Deterioration

@misc{blake1964gods1,
    author = "Blake, P",
    title = "God's Own Junkyard, the Planned Deterioration of America's Landscape",
    year = "1964",
    howpublished = "New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston",
    note = "talkorigins\_source = {true}; raw\_reference = {Blake, P., 1964, God's Own Junkyard, the Planned Deterioration of America's Landscape: New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston.}"
}

@article{trachtenberg1964gods,
    author = "Trachtenberg, Alan and Blake, Peter",
    title = "God's Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America's Landscape",
    year = "1964",
    journal = "American Quarterly",
    url = "https://doi.org/10.2307/2711103",
    doi = "10.2307/2711103",
    number = "2",
    pages = "232",
    volume = "16"
}

@article{crossref1989natures,
    title = "NATURE'S JUNKYARD",
    year = "1989",
    journal = "The Sciences",
    url = "https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2326-1951.1989.tb02196.x",
    doi = "10.1002/j.2326-1951.1989.tb02196.x",
    number = "6",
    openalex = "W4249946176",
    pages = "56-56",
    volume = "29"
}

This remarkable volume tells the unique history of modernism as reflected in the teaching of architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. Tracing developments at the GSD, which was home from 1937 to 1952 of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, Anthony Alofsin reveals that America had initiated its own modern agenda before the arrival of the European modernist ideology. Filled with archival photographs and plans that have never been published before, this book will be of great interest to students and professionals in the fields of art, architecture, and design, as well as to architectural historians.

@article{doi105860choice401978,
    title = "The struggle for modernism: architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning at Harvard",
    year = "2002",
    journal = "Choice Reviews Online",
    abstract = "This remarkable volume tells the unique history of modernism as reflected in the teaching of architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. Tracing developments at the GSD, which was home from 1937 to 1952 of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, Anthony Alofsin reveals that America had initiated its own modern agenda before the arrival of the European modernist ideology. Filled with archival photographs and plans that have never been published before, this book will be of great interest to students and professionals in the fields of art, architecture, and design, as well as to architectural historians.",
    url = "https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.40-1978",
    doi = "10.5860/choice.40-1978",
    openalex = "W602191786"
}

Abstract Owen Gutfreund’s Twentieth-Century Sprawl explains important--and largely unexamined--changes in the American landscape. He offers an illuminating look at how highways have dramatically transformed American communities, aiding growth and development in unsettled areas and undermining existing urban centers. Gutfreund takes a “follow the money” approach to show how government policies--from as early as the 1890s--subsidized the spread of cities and fueled a chronic nationwide dependence on cars and roadbuilding, with little regard for expense, efficiency, ecological damage, or social equity. As federal, state, and local governments invested in toll-free highways, Americans moved in unprecedented numbers to newly accessible open land on the urban periphery. The consequence was the collapse of center cities, ballooning municipal debt, and rapidly increasing air pollution, not to mention profound changes in American society and culture. Gutfreund tells the story via case studies of three communities--Denver, Colorado; Middlebury, Vermont; and Smyrna, Tennessee. Different as these places are, they all show the ways that government-sponsored highway development radically transformed America’s cities and towns. Indeed, though seeming quite dissimilar, both Denver and Middlebury have crippling traffic problems; housing and commercial activity has sprawled outward, leaving downtown areas in danger of decay, while residents have longer commutes, fewer transportation options, and increasing concerns about air quality and environmental problems. Smyrna, once a dusty backwater, is now booming, thanks to its location near three interstate highways, which attracted a huge Nissan factory (the largest auto assembly plant in North America, the size of 92 football fields). Based on original research and vividly written, Twentieth-Century Sprawl makes a major contribution to our understanding of issues that still plague our cities and suburbs today.

@book{doi101093oso97801951414120010001,
    author = "Gutfreund, Owen D",
    title = "Twentieth-Century Sprawl, Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape",
    year = "2004",
    abstract = "Abstract Owen Gutfreund’s Twentieth-Century Sprawl explains important--and largely unexamined--changes in the American landscape. He offers an illuminating look at how highways have dramatically transformed American communities, aiding growth and development in unsettled areas and undermining existing urban centers. Gutfreund takes a “follow the money” approach to show how government policies--from as early as the 1890s--subsidized the spread of cities and fueled a chronic nationwide dependence on cars and roadbuilding, with little regard for expense, efficiency, ecological damage, or social equity. As federal, state, and local governments invested in toll-free highways, Americans moved in unprecedented numbers to newly accessible open land on the urban periphery. The consequence was the collapse of center cities, ballooning municipal debt, and rapidly increasing air pollution, not to mention profound changes in American society and culture. Gutfreund tells the story via case studies of three communities--Denver, Colorado; Middlebury, Vermont; and Smyrna, Tennessee. Different as these places are, they all show the ways that government-sponsored highway development radically transformed America’s cities and towns. Indeed, though seeming quite dissimilar, both Denver and Middlebury have crippling traffic problems; housing and commercial activity has sprawled outward, leaving downtown areas in danger of decay, while residents have longer commutes, fewer transportation options, and increasing concerns about air quality and environmental problems. Smyrna, once a dusty backwater, is now booming, thanks to its location near three interstate highways, which attracted a huge Nissan factory (the largest auto assembly plant in North America, the size of 92 football fields). Based on original research and vividly written, Twentieth-Century Sprawl makes a major contribution to our understanding of issues that still plague our cities and suburbs today.",
    url = "https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195141412.001.0001",
    doi = "10.1093/oso/9780195141412.001.0001",
    openalex = "W1599494046"
}

@misc{crossref2012junkyard,
    title = "Junkyard",
    year = "2012",
    booktitle = "Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage",
    url = "https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452218526.n177",
    doi = "10.4135/9781452218526.n177",
    openalex = "W4253546525"
}

Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built since the end of World War II. This tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside is not simply an expression of our economic predicament, but in large part a cause. It is the everyday environment where most Americans live and work, and it represents a gathering calamity whose effects we have hardly begun to measure. In The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where everyplace is like noplace in particular, where the city is a dead zone and the countryside a wasteland of cars and blacktop. Now that the great suburban build-out is over, Kunstler argues, we are stuck with the consequences: a national living arrangement that destroys civic life while imposing enormous social costs and economic burdens. Kunstler explains how our present zoning laws impoverish the life of our communities, and how all our efforts to make automobiles happy have resulted in making human beings miserable. He shows how common building regulations have led to a crisis in affordable housing, and why street crime is directly related to our traditional disregard for the public realm. Kunstler takes the reader on a historical journey to understand how Americans came to view their landscape as a commodity for exploitation rather than a social resource. He explains why our towns and cities came to be wounded by the abstract dogmas of Modernism, and reveals the paradox of a people who yearn for places worthy of their affection, yet bend their efforts in an economic enterprise ofdestruction that degrades and defaces what they most deeply desire. Kunstler proposes sensible remedies for this American crisis of landscape and townscape: a return to sound principles of planning and the lost art of good place-making, an end to the tyranny of compulsive commuting, the un

@book{openalexw1535661197,
    author = "Kunstler, James Howard",
    title = "The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-made Landscape",
    year = "2013",
    journal = "Medical Entomology and Zoology",
    abstract = "Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built since the end of World War II. This tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside is not simply an expression of our economic predicament, but in large part a cause. It is the everyday environment where most Americans live and work, and it represents a gathering calamity whose effects we have hardly begun to measure. In The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where everyplace is like noplace in particular, where the city is a dead zone and the countryside a wasteland of cars and blacktop. Now that the great suburban build-out is over, Kunstler argues, we are stuck with the consequences: a national living arrangement that destroys civic life while imposing enormous social costs and economic burdens. Kunstler explains how our present zoning laws impoverish the life of our communities, and how all our efforts to make automobiles happy have resulted in making human beings miserable. He shows how common building regulations have led to a crisis in affordable housing, and why street crime is directly related to our traditional disregard for the public realm. Kunstler takes the reader on a historical journey to understand how Americans came to view their landscape as a commodity for exploitation rather than a social resource. He explains why our towns and cities came to be wounded by the abstract dogmas of Modernism, and reveals the paradox of a people who yearn for places worthy of their affection, yet bend their efforts in an economic enterprise ofdestruction that degrades and defaces what they most deeply desire. Kunstler proposes sensible remedies for this American crisis of landscape and townscape: a return to sound principles of planning and the lost art of good place-making, an end to the tyranny of compulsive commuting, the un",
    openalex = "W1535661197"
}

This article scrutinizes the travel of planning ideas between Western Europe and America in the post-war decades by employing the 1958 International Seminar on Urban Renewal as a case study. As a joint venture between the International Federation for Housing and Planning and James M. Miller, a planning professor from Columbia University, this meeting was the first transatlantic conference after 1945 principally intended to (re-)introduce American planners to European reconstruction efforts. Therefore, the seminar testifies to an emerging interest of the wider US professional public in West European planning during the 1950s. When American planners struggled with deteriorating downtowns and suburbanization, they turned to Europe, where cities experimented with pedestrianization, mixed-use zoning and comprehensive planning in order to build their razed city centres anew. Although Americans were relatively unsuccessful in implementing these ideas in their cities, the events surrounding the 1958 seminar show that, even during a period of US hegemony, transatlantic connections were more than a mere ‘Americanization’ of European practice. Thus, this article argues for viewing transnational connections in the post-war North Atlantic World as a circular flow of ideas, in which Europeans and Americans alternately acted as borrowers and lenders, according to their variable perceptions of each other.

@article{doi101080026654332013869183,
    author = "Wagner, Phillip",
    title = "New life for American Downtowns? The 1958 international seminar on urban renewal and the travel of planning ideas in the North Atlantic World",
    year = "2014",
    journal = "Planning Perspectives",
    abstract = "This article scrutinizes the travel of planning ideas between Western Europe and America in the post-war decades by employing the 1958 International Seminar on Urban Renewal as a case study. As a joint venture between the International Federation for Housing and Planning and James M. Miller, a planning professor from Columbia University, this meeting was the first transatlantic conference after 1945 principally intended to (re-)introduce American planners to European reconstruction efforts. Therefore, the seminar testifies to an emerging interest of the wider US professional public in West European planning during the 1950s. When American planners struggled with deteriorating downtowns and suburbanization, they turned to Europe, where cities experimented with pedestrianization, mixed-use zoning and comprehensive planning in order to build their razed city centres anew. Although Americans were relatively unsuccessful in implementing these ideas in their cities, the events surrounding the 1958 seminar show that, even during a period of US hegemony, transatlantic connections were more than a mere ‘Americanization’ of European practice. Thus, this article argues for viewing transnational connections in the post-war North Atlantic World as a circular flow of ideas, in which Europeans and Americans alternately acted as borrowers and lenders, according to their variable perceptions of each other.",
    url = "https://doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2013.869183",
    doi = "10.1080/02665433.2013.869183",
    openalex = "W2051077840",
    references = "doi101017s0963926809006294"
}

This article explores the changing modes and mechanisms of the transatlantic dialogue between urban planners from the perspective of US urbanists. During the early post-war period, this dialogue intensified quickly. US planners were involved in their country's broad efforts to provide assistance to and build strong political ties with Western European nations. Accordingly, they assumed the role of tutors vis-à-vis their European peers. Due to urban America's apparent flaws and the success of European planning projects, however, their interest in Europe broadened considerably during the 1950s. Initially, the initiative of individuals remained crucial for the flow of planning information from Europe to the USA, and European immigrants and émigrés helped facilitate transatlantic transfers. Looking at Europe, American planners sought to address the shortcomings of the domestic practice of planning as they perceived them. Europe served as an argumentative tool for US experts who were eager to change the socio-political framework that limited their impact on urban development in their home country. Information about European planning was transmitted through a diverse set of channels and the biographies of many of the experts involved with transatlantic exchange remind us of the complex international planning networks that existed throughout the twentieth century. American planners' interest in Europe remained biased towards specific regions and topics. Nevertheless, US planners negotiated the way in which they brought their limited influence to bear on American urban environments in a transnational context. The framework that supported their integration into international planning discussions became increasingly institutionalized towards the end of the research period.

@article{doi101080026654332013873732,
    author = "Joch, Andreas",
    title = "‘Must our cities remain ugly?’ – America's urban crisis and the European city: transatlantic perspectives on urban development, 1945–1970",
    year = "2014",
    journal = "Planning Perspectives",
    abstract = "This article explores the changing modes and mechanisms of the transatlantic dialogue between urban planners from the perspective of US urbanists. During the early post-war period, this dialogue intensified quickly. US planners were involved in their country's broad efforts to provide assistance to and build strong political ties with Western European nations. Accordingly, they assumed the role of tutors vis-à-vis their European peers. Due to urban America's apparent flaws and the success of European planning projects, however, their interest in Europe broadened considerably during the 1950s. Initially, the initiative of individuals remained crucial for the flow of planning information from Europe to the USA, and European immigrants and émigrés helped facilitate transatlantic transfers. Looking at Europe, American planners sought to address the shortcomings of the domestic practice of planning as they perceived them. Europe served as an argumentative tool for US experts who were eager to change the socio-political framework that limited their impact on urban development in their home country. Information about European planning was transmitted through a diverse set of channels and the biographies of many of the experts involved with transatlantic exchange remind us of the complex international planning networks that existed throughout the twentieth century. American planners' interest in Europe remained biased towards specific regions and topics. Nevertheless, US planners negotiated the way in which they brought their limited influence to bear on American urban environments in a transnational context. The framework that supported their integration into international planning discussions became increasingly institutionalized towards the end of the research period.",
    url = "https://doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2013.873732",
    doi = "10.1080/02665433.2013.873732",
    openalex = "W2022299743",
    references = "doi1010029781119084679ch4, doi101017s0963926809006294, doi101068a40357, doi1023071227211, doi1023071855626, doi1023072093530, doi1041359781446218648, doi1041599780674031180, doi105860choice351041, openalexw2606253750, openalexw646564788, trachtenberg1964gods"
}

Martin Wagner’s contribution to planning thought and management during the Weimar Republic is widely known, but he recedes into obscurity afterwards. However, he maintained a tenacious intellectual activity in his American exile, conducting teaching-oriented research as Associate Professor of Planning at Harvard Graduate School of Design and prolonging these explorations until his passing in 1957. Working with students and other colleagues – most prominently Walter Gropius – Wagner devised comprehensive proposals for an alternative regional urbanization pattern that combined radical city-core renewal for conspicuous services and high-end residence with a massive suburbanization of middle- and working-class housing and industrial activities. This scheme exacerbated his earlier conceptions and simultaneously incorporated new inflections stemming from a critical engagement with contemporary debates in the US, which allow a better understanding of his German period and the transatlantic transfer of planning ideologies. At Harvard, Wagner reinforced the political-economic perspective of his work, following a contradictory imperative to secure the implementation of proposals by assimilating capital’s spatiality in design strategies. Taking the dynamics of profit-oriented urbanization to their logical conclusion, the American Wagner envisioned a dark albeit consistent ‘diagram’ of the potential reach of a stark capitalist approach to territorial restructuring, prefiguring major urban shifts in subsequent decades.

@article{doi1010800266543320171299636,
    author = "Sevilla-Buitrago, Álvaro",
    title = "Martin Wagner in America: planning and the political economy of capitalist urbanization",
    year = "2017",
    journal = "Planning Perspectives",
    abstract = "Martin Wagner’s contribution to planning thought and management during the Weimar Republic is widely known, but he recedes into obscurity afterwards. However, he maintained a tenacious intellectual activity in his American exile, conducting teaching-oriented research as Associate Professor of Planning at Harvard Graduate School of Design and prolonging these explorations until his passing in 1957. Working with students and other colleagues – most prominently Walter Gropius – Wagner devised comprehensive proposals for an alternative regional urbanization pattern that combined radical city-core renewal for conspicuous services and high-end residence with a massive suburbanization of middle- and working-class housing and industrial activities. This scheme exacerbated his earlier conceptions and simultaneously incorporated new inflections stemming from a critical engagement with contemporary debates in the US, which allow a better understanding of his German period and the transatlantic transfer of planning ideologies. At Harvard, Wagner reinforced the political-economic perspective of his work, following a contradictory imperative to secure the implementation of proposals by assimilating capital’s spatiality in design strategies. Taking the dynamics of profit-oriented urbanization to their logical conclusion, the American Wagner envisioned a dark albeit consistent ‘diagram’ of the potential reach of a stark capitalist approach to territorial restructuring, prefiguring major urban shifts in subsequent decades.",
    url = "https://doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2017.1299636",
    doi = "10.1080/02665433.2017.1299636",
    openalex = "W2736908896",
    references = "doi101080026654332013873732"
}

@article{crossref2019earths,
    title = "Earth's junkyard",
    year = "2019",
    journal = "New Scientist",
    url = "https://doi.org/10.1016/s0262-4079(19)30525-1",
    doi = "10.1016/s0262-4079(19)30525-1",
    number = "3223",
    openalex = "W4232808748",
    pages = "3",
    volume = "241"
}

@incollection{crossref2024junkyard,
    title = "junkyard, n.",
    year = "2024",
    booktitle = "Oxford English Dictionary",
    url = "https://doi.org/10.1093/oed/8459925186",
    doi = "10.1093/oed/8459925186",
    openalex = "W4385103345"
}