Desert Visions and the Making of Phoenix, 1860-2009 by Philip VanderMeer (review)

Despite the tremendous growth of the past half-century, Phoenix has remained a provincial backwater in American urban history. That being said, the city has been swept up in several historiographical trends in the past twenty years. Philip VanderMeer does an excellent job of consolidating these different strands in Desert Visions and the Making of Phoenix. Early research on Phoenix, such as Morning Glories by Amy Bridges, focuses on municipal political development. Bradford Luckingham, another historian of the city, further expands the historical literature to include politically marginalized groups in his book Minorities in Phoenix. Matthew Whitaker and William Collins also explore the relationship between political development and racial minorities in their respective books Race Work and The Emerging Metropolis. Environmental history has recently risen to the forefront as Patricia Gober has written about the local relationship between conservation and community formation in Metropolitan Phoenix, and Andrew Ross discusses the lack of environmental sustainability in Bird on Fire. VanderMeer effectively consolidates these different conceptualizations of Phoenix in Desert Visions through his claim that "form, location, and culture" are the central issues in the history of the region. He argues that the history of Phoenix begins with the environmental impact of the inhospitable region's political, economic, and social character.

VanderMeer bifurcates the history of Phoenix between agricultural and suburban development. He describes Phoenix prior to 1940 as "an American Eden." From the very beginning, Anglo settlers utilized outside capital, engineering, and labor to transform Phoenix and the surrounding Salt River Valley into an agricultural oasis, a health haven, and a resort paradise. To achieve this end, local leaders excluded, or ignored the existence of, nonwhite residents; they also reformed the desert into a landscape familiar to white migrants fromback east. While successful, VanderMeer finds that this "fostered a somewhat dangerous belief in the malleability of nature and the near limitless power of human ingenuity" (p. 10).

The shift from agricultural development to suburbanization occurred between 1940 and 1960. Over these two decades, Phoenix developed the institutional and social form of a western interior city, but local leaders began to envision a "high-tech suburban" future for Phoenix—an existence similar to that of coastal California. Public-private partnerships between city officials and economic elites begat nascent efforts to attract electronic and aerospace manufacturing, military spending, and increased tourism to the Valley of the Sun. Affordable housing, air-conditioning, and swimming pools became foundations of the postwar social and spatial form. However, by the 1970s, some Phoenicians began to argue that the excessive environmental costs of the high-tech suburban model outweighed its economic and social benefits. By the 1980s, as the local leaders of the postwar generation had begun to retire or pass on, no new leaders renovated the "dying economic plan" of postwar Phoenix (p. 185). While the spatial growth of the city continued, the foundations of the economy no longer offered a basis for long-termprosperity. In the end, VanderMeer finds that the model of high-tech suburbia had become "metropolitan in character" (p. 186), and, unlike in previous generations, the consequences of sprawl could no longer be remedied at the municipal level.

Desert Visions, while a superb synthesis of Phoenix's history, also has several aspects that may be of particular interest to historians of technology—particularly the centrality of technological innovation to the growth of Phoenix. VanderMeer argues that the vision of local elites "reflected key elements of postwar American culture, especially a belief in the possibilities of growth, the transformative power of technology and science, and a prosperous future" (p. 183). He spends the majority of chapters 6 and 7 exploring the relationship between technology and the creation of the high-tech suburban lifestyle. VanderMeer credits the growth and development of Phoenix to economic opportunities created by the aerospace and semiconductor industries, as well as to social innovations like air-conditioning, preassembled homes, and transnational air transport. Desert Visions is critical...