Real Places: An Unconventional Guide to America's Generic Landscape

Rating:
Summary: An encyclopedia of small-scale urban and rural geography
Review: This profusely-illustrated book consists of approximately 120 mini-essays on a slew of topics that relate in some way to urban planning and urban geography, although there's quite a bit on rural geography as well. For some idea of the content, here are the first five of his essay headings, if they had been in alphabetical order: Abandoned farm/town, active zone (i.e., crime zone), air rights zone, airspace, annexation area, all the way to 'wreck site' at the end of the alphabet.

The essays are of uneven quality, and often seem a bit shallow. It's not entertaining enough to succeed as a popular book, and not analytical enough to succeed as a serious treatise. There's a niche for a book that would address topics of small-scale geography in the not-quite-rural but not-city-center places in which most of us spend our lives. Such a book might explain the different ingredients of suburban sprawl -- types of shopping centers, commercial strips, and housing developments, how they develop, how they affect the surrounding area, and how they age. Sadly, this book seemed pointed in that direction but fell short.