Educational Media Reviews Online

Livable Landscapes belongs in the library’s collection alongside the excellent 1987 Janet Mendelsohn and Claire Marino production, Figure in a Landscape: A Conversation with J. B. Jackson.

The late doyen and founder of landscape architecture as an academic discipline, John Brinckerhoff Jackson espoused how vernacular signposts of a community, town, village, or even a city, give it distinction and personality. Jackson exulted over strip malls, trailer parks, interstates, road-side stands, diners, bandshells, and commons. He roamed nomad - like throughout the United States, thoroughly documenting with his camera the human-made landscapes and commenting on their cultural significance. These structures revealed the substance of social intercourse, both at work and at play to him.

Livable Landscapes presents both a contradictory but complimentary point of view to Jackson’s philosophy and aesthetics. Paly journeys through Northern New England and comments on the eyesore of urban sprawl, suburbia, and haphazard, unplanned growth. Once icons of rural charm, serenity, civic pride, and small-scale democratic cohesion, the classic New England village--from the early village greens and churches in the 18th and 19th centuries to the 1962 style gas station - is in danger of extinction, save for its stalwart and politicized citizens.

The narrator remarks that the “landscape is a repository of our deepest beliefs and saddest mistakes” Our American Dream has also been transformed into a nightmare. Housing and real estate interests, demographic shifts, employment or unemployment issues, transportation modes, land use patterns, and last but not least, the dependence on the car have created thorny and seemingly hopeless dilemmas. By studying several communities in Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire, Paly assesses and surveys how townspeople deal with the challenges of urban/suburban growth when their community’s social and economic history has sprung from agrarian roots.

In Stratham, New Hampshire, we meet farmer John Hutton who has been confronted with real estate developers seeking to abut his acreage with a golf course. “What good is it when working people will not be allowed into the club?,” he asks. However, a 5 million dollar bond issue was voted into the public trust to preserve open space and the town’s rural nature for future generations.

IBM, the largest employer in Vermont with over 7,000 employees, as well as the University of Vermont in Burlington, has 25% of their workers commuting at least 45 minutes to and from work. Thirty-year old plans to develop a circumferential highway to ease traffic jams has led residents to organize and protest against them. The highway destroys the very landscape that people desire as their natural habitat. “Place means a lot to Vermonters,” the narrator remarks.

Littleton, New Hampshire is in the midst of a cultural and social renaissance on its Main Street, which has been revived by specialty small businesses. A ramshackle downtown in 1992, it is now home to a guitar shop, an old-fashioned candy store, and cafes, demonstrating that the soul of place lies in the small scale and personalized insignia of individuals. Of course, the Wal-Marts, Home Depots, Circuit Citys can be found on the circumference of the town for bargain hunters. Littleton’s civic and business leaders have banded together to bring Main Street back to life.

While Paly probably does not see nor appreciate the beauty and cultural meanings of the automobile and how it has changed the American landscape in the same ways that JB Jackson saw, they certainly are in accord about how communities are just like people: they are distinct, precious, and ever one of a kind.