LAND USE & TRANSPORTATION

Land use, transportation, and built form are the keystones of the world about us. They are the literal, physical form of the human-made world, a world that most of us inhabit on a daily basis. How do we use the land, how do we get around, what do we build? These all say much about us as individuals, communities, regions, and cultures.

This is, in essence, the built world, but it’s also the mechanized world. It is the order that humanity wishes to impose upon nature and the environment. What is more artificial, for example, than the modern city? And by being artificial, what can be more telling a mirror for human nature? But it is more than artifice, it is also a statement of value, from the brick and terra-cotta palaces of the Gilded Age to the cheap disposable houses of midcentury America, each and every thing that we build says something not just about who and what we are, but also who and what we hope (or hoped) to be. Learn what J. B. Jackson called the “human-altered landscape,” and you learn not just the realities, but also the realized and shattered dreams, and sometimes the nightmares.

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MAX at Night