Is Form Destiny? Technologies of Personal Security

Early on the morning of 22 August 2003, someone broke into a car dealership in West Covina, California, and torched twenty Hummer H2s, the look-alike replica of the Humvee military vehicle. Graffiti left at the scene linked the attack to a fifty-million-dollar fire at an unfinished residential complex in suburban San Diego earlier in the month. A militant environmental group, the Earth Liberation Front, claimed responsibility for the San Diego fire.

What is it about ersatz military toys and homes behind walls that inspires such anger? In Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America (New York: Routledge, 2003), Setha Low expresses her disdain for the gated, architecturally uniform, covenant-controlled residential development using the vilest epithet she can muster: "nice." The pursuit of niceness, the process of maintaining a clean, orderly, homogeneous, and controlled neighborhood to preserve stable housing values, is also a way of creating "whiteness." Whiteness, in turn, has less to do with racial identity than a mindless, submissive cultural assimilation. Keith Bradsher's more notorious High and Mighty: SUVs—The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), on the other hand, argues that both sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and gated communities succeed because they appeal to the dark "reptilian dreams" that lurk in each of us. "We're going back to medieval times," Bradsher quotes automotive marketing psychologist Clotaire Rapaille as saying, "and you can see that in the way we live in ghettos with gates and private armies. SUVs are exactly that, they are armored cars for the battlefield." The person who drives an SUV is not only the sort who is willing to gain a 10 percent improvement in his own odds of surviving a crash by doubling or tripling the chances of killing you, he is the kind who wants you to know he is fully capable of making such a calculation.

And why all this anger now? Neither the SUV nor the planned suburb is a particularly new idea. In 1935, Chevrolet bolted a station wagon body on the chassis of a pickup truck and called it the Suburban. It came in two versions: a fully glassed estate wagon with three rows of seats and room for eight, and a panel truck. The estate wagon made the pages of Vanity Fair, but it didn't ride very well, had only two doors, and never really caught on with the horsey set. It was the panel truck that kept the model going, proving especially popular with morticians, who used it to fetch flowers, bodies, and coffins, saving the hearse for funeral days. In 1963 Jeep brought out the Wagoneer, a four-door, four-wheel-drive station wagon. It was boxy and expensive, and remained a specialty item. But the Wagoneer's replacement, the slightly smaller Cherokee, was more refined and far more successful. Introduced in 1983, it was a well-engineered unit mating a semi-unibody shell with a lightweight chassis—the first modern SUV.

The West Covina Hummer attack was particularly ironic, because environmentalists largely ignored the popularization of SUVs until behemoths like the Hummer and Ford's Excursion, a 3,100-kilogram station wagon on steroids, began to fill the roads. Environmentalists owned a lot of beat-up old Broncos, Scouts, and Wagoneers that they used to haul camping gear, canoes, and bicycles on weekends. Automotive issues were so low on their list of priorities that no major environmental organization maintained a field office in Detroit until after Ford unveiled its immensely popular Explorer in 1991.

Before there was the Chevy Suburban, there were, of course, suburbs. The oldest planned suburban development in America was Llewellyn Park, begun on a 400-acre (160-hectare) site in West Orange, New Jersey, in 1853. In 1868, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (the architects of New York's Central Park) designed a radical departure from the Llewellyn Park model, Riverside, outside Chicago. Where Llewellyn Park's lots were 3 acres (1.2 hectares) or larger, Riverside's homes were built on half-acre...