How business appropriated the pastoral landscape, as seen in the
corporate campus, the corporate estate, and the office park.
By the end of the twentieth century, America's suburbs contained more
office space than its central cities. Many of these corporate workplaces
were surrounded, somewhat incongruously, by verdant vistas of broad
lawns and leafy trees. In Pastoral Capitalism, Louise Mozingo describes
the evolution of these central (but often ignored) features of postwar
urbanism in the context of the modern capitalist enterprise.
These new suburban corporate landscapes emerged from a historical moment
when corporations reconceived their management structures, the city
decentralized and dispersed into low-density, auto-dependent
peripheries, and the pastoral--in the form of leafy residential
suburbs--triumphed as an American ideal. Greenness, writes Mozingo, was
associated with goodness, and pastoral capitalism appropriated the
suburb's aesthetics and moral code. Like the lawn-proud suburban
homeowner, corporations understood a pastoral landscape's capacity to
communicate identity, status, and right-mindedness.
Mozingo distinguishes among three forms of corporate landscapes--the
corporate campus, the corporate estate, and the office park--and
examines suburban corporate landscapes built and inhabited by such
companies as Bell Labs, General Motors, Deere & Company, and Microsoft.
She also considers the globalization of pastoral capitalism in Europe
and the developing world including Singapore, India, and China. Mozingo
argues that, even as it is proliferating, pastoral capitalism needs
redesign, as do many of our metropolitan forms, for pressing social,
cultural, political, and environmental reasons. Future transformations
are impossible, however, unless we understand the past. Pastoral
Capitalism offers an indispensible chapter in urban history, examining
not only the design of corporate landscapes but also the economic,
social, and cultural models that determined their form.
