194 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Anyone wanting to learn more about how our country came to be the way it is will find Highways to Heaven not only informative but the proverbial good read. Joseph J. Corn Dr. Corn’s most recent publication on automobile history is “Work and Vehicles: A Comment and Note,” in The Car and the City: TheAutomobile, the Built Environment, andDaily Urban Life, ed. Martin Wachs and Margaret Crawford (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). He is presently working on the history of automotive technical literature. Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940. By John M. Findlay. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Pp. xiv+394; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $15.00 (paper). Long mythologized for its openness and freedom, the American West has lately become the province of revisionist historians intent on underscoring the grim economies of frontier life. Amid the bruit over this New West, John M. Findlay’s study of western cityscapes after World War II is especially timely, as it reveals both the shortcomings and the benefits of territorial—and technological—expansion. Findlay, a histo rian at the University of Washington, highlights the historical signifi cance of Disneyland, Stanford Industrial Park, Sun City, and the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, arguing persuasively that these four “magic lands” represented a new pattern in American urbanization: a movement away from the older, eastern model of central downtowns and concentrated capital toward an “assemblage of urban villages” (p. 280). Citing architect Amos Rapaport’s claim that “users” and “planners” often derive different meanings from the same environment, Findlay offers a “micro view” of western cities, based on “how average people created, and were affected by, a mid-20th-century urban culture” (p. 8). Despite critics’ fears that western urban sprawl—the consequence of rapid economic and demographic growth in the postwar years—would pro hibit the formation of communities and breed social chaos, Findlay finds that citizens worried about the “quantity of urbanization, rather than its shape” (p. 49). Even after 1965, when westerners were forced to acknowledge the problems of uncontrolled urban development, they continued to view growth as a positive sign of the region’s difference from the East. In four chapters focused on each magic land and its relation to the surrounding urban fabric, Findlay shows how the evolution of western cities during the 1950s and 1960s assumed a distinct pattern. Where entrepreneurs, academics, and city boosters confronted illegible land scapes, they created enclaves ofurban order where Americans could best “be themselves.” Disneyland epitomizes this reform impulse. Walt Disney intended his sanitized theme park to be an “antidote to the TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 195 perceived urban malaise” (p. 67); its success, moreover, spurred him to include EPCOT (Environmental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) in his plans for Walt Disney World, an indication that a utopian vision was never very far from his impulse to entertain. Once on the ground, however, magic kingdoms had dramatic, sometimes negative effects on their environs. Disneyland transformed a predominantly agricultural area into an urban, commercial culture, compelling Orange County residents to imagine their futures in new ways. Sun City drew thousands of senior citizens into Phoenix, boosting the economy and making the retirement community nationally famous, but upset the political and physical landscape of Arizona. The futuristic Seattle World’s Fair, conceived to rejuvenate the downtown area, ironically reinforced the city’s decentralization. The juxtaposition of best-laid plans and unforeseen consequences is most effectively drawn in the case of the Stanford Industrial Park. Beginning in the 1950s, Stanford University invited firms like Hewlett Packard to design and build campus-like facilities on university land—a plan literally designed to nurture joint academic/industrial research in the sciences, boost Stanford’s real estate revenues, and maintain Palo Alto’s manicured, suburban setting. But while the park succeeded on all these counts and became the model for subsequent “research parks,” particularly in Silicon Valley, its much imitated success initiated a period of growth that clogged freeways, segregated classes, and in 1987 gave Santa Clara County the most toxic waste in the nation. Truly a New West, the cityscapes described in...
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Jan 1, 1999
Robert Neuman 
Open Access