On Monuments and Malls

By David Kaufmann

Endnotes

  1. Robert Smithson, “The Crystal Land,” The Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, ed Jack Flamm, (Berkeley: U of California P, 1996) 8.
  2. Ann Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere (Cambridge: MIT P, 2004) 118.
  3. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans Stephen Randall (Berkeley: U of California P 1984) 92.
  4. Dan Graham, “Homes for America,” Arts Magazine December 1966-January 1967. Reproduced in Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Moments of History in Dan Graham,” Neo-Avant-Garde and Culture Industry (Cambridge: MIT P, 2000) 183.
  5. Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,” The Collected Writings of Robert Smithson 72.
  6. Jennifer L. Roberts, Mirror Travels: Robert Smithson and History (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004) 66, 82.
  7. See Robert Beauregard, When America Became Suburban (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia (New York: Vintage 2004) and Jon C. Teaford, The Metropolitan Revolution (New York: Columbia UP, 2006). They each represent different viewpoints: Hayden is a fierce critic of contemporary sprawl and reads the past through this lens; Teaford casts himself as suburbia’s fierce defender. For a brief overview of the literature, see Robert B. Fairbanks, “The New Metropolitan Reality,” Journal of Planning History 7:2 (May 2008) 158-164 and Oliver Gilham, The Limitless City (Washington DC: Island P, 2002) 25-46.
  8. Teaford 126.
  9. Karen Keller, “Somehow, Passaic is a suburb,” Herald News (Passaic County, NJ), accessed June 30, 2011, http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies-offices/12032439-1.html,
  10. Auerbach is quoted in an oddly upbeat article designed to sell Passaic real estate. See Lisa Ianucci, “The City of Passaic, New Jersey, The New Jersey Cooperator, accessed February 12, 2015, http://njcooperator.com/articles/248/1/The-City-of-Passaic-New-Jersey/Page1.html.
  11. Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” Situationist International Anthology, (Ken Knabb. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2007) 6.
  12. Edward L. Glaeser, and Joshua C. Gottlieb “Urban Resurgence and the Consumer City.” Urban Studies. (July 2006) 1275–1299.
  13. Dolores Hayden, A Field Guide to Sprawl (NY: Norton, 2004) 18.
  14. Benjamin J. Barber, J. “Civic Space,” Sprawl and Public Space: Redressing the Mall, ed. David Smiley (Washington DC: National Endowment for the Humanities, 2002) 36.
  15. Here is how Fitterman describes it in the promotional material he produces for the mall:

    A thousand years ago along the banks of the Mississippi River, in what is currently southeast Illinois, there was a city that now mystifies both archeologists and anthropologists.
     

    At its zenith, around A.D. 1050, the city that is now called Cahokia was among the largest metropolitan centers in the world. About 15,000 people lived in the city, with another 15,000 to 20,000 residing in its surrounding “suburbs” and outlying farmlands. It was the region’s capital city, a place of art, grand religious rituals and science.
     

    But by 1300, the city had become a ghost town, its carefully built structures abandoned and its population dispersed.

    Robert Fitterman, Sprawl (Los Angeles: Make Now, 2010) 13.

  16. Gregg Easterbrook. “Suburban Myth, ” New Republic, March 15 1999, 18.
  17. Thad Williamson. “Beyond Sprawl and Ant-Sprawl.” Critical Urban Studies: New Directions, ed. Jonathan S. Davies and David L Imbroscio (Albany: SUNY P, 2010) 168.
  18. “The neoclassical treatment of consumer and worker sovereignty is well known. Individual choice over bundles of work and consumption activities determines social outcomes mediated by profit-maximizing competitive firms and market-determined commodity and factor prices as the basis for preference aggregation. Thus consumer and worker sovereignty in economics parallels that of citizen sovereignty in political theory. The aggregation of individual preferences through market demand functions in economic theory harmonizes the aggregation of political preferences through majority rule, universal suffrage, individual liberty, and institutional protection of minority rights. In both cases, the free individual voter or utility-maximizer acts within the context of sovereign (i.e., ultimately preference-responsive) political and economic institutions” Herbert Gintnis. “Consumer Behavior and the Concept of Sovereignty: Explanations of Social Decay,” The American Economic Review. 62:1/2 (1972 268-9.
  19. Williamson 171.
  20. Libertarians like Robert Bruegmann celebrate this substitution this way:

    If I shop at a suburban Wal-Mart rather than a downtown department store or choose to live in an apartment near the old downtown….these choices have an effect on urban form. If my choices are echoed by those of many other people, they can have a profound effect….More than any other human artifact in the world today, our urban areas are the result of the actions of every citizen, every group and every institution, every day.

    Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History (New York: Norton, 2004) 225.

  21. David Brooks. “Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia,” The New York Times Magazine, accessed March 9, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/magazine/our-sprawling-supersize-utopia.html.