Life on “The Avenue”: An Allegory of the Street in Early Twenty-First-Century Suburban America

This chapter explores landscape as itself a symbol, symbolizing a cultural landscape, “Main Street USA,” that no longer exists. But by functioning as a substitute for it, the landscape is simulacrum. We distinguish then landscape-symbol from symbolic landscape. The landscape-symbol, which, in this case, is the imagineering of sham, retail architecture, is constructed well enough to partially succeed symbolically, but this is only because people have forgotten the veritable embodied experiences of a true main street. People settle for a fake city/town main street that is located in suburbia and ensconced in a sea of parking, because people know no better, and the sham landscape gives them the impression of meeting their needs for sociality and a sense of place. Cities have deteriorated and people no longer engender body schemas that would bring them to mock such phony, packaged architecture. And this lamentable ignorance allows for the ersatz main street to be “successful,” because it emulates the gestural embodiments, the enactment of meanings of the main street without being one—it’s a shame that the pedestrians are not being paid as actors and actresses. Here, in a post-modern context, where architectural simulation poses as architecture, an ideal geography of the imagination substitutes for the real, and where the symbol poses as the real in the geography of perception. These interrelating substitutions of real and ideal are efficacious because they are experienced through an enactive embodied geography.