113 : more than an intellectual tradition or a conservative
reaction to modernity product of the fear of city (and her life‐style).
111 ILARDI, Emiliano, La frontiera contro la metropoli; spazi, media e politica nell’ immaginario urbano
americano, Napoli, Liguori Editore, 2010, p.73‐74 [English text translated by the editor from Italian]
112 Ibid.
113 THOMPSON, Michael J. (ed.), Fleeing the City. Studies in the Culture and Politics of Antiurbanism,
New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 12
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