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5 Public Land, Private Politics Finding a New Urban Realm in the Great Basin It was never the West as landscape she resisted, only the West as transience and social crudity. And those she might transform. —Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose In South Jordan, Utah, in the southwest corner of the Salt Lake Valley, up at the end of 11 400 South Street and at the crest of a bluff overlooking the great big bowl of this basin, is an apron of spent land marked by decades of mining activity. The mining company that owns the land, part of the largest unbuilt holding in the valley, is turning it into a place to live and work. This place is named Daybreak because once you have risen above the South Jordan populace on the entrance parkway, with its giant copper-colored capital letters daybr eak set on a stone mount, and cleared the bench, you can turn around and—depending on the time and the season—watch the sun rise over Lone Peak, Twin Peaks, Mount Olympus, the Pfeifferhorn, or Thunder Mountain, the sun like a molten snowcone on the silhouette of any one of the Central Wasatch giants. Salt Lake Valley may seem an evenly filled-in oval from maps and some vantage points, but most of the development lies on the east side of the valley. Most of the houses with views lie on the East Bench, the name given to the table of higher ground against the Wasatch Mountains. In Salt Lake City, the East Bench starts at around 1100East Street—11blocks east of Temple Square—with the short, steep rise of the Wasatch Fault and the climbing of brick bungalows up the slope. Going farther east and higher up is like taking a course in twentieth-century architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright makes an appearance past 1300 East, and then Abraham Levitt. The farther you go up the East Bench, the bigger and more tasteless the houses get, until the majestic edge of the valley, where massive 132 Chapter 5 stucco, steel and concrete boxes cling to eroded slopes. The Wasatch wall hangs above these monsters and, apart from the weather sweeping across the valley and the sunsets, the view of the bleak Oquirrh range and the gray puddle of Great Salt Lake can be a tough sell. Daybreak is pioneering the West Bench. It has taken the sunrise metaphor gleaned from the views to craft a message of new beginning in the valley. Until now, the West Bench has been empty because it has been a fallout zone for the nearby Bingham open-pit copper mine, that nearly mile-deep Great Basin earthwork that is one of the largest open-pit excavation sites in the world. The Kennecott Utah Copper Corporation, since bought out by international mining giant Rio Tinto, owns almost the entire west side of the Salt Lake Valley and much of the Oquirrh Mountains as a buffer for the mine, a spread twice the size of the District of Columbia. Some time ago, realizing that it would stop mining over the next few decades, Kennecott hatched an exit strategy from Salt Lake Valley: Plan a city on the west side of the valley, better than the one that’s on the other side, build it, sell it, and leave. That ambition is evident even in the first few completed phases of Daybreak, the first project of Kennecott Land and Salt Lake County’s West Bench Master Plan, which plans eventually to house one million people. I’ve come here, cresting the hill up to the bench on a sparkling fall morning to walk Daybreak’s model streets with Nathan Francis, a planner with Kennecott Land. So far, only about two thousand of the thirteen thousand homes have been built. The rest of the houses, plus 5.2million square feet of office space, 2.4 million square feet of retail, and 1.5million square feet of industrial space, will be built over the next fifteen years.1 That’s equivalent to the downtown of a medium-sized city, dropped on the West Bench. It is also another pod of houses and jobs that has moved out into the Great Basin on the surf of the booming economy earlier in the decade,2 but Daybreak regards itself as a break from that pattern of sprawl. Like Overlake, it is the importation to Utah of new urbanism, a school of city planning, design, and development that recommends...

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