The best books on the hidden power of space and place to shape our lives

This book reminds us that in addition to shaping our laws, our institutions, and our culture, white supremacy has also shaped our nation’s landscape, from housing discrimination and redlining to blockbusting and urban renewal.

Although Brown focuses on racial segregation and Black neighborhoods in Baltimore, his insights speak to communities of color throughout the United States and how decades of hypersegregation in American cities have adversely impacted health, livelihoods, and lives.

What makes Brown’s analysis of the landscape of urban apartheid so compelling, however, is his recipe for dismantling it and replacing it with a new landscape of racial equity. 

For several years, I’ve been teaching a course called the American Way of Death, and Sara Jensen Carr’s The Topography of Wellness features prominently on my syllabus.

Carr explores how soaring mortality rates in the nineteenth century, mostly from diseases like cholera and tuberculosis, prompted an army of public health reformers, urban planners, and municipal leaders to tackle the toxic urban landscape by envisioning and creating a new landscape with the kinds of infrastructure that today we take for granted. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the new and improved city, with its public water and sewer systems and public parks, was benefiting both rich and poor alike.

Carr is quick to point out, of course, that scientific and political notions of health and wellness continue to shape our nation’s landscape, with mixed outcomes, mostly as a result of systemic inequities and unequal access to the kinds of urban amenities that lead to better health outcomes. 

I’m old enough to remember T.W. Rogers, the downtown department store that was still hanging on in Lynn, Massachusetts, in the early 1980s before finally succumbing to the same market and political forces that doomed so many similar enterprises during the postwar exodus of retail from the downtown to the suburbs.

This book pays tribute to the grand palaces of consumption, both large and small, that emerged in virtually every American city and town during the first half of the twentieth century. I was especially pleased that Howard chose to focus not only on the large urban retailers found in big cities but also on smaller establishments, similar to the one that I can still recall from my childhood.

Naturally, the younger generation today knows the department store as the anchor store at the mall, and once again, as happened more than half a century ago, it is under threat and has been for more than a decade with the advent of online shopping. Howard’s analysis could not be more relevant in the long shadow of the pandemic, which continues to remind us just how vulnerable our brick-and-mortar retail establishments are.

This was a bittersweet read for me. I grew up in Lynn, Massachusetts, a post-industrial city that was a shadow of the bustling place it was when my parents were growing up there in the 1940s and 50s. Young’s recounting of his return to the city of his childhood, Flint, Michigan, speaks to all of us who long not just for the places that we think we know but for those places that had already ceased to exist before we were born.

At the same time, Young’s poetic exploration of place, tinged with nostalgia, teaches us that even the cities and towns hardest hit by the unforgiving forces of globalization and corporate capitalism and haunted by ghosts of past prosperity can be fertile with new possibilities and new stories. 

For the better part of a decade, I traveled back and forth between my home in Boston and a small hobby farm on Block Island, Rhode Island. During my time there, I met a handful of legacy farmers, most of them land-rich and cash poor, struggling with how to hold on to parcels of land that had been in their families for generations, a theme that is central to Clearing Land. This surely resonates with small and mid-sized farmers throughout the United States trying to remain viable in a landscape dominated by Big Ag and increasingly impacted by climate change.

Of course, unlike the prickly old Yankees that continue to make a go of farming on Block Island and other parts of New England, the New England farming family to which Brox belongs are Levantine, a reminder that immigrant families have long had a hand in shaping—and continue to shape—the cultivated landscape of the United States.