Crossing the Expendable Landscape - Softcover

Bettina Drew is the author of the critically acclaimed Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side, nominated for Book of the Year by the Chicago Sun-Times. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

"This is a lively book, leavening moral indignation with cool appraisal. It is a frightening book too, in terms of American democracy. The horrors of Stamford and the complacent rot of Hilton Head are no joke. Bettina Drew does not hesitate to denounce these things, and she begins at least to value the attempts of The New Urbanism to change them." Vincent Scully

"Bettina Drew's Crossing the Expendable Landscape is a sad and angry book, a melancholy contemporary travelogue sustained by acerbity and wit. Its theme is how wealth and power heartlessly condition our surroundings, leaving those of us without those resources to make our lives on the periphery or in the ruins of transient corporate empires. Ms. Drew's clear, balanced prose eloquently demonstrates that American capitalism is the most fearsome revolutionary force ever let loose on the planet and that, unchecked by the public interest, it grows less socially responsible every day." Robert Stone

Noted essayist Bettina Drew takes the reader on an in-depth exploration of several American cities-- Stamford, Hilton Head, Las Vegas, Dallas, Celebration-- to examine the consequences of built environments that fail to reflect regional, historic, aesthetic, and social values. Drew talks to the everyday people who live in these cities, along with the urban planners and developers who created them, about the cultural impact of big-business-inspired living. She concludes with an overview of the ways in which some architects and planners are now working to humanize American landscape development. Always searching for the impact of physical environment on human happiness, Drew focuses on what has gone so wrong with mass architecture and reflects on the possibilities for built environments in the future.

Bettina Drew is the author of the critically acclaimed Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side, nominated for Book of the Year by the Chicago Sun-Times. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.