- Industry: Printing & publishing
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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
Umbrella term covering various mystical, quasimystical and pseudo-mystical aspects of modern American culture. The term dates back to the 1980s, although the ideas it covers are often older. Some New Age concepts originated in 1960s and 1970s hippie or psychedelic culture, including the emphasis on self-development and expansion and on multiple forms of spirituality. However, New Age differs from psychedelic culture in several ways. New Age tends to have a more holistic emphasis, stressing the notion of people within their environment; for example, many New Agers were strongly influenced by the Gaia hypothesis (which portrays the world as a single living organism). Still, there is little or no homogeneity among the various groups within New Age culture, which range from pagans and covens of witches to health faddists and enthusiasts for cyberculture. Some New Age groups are darkly anti-technological, others have large web-sites. Some focus on single issues of importance, others have wider agendas.
A few general themes nonetheless appear. The personal health craze which began in the 1970s overlaps with many elements of New Age culture, and many New Agers place great stress on physical and mental health and fitness, seeing the two as overlapping.
Fashions in food, physical fitness and design range from the whole earth foods movement to feng shui and crystal healing. This also relates to their emphasis on holism and green philosophy New Agers have been involved in a number of radical environmental movements.
The interest in alternative forms of spirituality is also inherited from the 1960s. A strong emphasis on Indian spirituality including yoga and tantrism continues, but the focus on Middle Eastern and Sufi philosophy has been dropped and replaced by an interest in Eastern mysticism. Most evident, though, is the growth of “indigenous” spiritual movements like wicca (see witchcraft). An interest in Norse and Celtic paganism is also growing, and a number of “churches” have been founded. These new spiritual groups reject what they see as a darklight polarism in Judaeo-Christianity in favor of a more “balanced” view of the world.
Critics of the New Age movement argue that it is a jumble of fads and poorly understood mystical faiths with no real philosophical core. This criticism is in many ways justified; however, the holistic focus and emphasis on personal development are to some extent a reaction to the increasing secular materialism and technological determinism of the modern world. Interestingly and this again separates the New Age from hippie culture, most New Age groups do not reject technology and material values. Instead, they seek to subvert these things and build them into their own neo-materialist philosophy which situates materialism within a wider world view. Things, in the New Age view, are also artifacts, resonant with a variety of values.
Industry:Culture
The types and locations of municipal parks are as varied as those of the people who use them. They include ecological reserves, green spaces, beaches, cement slabs, sports fields and reclaimed factories, ranging in size from a tiny plaza to many acres. Central Park in New York City is perhaps the most famous with its acres of lawns, lakes and forest in the middle of Manhattan. These green parks serve as a relief from busy cities; an escape to the country without going there. Others, like Gas Works Park in Seattle, WA, have converted abandoned industrial sites into urban recreational facilities. On a smaller scale, vest-pocket parks are small green spaces squeezed onto empty lots or between two buildings. Outside cities, metropolitan parks tend to be larger, as they have not had to compete with real-estate interests for land.
Children’s playgrounds are common in all areas, existing by themselves or within larger parks. Standard playground equipment includes swings, jungle gyms, merry-gorounds, see-saws, slides and sandboxes. Safety is a major concern.
Parks’ conditions range from well-maintained lawns and facilities to dismal scenes of broken equipment and struggling plants. Funding has been problematic for many municipalities as limited budgets rank other services above public parks. Many parks, especially those of historic significance, have private community activist groups, who work to make up for shortcomings in municipal funding and maintenance. Safety is another concern as people tend to feel that parks are dangerous after dark, and providing adequate lighting and supervision is expensive and difficult for many cities.
Parks generally serve two main purposes: maintaining open space and providing a place for children and adults to play exercise and spend active time outdoors. They are commonly used as spaces for concerts, festivals, political rallies and other community events. Factors affecting the public’s use of parks include available leisure time, transportation, education and income levels. Quantity of leisure time has had the most impact on recreational activity—as work weeks have become shorter and people have more flexible schedules, many cities have seen a rise in park use.
Parks have changed according to the needs and attitudes of the general public in the century since cities first began to sponsor them. The first public parks were either for children’s active play or adults’ passive promenades. In the second half of the twentieth century many parks included basketball and tennis courts and baseball diamonds as a desire for more active recreation spread among all age groups. Parks face new challenges as recreational preferences continue to change—skateboarding and in-line skating are rough on park equipment. Some municipalities have built skating parks, the latest evolution in public recreation, ramps and jumps specially built for new high-impact, high-energy activities.
Industry:Culture
The havoc wreaked by organized crime in the United States is usually thought to be intramural. Gangland killings and the occasional internecine war seem remote from the ordinary concerns of the public. This may account for the enormous entertainment value Americans have found in the machinations of the Italian American Mafia (also called La Cosa Nostra—“our thing”) and other crime syndicates. Francis Ford Coppola’s screen adaptations of Mario Puzo’s stories of family life in the mob, beginning with The Godfather in 1971 became cultural icons. Not only did the first two films in Coppola’s trilogy sweep the Academy Awards in 1971 and 1974, but they contributed to constructing the myth and image of organized crime in the United States.
Tapes of telephone conversations and private conversations collected by informants wearing “wires” revealed the extent to which Hollywood shaped the self-concepts of mobsters like John Gotti, who was known in the New York media both as the Teflon Don (though he was eventually brought down by the testimony of his associate, Sammy “the Bull” Gravano) and the Dapper Don (Newsday sent a fashion reporter to the last of Gotti’s three major trials). For instance, the use of “godfather” to refer to the leader of a Mafia family was invented by Puzo, and adopted by real-life Mafia leaders, formerly known as “capo” (head or chief). The paramount Mafia leader would be known as the capo di tutti capi, the chief of all chiefs.
But the entertainment value of the Mafia and other interstate criminal syndicates, like the Los Angeles based gangs Crips and Bloods, is balanced by the heavy economic and social costs of organized crime. The image of a brutal, but righteous mob leader, like the fictional Don Vito Corleone protecting his family and friends, began disappearing after the Second World War, when the old “mustache Petes” were swept aside by capos and consiglieres using modern business techniques backed by violence. The old code of silence in the Mafia, “omerta,” was broken first by Joe Valachi in 1963 before the McClellan Committee in the United States Senate and a number of times since. Mafia underlings looking for a good deal from prosecutors found little reason to protect what was no longer a family, but a murderous corporate enterprise.
By 1975 the National Conference on Organized Crime estimated that the annual cost to the American economy of organized criminal activity was in excess of $50 billion. Some 1990s estimates were double the 1975 figure. Even much higher dollar estimates do not encompass the huge losses caused by mob commerce in illegal drugs, including designer drugs like methamphetamine (“crystal meth”), or mob support of prostitution, illegal gambling and loan sharking.
As the mob has diversified into a variety of illegal businesses by providing cash and protection for illegal entrepreneurs, it continues infiltrating legitimate businesses as well.
Intergenerational control of materials and solid-waste hauling—later including the illegal disposal of toxic wastes—several construction trades and related unions and construction companies themselves have been carefully documented in New York City and other metropolitan areas. The New York State Organized Crime Task Force found mob control so pervasive in New York City’s construction industry in the 1980s that not a single yard of concrete was poured in the city without the mob taking a cut of the profit. The result, as in so many other mobinfluenced businesses, was an extortionate price for concrete, often twice as high as it was in other places.
The reaction to the ascendancy of organized crime in legitimate and illegal businesses was a new federal law, the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
Long recommended by legal scholars and prosecutors, Congress passed RICO in 1970 as part of the Organized Crime Control Act. A number of states followed RICO with similar statutes that allowed them to reach conduct that was not covered by the extremely broad definition of interstate commercial impact that was required to trigger federal penalties.
Law-makers had learned what everyone else in American society had absorbed from the entertainment and publishing industries: organized crime had become an integral part of the American economy. It was providing goods that people wanted and protecting illicit businesses that had huge markets. It would take extraordinary measures to unravel mob involvement in American life. RICO was such a measure. By defining a criminal enterprise as any individual or organization responsible for a “pattern of racketeering activity” and then defining that pattern as two or more acts of racketeering within ten years, RICO enabled federal prosecutors like Rudolph Giuliani to attack the Mafia head on. Since the passage of RICO, the leadership of all five Mafia families based in New York has been indicted, convicted and jailed, including the Teflon Don.
The reaction to the pervasive influence of the Mafia has produced such a broad law that a number of conventionally respectable enterprises may now be labeled criminal enterprises. Prosecutors in Florida have used RICO against tobacco companies, and its civil provisions have been upheld in suits against anti-abortion protesters who block access to clinics.
While RICO has been effective against organized crime, mob influence has expanded as a variety of ethnic groups break the hold of the old Italian American families. Recent cases involved criminal syndicates among Mexican, Vietnamese, Colombian and Chinese immigrant groups in the United States.
Industry:Culture
While traditionally seen as a “gentleman’s” profession marked by small, intimate production, intellectual values and high culture (except for some commercial presses), late twentieth century book publishing in America told, once again, the story of corporate mergers within a realm defined by public discourse. The once-artisanal imagery of a preindustrial field has given way to intensive marketing, corporate control, rapid evaluations of success and failure and balance sheets based on subsidiary rights rather than volumes sold or read. Book publishers like Simon & Schuster and The Free Press are part of Viacom, Bantam Doubleday Dell was absorbed by Bertelsmann AG of Germany HarperCollins forms part of the News Corporation and Random House, Knopf, Pantheon, Crown and Ballantine are all under Advance Publication. While the bestsellers published by big houses dominate the marketplace, there are, nonetheless, some independent publishing houses and numerous university presses—publishing can still be done on a relatively cheap scale. To understand American publishing culture one has to recognize its product as well as its economic structure.
Reading was one of the most popular leisure activities in the first half of the twentieth century, and led to the establishment of distinguished publishers like Random House (1925) and Alfred Knopf (1915) beside older houses like Houghton Mifflin. New York City, NY dominated publication, although Philadelphia, Boston and other cities were active centers. This was also an era of important editors who found and guided many of America’s great writers. While sales were important, Random House also supported Modern Library editions that made world and American classics accessible for generations. Bookstores, meanwhile, were elite retreats and nurturing local establishments.
After the Second World War, both the expanding markets fostered by the GI Bill and new families of the baby boom increased the market for textbooks and other sales. This was also the era in which paperbacks—and paperback publishers—provided America with even cheaper reading. By the 1960s, publishers expanded by going public (selling stock in private companies) and merging, a pattern that would intensify thereafter. The danger was overproduction, although the number of publishers allowed both avant-garde and saccharine bestsellers to find their way to market. Yet mergers soon combined paperback and hardback houses, as well as other media companies, changing publishing inexorably into a business driven by deals rather than culture.
But what of the product? Major fiction and social issues/non-fiction attract people’s attention and prestigious book reviews in the New York Times and other serious news publications. Yet, specialized lists and interests that distinguish houses and editors compete with the need for mass sales and links to movies or other media. Publishers need the regular summer blockbuster by Danielle Steele, Tom Clancy or Elmore Leonard, or sleepers like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which stayed on the New York Time’s bestsellers list for years. Prizes like the Pulitzer Prize or the American Book Award confer prestige, but do not necessarily provide the profits that a romance, a successful children’s series or an instant celebrity book will rake in.
In fact, the business produces many types of books. The education book market, for example, now accounts for more than 20 percent of all book sales (over $20 billion annually) in America, dominated by Harcourt General and McGraw-Hill. This also vests power with state officials who may decide on textbooks for large markets like Texas schools.
With increasing affluence, there are many nonfiction “lifestyle” books published on hunting, tennis, cooking and home decorating. In a culture that claims everyone can succeed, more books are published on self-improvement—how to get thin, to have selfesteem, to get rich. Graphic novels, upscale comic books, try to appeal to people who do not read much. Audio books cater to older people and to commuters who spend a great deal of time in their cars. Children and teenagers also create a lucrative market through direct sales, and schools and libraries.
Book publishing then has met an extremely diversified market, but, more and more, books are published only because there is a perceived market, not because of literary and social values. This is especially true in terms of relations with other media, where books have established an ever-closer relationship with movies and, to a lesser extent, television. Bestsellers by authors such as Robin Cook, Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy, Stephen King and John Grisham seem to go immediately from novels into movies. In turn, novelization publishes books based on successful movies. Celebrity biographies and product linkages (e.g. Star Trek guides) also increase mutual sales. Mergers have intensified these connections—with their diversified holdings, conglomerates want to sell not only the book, but the toy the game, the T-shirt and the music that go along with the book.
The situation is uniquely American in that publishing must compete with other mass media to become lucrative. While Gallimard makes an annual 3 percent profit, and is considered healthy, American publishing houses have a profit target of 12–15 percent.
The big conglomerates envision their publishing arms to be as remunerative as cable television and film. Newhouse bought Random House for $60 million; ten years later it is worth $1 billion. Hence, publishers bet on high advances for famous writers for perceived huge returns, while foreclosing development of unknowns or risky topics.
With publishing concentrating more and more on celebrities, the overheads of publishing houses have also increased. Instead of paying editors the same salaries as university professors, book publishers emulate the lifestyle of their colleagues in Hollywood. More importantly more and more money is spent on promotion and marketing; agents shove aside editors. Sales conferences at Random House can cost up to $1 million. Publishers then see themselves unable to publish a book that will sell less than 20,000 copies to cover an average overhead of $100,000.
Large companies, like News Corporation, are also major players in American politics.
The infamous $4.5 million advance proposed to Newt Gingrich by Rupert Murdoch raised many eyebrows, since the return of such a book could never offset the original payment. Furthermore, as Andre Schiffrin, director of the independent New Press, points out, “Harper, Random House, and Simon & Schuster were once bastions of New Deal liberalism. Yet the current output of US publishing is markedly to the right” (Hazen and Winokur 1997:83). The publishing industries in the 1990s were comfortable saying that their decisions had to be made under market pressure.
Nonetheless, in a market economy where goods need to be sold and deposed regularly books have limited shelf-lives. If they do not sell, they go back to the warehouse and will be recycled as remainders, unloaded at much cheaper prices (instead of being carried as taxable resources). This is also a related issue of the proliferation of giant chain bookstores. Barnes and Noble had 25 percent market share in the first quarter of 1996.
Other big stores like Borders and the online booksellers Amazon.com all concentrate their sales on glossy bestsellers. Publishers also provide “co-op” advertising money to help sell their books, either through bookstore advertising or in-store advertisement placements. Independent book stores are increasingly squeezed out, as played out uncritically in You’ve Got Mail (1999) where Tom Hanks, a corporate type, bought up Meg Ryan’s small children’s bookstore.
Though the picture is bleak for independent book publishers, book stores and readers who sort these books, independent houses like Grove Press, New Directions, Beacon Press, Workman Publishing, New Left Books and the New Press have promoted more innovative publications and alternative agendas. Grove Press, for example, fought censorship in the 1950s, while New Directions fostered attention for authors as diverse as Borges and Djuna Barnes. University presses are still the major sources for scholarly publications that normally do not expect much profit. They are subsidized by universities that traditionally have seen these arms as ground for furthering intellectual debates, even though they too are getting more aware of the bottom line.
Publishing, then, has gone from being an intellectual pursuit with commercial interests to conglomerate businesses in which books are commodities. While American publishers produce tens of thousands of titles, freedom of information and democracy of thought are constrained by the structure of the market, which nonetheless allows cracks of free or alternative expression to surface and, at times, succeed. The prospect of electronic publishing and distribution may radically change this in the next few decades. Yet, the patterns rehearsed here are already familiar from other media, and may predict some of the forms that an electronic economy of culture will take.
Industry:Culture
Sunday School, also known as Christian Education, Church School or Sabbath School, provides religious education, primarily for children and young people. Sunday Schools have been important in North America, primarily in Protestant churches, to provide religious instruction because the historic separation of church and state prohibits religious education in public schools. Lay volunteers teach most Sunday School classes, receiving varying degrees of training, and following denominational Christian education policy, curriculum and social and theological emphases.
Industry:Culture
The wife of the president occupies a central but largely undefined role beyond ceremonial duties and expectations of help in campaigning, outreach and family life. Each First Lady has imposed her own stamp upon the role. In the late twentieth century many especially Republicans, appeared feminine, dutiful wives in their public persona. Others have brought more extensive questions and changes to the White House, evoking both admiration and rejection. Their iconic status is memorialized in a Smithsonian Institution exhibit of First Ladies in characteristic gowns.
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962), for example, proved an outspoken liberal during her husband’s four terms and afterwards, when she remained active in the Democratic Party and international affairs. This evoked both devotion and hatred that often divided along political and social lines. Her successors, Democrat Elizabeth Virginia Wallace (“Bess”) Truman (1885–1982) and Republican Mamie Geneva Dowd Eisenhower (1896–1979), took on more typically domestic roles in the 1950s, embodying small-town, Midwestern values; vice-presidential candidate wife Patricia Ryan Nixon (1912–93) also symbolized these values when her husband refuted influencepeddling charges by referring to her plain cloth coat. While Mrs Nixon would later become a protector in her husband’s scandal-ridden administration, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (1929–94) brought youth (aged thirty-one), beauty style and patrician charm to her husband’s brief Democratic presidency and became a beloved symbol as widow and mother after his death. She also made the role of First Lady more publicly active in terms of restoration of the White House and support for the Arts. Her cosmopolitan charm on a state visit to Paris led her husband to quip that he was the man who had accompanied Jackie to France.
After Kennedy’s assassination, Democrat Claudia Taylor “Lady Bird” Johnson (1912– ) promoted local and national beautification. Similarly after Nixon’s resignation, another Republican wife, Elizabeth Bloomer “Betty” Ford (1918–), restored light to White House life. She also became a mentor in discussing her battles with cancer and drug and alcohol dependency which led to the formation of the Betty Ford Clinic.
In the 1970s, Democratic wife Rosalyn Smith Carter (1927–) established a more “hands-on” position in government, attending Cabinet meetings and touring internationally which led to accusations of interference that also plagued her Republican successor, Nancy Davis Reagan (1923–). Reagan used her position to campaign against drugs (“Just Say No!”); her love of designer clothes, wealthy friends, astrology and her influence on her husband were all attacked by critics. Barbara Pierce Bush (1925–), although devoted to literacy campaigns, also restored domesticity to the White House.
The last First Lady of the millennium, Hillary Rodham Clinton, revived many of Eleanor Roosevelt’s liberal public roles—and vicious criticisms. Her search for a balance between feminist independence and American expectations of wives and mothers has been evident in changes of style and presentations of self. With her intelligence, legal background and drive, she initially appeared as a “partner” in the administration, notably in healthcare reform, but galvanized hatred among conservatives for this and other policy and personal issues. Public sympathy for her grew during the impeachment procedures. In 2000 she moved out of the White House to pursue her senatorial bid in New York, an independent career no former First Lady has ever attempted within her political marriage. Whether she marks a new role model for the First Lady will be tested by future candidates and perhaps by the “first man” to shape this public/private role.
Industry:Culture
Who hasn’t tasted one of the “Billions and Billions served?” The McDonald Brothers, who had founded a burger and barbeque joint, complete with carhops, in the 1930s, revamped their system in 1948 to promote speedy service and cheaper food (and incidentally attract a family clientele). After lackluster franchise results, their project was acquired by salesman Ray Kroc in 1955 who went on to create a global empire. He redesigned the service, ambience and food itself to fit changing mores and new locations at home and abroad, while families, leisure and travel adapted in turn to the emblematic golden arches. This process is analyzed in John Love’s (1986) McDonald’s: Behind the Golden Arches, while Watson (1997) and others consider the interactions of McDonald’s and Asia in Golden Arches East. Other major competitors in the hamburger and familymeal market include Burger King and Wendy’s (with a folksy image), as well as regional chains like Carl, Jrs, Jack-in-the-Box (hit by food-poisoning scares) and Hardee’s.
Industry:Culture
Syndication refers to the non-network distribution of shows. There are two main ways to license programs to individual outlets. The first way is with programs that are new and created especially for syndication, such as The Oprah Winfrey Show, Wheel of Fortune and Xena: Warrior Princess; games and talk shows are popular products. In off-network syndication, the distributor takes a program that has already been shown (for at least three seasons) and rents episodes to local stations or to cable networks. Nick at Nïte, for example, has used this form—reruns of baby boomer sitcoms—to gain an adult audience.
Syndication also has impact on international markets and the exporting of American products—during the 1990s when American television was dominated by sitcoms that did not sell well abroad, syndicated shows such as Baywatch found bidders overseas.
Industry:Culture
While Broadway’s show-stopping tunes, dancers and stars might seem to determine this film genre, the Hollywood musical has a more complex social and cultural history. At times, it has dutifully translated Broadway success into lavish new productions, reaching audiences far from Manhattan. Hollywood also has widened the scope of music, dance and story, creating magic with mice, mermaids and Astaire, using music to underpin or label the action rather than move it along, and targeting new audiences.
The Hollywood musical responds to the Hollywood silent, which actually relied on accompanying sound. In addition to filming existing musicals, operettas and Vaudeville acts, Hollywood explored backstage comedies (42nd Street, Warner Bros, 1933), biopics (The Great Ziegfeld, MGM, 1936). Filmed dancing showed elegance defying physics and human limits in choreography (Busby Berkeley’s directing, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing at RKO Studio), especially when MGM polished the film. Whether audiences escaped the Depression or explored new techniques of sound and vision, 1930s musicals defined a first golden age, including children’s classics like Shirley Temple movies, The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939) and Disney’s animated Snow White (1937).
Above all, these were consummate products of a studio system able to marshal legions of stars to sing and dance. Theme songs and associated music also developed in this era for dramatic and comedic films.
Musicals went to war in the 1940s with a relentlessly cheery and patriotic face (e.g.
Yankee Doodle Dandy, Warner, 1942). This also set the stage for a renewed golden age, stretching to the 1960s, when mature stars and new talents meshed in bigger and bigger productions that would begin to crash in the late 1960s. Characterized by an overall “niceness,” even when dealing with race, class, gambling or selling a soul to the devil for baseball glory MGM and other studios produced a string of classics like Singin’ in the Rain (MGM, 1952), which recast the story of musicals themselves, An American in Paris (MGM, 1951) and The Kïng and I (Twentieth Century FOX, 1956), with stars like Gene Kelly Julie Andrews, Leslie Caron and Rex Harrison. Musicals, in fact, captured an unprecedented five Oscars for Best Picture after 1958’s Gigi (MGM): West Side Story (1961); My Fair Lady (Warner, 1964); Sound of Music (FOX, 1965) and Oliver! (Columbia, 1968). In 1964, in fact, musicals swept the major categories, drawing in Julie Andrews for her performance in Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964) as well. By the late 1960s, success gave way to larger and ponderous failures like Paint Your Wagon (1969) and Mame (1974). Star power also became a point of conflict as non-singing (or nondancing) stars were dubbed into parts in ways that disconnected them from fundamental action and brought the genre to a long dry spell from the 1970s onwards, broken by stellar exceptions like the work of Barbra Streisand or Cabaret (1972).
But Hollywood musicals also looked beyond Broadway. Disney, for example, has its own tradition of animated musicals translated into Broadway after the success of Beauty and the Beast (1991) and The Lion Kïng (1993). Recording artists and appeals to teenage audiences were also important from roles showcasing Sinatra in the 1930s and 1940s to those that followed Elvis in the 1950s, the Beatles in the 1960s and “soundtrack” musicals like Saturday Nïght Fever (1977) or The Big Chill (1983), where music moves the action but surges from the stereo or background to do so. Whitney Houston’s romantic role in the diva-pic The Bodyguard (1992) also underscores the integration of the musical, although African Americans were sometimes trapped in all-black stories not so far from Broadway segregation (Cabin in the Sky, 1943; Carmen Jones, 1956; The Wiz, 1978). Meanwhile, the centrality of movie themes and scores (marketed with blockbuster movies) creates yet another domain of musical entertainment.
Industry:Culture
The private garden has long been part of the American domestic ideal. Implicit in the “American dream” of a home with a white picket fence is the green lawn inside that fence. Individual gardens come in all shapes and sizes, from subsistence food production to flower-cutting gardens to manicured topiaries. The centerpiece of the stereotypical garden is the lawn. More varied elements include flowering plants and trees, water features and vegetables. Gardens are both ornamental and functional, often serving as extended living areas complete with outdoor furniture. Rural yards in the South, where weather permits outdoor activity year-round, become outdoor rooms where cooking, washing and social activities take place.
The trends of contemporary architecture have generally been slow to influence gardens and landscape architecture. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a shift towards relaxed planting styles, inspired by regional natural settings and a yearning for the wild, historic American landscape. Shrinking property sizes are another major factor in changing garden design. Container gardens have sprouted in cities, on corporate plazas, small yards, roofs and window boxes. Busy lifestyles that preclude a weekend of lawn mowing, and rising water costs have also led to lower-maintenance gardens.
Plantings and garden styles change drastically from one region to another according to climate. Southwestern gardeners often plant succulents which thrive in arid climates, a water-efficient practice called xeriscaping, though they also grow water-dependent lawns, an imitation of the traditional temperate climate’s yard. The southeast supports more lush, tropical species, and the northern states grow a variety of smaller annual and perennial plant life.
Community gardening in America tends to flourish in times of economic hardship or war. The First World War had Liberty Gardens, the Great Depression necessitated community gardening and, during the Second World War, the Victory Garden program contributed to national vegetable production. Such gardens were not generally popular again until the 1970s, when they were promoted with urban-renewal efforts as a way to heal urban blight.
In many cities, community gardens have been developed in vacant lots where buildings have been torn down and not replaced. Some start as squatters’ gardens, without approval from municipal authorities; others are started by city agencies or special interest groups with community support. They utilize raised planting beds, which conserve water and space, and are often divided into small plots tended by a single individual or family.
Community gardens are often hard to preserve on a long-term basis because of real-estate pressure, and their creation and preservation has been a catalyst for and product of community activism as people work to maintain valuable neighborhood resources. Some municipalities have sponsored work-training programs in community gardens for disadvantaged youth. Such gardens reinforce community ideals, preserve a neighborhood’s green open space and, when well tended, can yield substantial quantities of produce.
Industry:Culture
