Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape

Abstract

As I write, earthmoving equipment is mounding desert soil into tees and fairways for a golf course across the street. Tractors, scrapers, and compacters ready pads for apartment complexes, tilt-up warehouses, and commercial complexes along the route I commute most days. On campus, bucket loaders scrape away a knoll that awaits construction of a classroom complex. The clearing away of one landscape to be replaced by another, an act described in the past and present as “creative destruction,” is ubiquitous and has been for some time. To our collective benefit, Francesca Russello Ammon saw in that awesome ubiquity the subject for a history that brings together landscapes literary and literal, destruction creative and regrettable, clearance in city centers and at the metropolitan edge. Her hook, and the thread that runs through the book is the bulldozer, in its guises as artifact, symbol, and tool. The result is an achievement of note; the product of research in varied archives and of an imaginative marshaling of sources.