Crossing the Expendable Landscape

In a series of loosely organized chapters, biographer and essayist Drew (Nelson Algren: A Walk on the Wild Side) offers a disconsolate, myopic look at the origins of ""the late twentieth-century landscape"" and its expression in the architecture and planning of several American communities. The book's scope--Drew visited Dallas, Las Vegas, Hilton Head, S.C., and Disney's new Celebration, in Florida, among other cities and towns--precludes comprehensive discussions of her main topics (unregulated capitalism, poor urban planning, white flight); too often she abandons objective analysis for impressionistic attacks on the easiest, vaguest targets: corporations, speculators and junk-bond salespeople. Concentration on more banal forces such as population growth, increased corporate competition and the aesthetically indifferent economics of mass-produced, affordable modern housing would have provided needed balance. (To claim, for instance, that shopping malls were ""engineered by marketing experts to control how people moved and behaved"" is to underestimate consumer fondness for the convenience, selection and lower prices malls provide.) Drew does suggest a positive alternative by praising Disney's controversial town of Celebration and other experiments by the New Urbanism movement, but the book's predominant tone is as somber as the landscapes it condemns. (Nov.)