Planning, Provinciality, or Kosher Chinese Pizza

Abstract

Planning, Provinciality, or Kosher Chinese Pizza Chris Field* ? ccoKDiNG t? a "usually reliable source," Kosher Chinese pizza has¦**¦ been offered in a San Francisco North Beach cafe.1 Only in California? Or is it only in America? Or, is this pathetic, muddled, and commercially desperate appeal simply symbolic of global western industrialization, that most powerful of cultural imperialisms? As I travel and compare emerging industrial landscapes, a dull numbing fear comes to weigh me down. A dreary kind of out-ofscale fundamental uniformity is spreading over the world. Perhaps large uniformities are cultural sicknesses. I do not find much joyful, truly progressive connection with civilized values readable out of most recent landscape change. To be sure, there are gardens and reserves, some fine public buildings and even relict regions which speak of sensitivities that are far from dead. Then there are those flowers at the crossroads, the pocket parks in the cloverleaf, token efforts which seem to be desperate and pathetic cries protesting the really powerful forces in our society. Urban beautification programs * Presidential address presented at the annual banquet of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, Marriott Hotel, Tucson, Arizona, June 11, 197Q. Dr. Field is Associate Professor of Geography at University of Montana, Missoula 59801. 1 Should Kosher Chinese pizza be thought a unique example of an atrocious ethnic joke, note the following. Upon arriving in Tucson I serendipitously found a column in the June 9 Arizona Daily Star by Paul Wolfe entitled "And Pastrami Tacos . . ." After some amusing investigative reporting and worried remarks about the state of the American Way of Life, Wolfe concludes with: "I had visions of driving past a taco stand someday and seeing the newest item: Hot German potato salad chimichangas." The ironic twist here is that chimichangas are a fairly new Sonora border region speciality. 8 ASSOCIATION OF PACIFIC COAST GEOGRAPHERS are largely superficial, cosmetic to a disfunctional social and spatial order. We seem to be driving ourselves to uniformity with national norms, mass market behavior, and acquiescent response to the goals of corporate and government management. The sameness of development is afflicting societies from Brazil to Spain, from Australia to the Soviet Union. The real blight of our living landscapes is a kind of spatiocultural indifferentiation, a uniformity of simplification, the normal cause as well as consequence, I suppose, of social apathy. Cultural geographers profess to enjoy reading landscapes, discerning patterns , and finding evidences of changes, creations, and establishments . But now? The varieties of plants, crops, houses, neighborhoods , settlements, languages, foods, and economies are essentially old unities whose meaningful differences are overrun in the processes of coping with massive change. Well, so what? Our profession is adaptable. We can search for order instead of beauty and see either wherever we choose. Perhaps. An Industrial Uniformitarianism There are some social and philosophical consequences which I would like to discuss because I think they are significant to our future. Hare and Hewitt have exposed the problem well: The price that we pay for our well-being is a submerged individuality and a massive application of wealth and power, solely to prevent human and natural diversity from upsetting the urban industrial system. This has become the main ecological role of government, science, law, and the mass media . . .2 The spread of the industrial way to nearly all parts of the world is replicating the process of its development in the West. It proceeds by the establishment of impersonal and economic kinds of dependency . It is more than high energy commitment and environmental destruction, although that is becoming serious enough. The simplification of social connections by the substitution of commercial linkages is atomizing individuals in relationships to familiar ethnic or 2 F. Kenneth Hare and Kenneth Hewitt, Man and Environment: Conceptual Frameworks, Commission on College Geography Resource Paper No. 20 (Washington, D.C.: Association of American Geographers, 1973), p. 35. YEARBOOK · VOLUME 39 · 19779 provincial contexts. This process removes the necessity of local social responsibility and diminishes the potential for experiencing essential moral freedom. The isolation of the lonely crowd has been effective in the building of an economic machine run by that "invisible hand" of scarcely restrained self-interest. That physical abundance, spatial mobility...