At the end of the Spring 2016 semester, Prof. Paul Groth retired from the Architecture and Geography Departments at Berkeley. To celebrate his career on campus, RM1000 asked Prof. Sarah Lopez of University of Texas, Austin to interview her former dissertation advisor and mentor.

This study surveys the historical geography of suburban landscapes built and abandoned over the course of the United States’ long twentieth century. Diverse thinkers and actors, it shows, have understood the edges of the American metropolis to be laboratories of a sort, experimental sites where the forms of a reordered city might be glimpsed in microcosm and put on display. Suburbs have also served as laboratories where questions of landscape’s animacy — not what landscape means, the focus of a generation of scholarship in cultural geography, but what landscape does — came vividly to the fore, provoking much debate and speculation. Drawing on archival sources, visual materials, maps, plans, and field study of the built environment, this work recasts debates that have long been central to cultural geography, geographic thought, urban and suburban studies, and the intellectual histories of planning and urbanism. It argues that both the modal techniques planners and builders came to prescribe for the post–World War II suburb and the most noticeable programs since predicated on redressing suburbia’s perceived failures can find their roots in prewar debates, ontological in character, on the “life” proper to landscape, indeed to matter itself. Both tendencies, the study argues furthermore, established the terms by which Americans since have considered the possibility of giving life form by way of its environment — and assessed the threats presented by built environments deemed formless.

This work makes its intervention in three stages. It first assembles a new intellectual history of American planning around questions of the suburbanization of industry and the decentralization of urban form. During the Progressive Era, planners, architects, industrialists, realtors, and a host of reformers held industrial suburbs, more than strictly residential ones, to be the key to remedying urban “congestion.” In ways that existing histories have not realized, these actors also articulated a distinctive ontology of suburban landscape as an animate participant in life and work. This was not an environmental determinism, as most geographers would have it, but rather a multiform theory of the milieu that was indebted to broader vitalist and materialist currents in social thought. Numerous social scientists, life scientists, and philosophers, too, contribute to this history. In juxtaposing their thought with that of the first generation of self-identified scientific planners, this study explores ongoing tensions between formalist and anti-formalist, rationalist and vitalist, organismic and non-organismic tendencies lending structure to how certain Americans have made sense of how landscape matters. Many maneuvers central to contemporary “new” materialisms, “object-oriented” ontologies, and “non-representational” theories in geography and its neighboring disciplines are, in fact, quite old. To couple them with questions of landscape, one does well to revisit the decentralist debates taking place at the turn of the twentieth century.

The analysis then scales down empirically to the San Francisco Bay Region, where premiums on a decentralized metropolitan form, as well as notions of the environment’s “influence,” have particularly deep roots. It turns most especially to the Carquinez Strait, a peculiar, imperfectly visible vector of suburbanization east of the bay, to which industrial flight was early, intense, relatively coordinated, and financed remotely by capitalists in San Francisco and, to some extent, Oakland. From the late nineteenth century on, the Carquinez became a repository for only the most noxious functions expelled from denser urban centers, as well as a site of considerable experimentation in sorting, buffering, and enclosing the “whole” new towns employers composed adjacent to their workplaces between 1880 and 1930. In surprising, sometimes unsettling ways, planners and industrialists also theorized the affordances of ambient climate and unbuilt environment to industrial work. A prehistory of the post–World War II suburb must consider the portable models and morphologies worked out in these and other “suburbs of last resort.”

As the narrative moves into the postwar period, its conceptual focus pivots from questions of suburban order to suburban ruin. Since the 1970s, the Carquinez has been marked by landscapes of abandonment: decapitalized workplaces, decommissioned military installations, and, lately, overgrown pockets of the post-2008 residential foreclosure crisis. Suburbs and peripheries are increasingly the loci of American privation, but there is still a tendency among analysts to narrate urban “decline” in ways that privilege denser centers, deploying metaphors of the rotting core rather than the fraying edge, and granting visibility and salience to some landscapes of decay at the expense of others. “Suburbs of Last Resort” establishes a prehistory in this sense as well. It argues that concepts of inbuilt suburban “formlessness,” which intensified in Northern California in the 1950s and 1960s, have rendered working-class suburbs, even or especially in times of their abandonment, peculiarly invisible. Such notions, too, have roots in prewar debates. The study closes by tracing a countervailing intellectual history, complementary to the more affirmative account of prescriptions for suburban form, of attempts to ontologize — and to denigrate — newly built suburbs as their own species of “ruins.” It has been precisely when their form is ambiguous or abandoned that suburban landscapes have seemed most animate: “contagious” in their putative spread, productive of manifold anxieties, and provocative of new forms of reflection and action.

In the decades around World War II, the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California rapidly evolved into a more complex urban region. A diverse group of architects, landscape architects, and urban planners recognized the social and environmental issues inherent in this regional city. Their vision to combine modernist design with regional inspirations from nature, enacted at the regional scale, gave birth to an "arc of regional modernism" in mid-century American urbanism and architecture.

This vision of regional modernism arose in the 1930s when a group of architects and landscape architects combined ideas from the Modern Movement with inspirations from Bay Area natural landscapes. Often viewed as a unique contrast to the International Style, their philosophy of environmental design was instead an integral part of a modernist architecture more varied than typically understood.

The architecture and urban planning group Telesis presented a vision of urban regional growth--inspired by both Lewis Mumford and CIAM--that included modernist urban renewal and regional urban growth control. Telesis laid the foundations for the Bay Area's legacy in both urban renewal and the natural open space preservation of the greenbelt.

The Safeway Corporation's evolving designs for the postwar supermarket demonstrate how one grocery store chain used modern architecture to promote an image of the modern corporation and then used regionalist architectural motifs to obscure the realities of large-scale food distribution.

Better understood as regional modernists, women such as Catherine Bauer Wurster, Dorothy Erskine, Geraldine Knight Scott, and Elizabeth Mock played a substantial role in supporting and tempering the spread of modernism while demonstrating the importance of women in some of environmentalism most significant urban accomplishments. A case study of Bauer presents her history in environmental conservation and regional planning.

Finally, the events at People's Park in Berkeley in 1969 demonstrate the decline of the arc of regional modernism. Two visions of incorporating nature into the urban fabric collided when the top-down planning vision of regional modernism clashed with the efforts of young designers to create a more collaborative, community-based movement in architecture and planning.

Across the United States migrants work in service sector jobs and live in cramped apartments while in their home countries their newly built houses stand empty. Remittances--funds sent from economic migrants abroad to family members who remain in the home country--have radically altered everyday built environments throughout the developing world. In rural Jalisco, Mexico, remittance construction, which once meant building a dream house for oneself and one's family, has evolved into a community-wide project of rebuilding entire hometowns. Such construction has been formalized and institutionalized by the Mexican government's Tres Por Uno (3x1) program, which triples dollars dedicated to development projects with federal, state, and municipal funds. I argue that migrant use of remittance dollars to improve and develop their hometowns, encouraged by the 3x1 program, simultaneously demonstrates a newfound independence and agency for the rural poor and results in a host of unanticipated consequences for migrants and their communities, including familial fragmentation, the financialization of traditional society, and emerging conflict between migrants and villagers.

A disjuncture between migrant aspirations and project outcomes is revealed through analysis of what I call "remittance space"--the sum of individual migrants' and their communities' construction practices and narratives, as well as the macro-scale political and economic processes, and symbolic and spatial transformations that are collectively shaped by and shaping remitting as a way of life. Focusing on a series of villages in the south of Jalisco, I begin my analysis by tracking the evolution of the "remittance house" as both a site of architectural hybridity and domestic change. Next, I explore the Tres Por Uno development discourse as it interfaces with the spatial legacy of rural Mexico, formalizing remittance construction. The heart of my research consists of "building ethnographies"--my term for fine-grained ethnographic research of the envisioning, construction, and use of building projects--on three Tres Por Uno projects that identify the social and spatial consequences of what I term the Remittance Development Model (RDM). The rodeo arena produces a spectacle of traditional culture and gendered expectations amid the commercialization and financialization of the jaripeo or bull-riding event; the cultural center imports U.S. norms of public space and participation that destabilize the traditional social hierarchy based on compadrazgo or extended familial networks; meanwhile, the old age home, an attempt by migrants to prepare for aging and death, raises questions about the lack of public services for rural constituents, and the relation between social capital and societal obligations. These projects contribute to understanding the RDM and its implications.

The Remittance Landscape brings a material analysis of migration to Latina/o scholarship and a perspective of mobility and transnationalism to the study of architecture and place. Anthropological and sociological studies on migrant subjectivities often overlook the built environment as a medium through which individual and group identities are formed and contested. Urban and architectural historians who address ethnic and immigrant neighborhoods do not theorize migration itself, nor do they address the places immigrants come from as constitutive of the places where they arrive. Similarly, a material analysis of migrants' here-there connections contributes to migration scholarship both methodologically and epistemologically. North American migrant urbanism cannot be understood without addressing migrant hometowns that have become, in a sense, the distant hinterlands of American cities.