The momentous changes which are transforming American life call for a
new exploration of the economic and cultural landscape. In this book
Sharon Zukin links our ever-expanding need to consume with two
fundamental shifts: places of production have given way to spaces for
services and paperwork, and the competitive edge has moved from
industrial to cultural capital. From the steel mills of the Rust Belt,
to the sterile malls of suburbia, to the gentrified urban centers of our
largest cities, the "creative destruction" of our economy--a process by
which a way of life is both lost and gained--results in a dramatically
different landscape of economic power. Sharon Zukin probes the depth and
diversity of this restructuring in a series of portraits of changed or
changing American places. Beginning at River Rouge, Henry Ford's
industrial complex in Dearborn, Michigan, and ending at Disney World,
Zukin demonstrates how powerful interests shape the spaces we inhabit.
Among the landscapes she examines are steeltowns in West Virginia and
Michigan, affluent corporate suburbs in Westchester County, gentrified
areas of lower Manhattan, and theme parks in Florida and California. In
each of these case studies, new strategies of investment and employment
are filtered through existing institutions, experience in both
production and consumption, and represented in material products,
aesthetic forms, and new perceptions of space and time. The current
transformation differs from those of the past in that individuals and
institutions now have far greater power to alter the course of change,
making the creative destruction of landscape the most important cultural
product of our time. Zukin's eclectic inquiry into the parameters of
social action and the emergence of new cultural forms defines the
interdisciplinary frontier where sociology, geography, economics, and
urban and cultural studies meet.
