Abstract
This paper explores different ways that the category of nature is used in addressing landscape changes associated with exurbia and exurbanization. Nature is an important category in the practices and representations that residents and planners use to construct and maintain exurban landscapes. However, common ways of mobilizing nature in exurban planning discourses often obstruct better discussion, rather than facilitate it. Invoking nature can make planning processes more difficult by providing a means for naturalizing planning decisions and also by exacerbating struggles over whose nature will be managed in what ways. More explicitly framing what is meant by nature in exurban planning may improve discussion of landscape problems associated with sprawl. The goal of this paper is to contribute to creating a framework for more actively contextualizing how “nature” is used in discourses relating to exurbanization. I suggest that such a framework would need to consider—and make explicit—themes such as the four that I discuss in this paper: (1) the centrality of the production of nature to exurban landscapes; (2) multiple meanings of nature that are often confused; (3) ways that normative statements about nature tend to be unquestioned in exurban planning; and (4) the simultaneous difficulty and usefulness of critiquing and “denaturalizing” both material and discursive nature. Explicit conversations about the role and representation of nature within residents’ and managers’ land-use practices and ideologies could create opportunities for dialogue between residents, planners, and academics about the valuation of and preferences for constructing particular landscapes, especially in addressing problematic aspects of the phenomena of “amenity migration” and “sprawl.”
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Notes
Berube et al. (2006), Brown et al. (2005), and others base their argument that exurbs differ from suburbs in terms of housing or population density; I would also include criteria based on aesthetic and ideological manifestations of nature, which can be intensely exurban in denser settlement patterns, as in the older leafy megalopolitan exurbs that would be considered urban or suburban by standards based entirely on settlement density. Although vernacular use of the term “exurb” sometimes includes the fast-growing non-urban-contiguous tract subdivisions Dolores Hayden calls “boomburbs” and “zoomburbs” (Hayden and Wark 2004; Brooks 2000), exurban landscapes are more commonly identified as residential landscapes distinguished by natural amenity, or at least by the high proportion of nature allowed by low building density (Berube et al. 2006). One rule of thumb for distinguishing exurbs from suburbs is the distinction between lots large enough for septic systems—often over one acre—and those on municipal pipes. The categories of rurality and of the pastoral landscape point to other important sets of exurban landscape discourses related to working landscapes (Cadieux 2006; Wolf and Klein 2007). Although these fall outside the scope of this paper, I note that even in productive landscapes, natural processes and landscapes are protected and privileged in exurban planning discourses (Hillier 1998).
A third discourse group is formed by environmental and cultural academics—and also residents, activists, managers, and policy-makers—who study, represent, and frame exurban nature in more abstract and theoretical terms. Although work from this discourse group informs the analysis (mainly in terms of its self-consciousness in using the category of nature, acknowledging the contested and cultural nature of nature), a careful consideration of the interactions of these discourses with those of the first two groups falls outside the current paper and is covered in forthcoming work.
Literature review included core literature on exurbia (Gosnell and Abrams 2009; Marcoullier et al. 2004; Exurban change program 2008; Taylor 2009; Varangu 1998), articles from a comprehensive keyword search for “exurb*” in Thompson ISI Web of Knowledge, and case study documents (such as those related to Baskind-Wing 2009; Cadieux 2006; Young 2009); contact author for full bibliography.
Nature as represented, altered, or cultured may be considered as “second” nature, as it is in much marxian geography (Smith 1984); however, I use “nature” here as a broad category, and consider this division between first and second nature as one of many examples of the tension between nature’s multiplicity and desire to pin down a meaning of nature. In this vein, while I point explicitly to the multiplicity of nature by using the plural “nature(s),” I note that nature is always multiple, even where I use the singular noun to preserve clarity in the text.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Laura Taylor, Michael Bunce, Patrick Hurley, Colin DeYoung, the AAG exurbia panel participants, and two very thoughtful reviewers for suggestions on versions of this paper; to the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies for a stimulating and supportive academic home in which to write this paper; and to Ian MacDonald’s firm for the opportunity (and permission) to analyze discourses around the House in Erin, which while an award-winning house, is not exceptional in the treatment of nature it elicits.
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Cadieux, K.V. Competing discourses of nature in exurbia. GeoJournal 76, 341–363 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-009-9299-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-009-9299-0