(De)constructing the Grid

Abstract

The design and implementation of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) by the federal government in 1785 produced—and reproduced over time on a continental scale—a system of rectilinear land subdivision that imparted a widespread “regularity” to the American landscape, especially west of the Appalachians. Observed in such tangible landscape features as survey lines, road patterns, and administrative boundaries oriented to the cardinal directions, the ubiquity of such checkerboard-shaped survey and boundary patterns in North America is encountered nowhere else at such a grand scale. An earlier generation of scholars viewed the PLSS as a conspicuous impress of federal governmental authority that imposed a system of land subdivision and survey within which settlers were forced to operate. Following in the vein of more recent scholarship that scrutinizes cultural landscapes within the context of contemporary post structural social theory, this chapter argues for a more nuanced interpretation of the PLSS as a material manifestation of Enlightenment idea(l)s and discourses, and as striking example of what Lefebvre refers to as “ abstract” spaces produced by planners and bureaucrats. The chapter begins with an overview of the genesis and implementation of the PLSS set against the backdrop of federal land alienation policies during the Early National period. This is followed by a discussion of relevant literature on the subject, contrasting early empirical interpretations with more recent post-structural formulations. Next, examples of visible impacts on settlement patterns and landscapes in the Midwest and Great Plains are offered. Finally, ideas of the production of space are employed as frameworks for identifying and understanding specific historical-political discourses encoded in the PLSS’s rectilinear survey landscape.