Desert Visions and the Making of Phoenix, 1860-2009

Introduction

2 Introduction Form, location, and culture have been central issues for Phoenix from its beginning, as early migrants sought to create something that people further east, the cultural standard bearers, would view favorably. Throughout its history, residents have pursued growth with this in mind. For the last half century they have reveled in the city’s rise relative to other urban places, and they have taken this quantitative measure as indicating larger achievements. This dynamic has made both pride and insecurity consistent elements of the city’s past. Equally central is a persisting mixture of perspectives about the centralcharacterofthisplace,asmigrantshavecontinuedtobringexpectations rooted in places from which they came. I, too, am a migrant to Phoenix, coming with expectations and a cultural perspective.Imovedtotheareain1985,amidwesternerbybirth,byresidence, and through my historical research. Studies and work had taken me to the variousstatesoftheOldNorthwest,andfromobservationandstudyIknewthe lay of that land. Central Arizona confounded my knowledge and perspective. Its topography of mountains and valleys contrasted with rolling, forested hills and grassy prairies; the burden of its ovenlike summers was the seasonal reverse of frigid Michigan winters; and its regularized canals and irrigation ditches bore little resemblance to Indiana’s itinerant creeks and streams. Illinois’s checkerboard of sections and townships, the regular location of its county seats, and the wide distribution of its towns and cities represented very different natural and constructed landscapes than the clusters of cities and towns in Arizona. Living in Mesa, working in Tempe, and visiting Phoenix and Scottsdale, I found that the built environment of these cities was more familiar. Detached, single-family homes were built in various architectural styles, especially different types of ranch homes, which were common throughout the country. The landscaping of yards varied more substantially. Some had lawns and deciduous trees; others sprouted citrus trees or tropical plants; while the most divergent, to my midwestern eyes, contained cacti and rocks or stones. The cities had grassy playgrounds and shade trees, while parks on the urban periphery and some places within the cities were mountains or buttes, rocky with low-lying vegetation, unlandscaped, and open to the sun. The juxtaposition of arid desert with landscaped lawns and swimming pools suggested a contrast that was both historical and contemporary, built and natural, visual and cultural. These differences, these tensions, pushed my interest past a standard curiosity about the place in which I lived and beyond my midwestern sense Introduction 3 of this as a truly different, even “exotic” locale. The reasons for my own migration I understood, but why had so many others come? What had they been expecting, and what did they find? How did they change this place, and how did it change them? My efforts to understand how and why this area had grown began with my observations and moved to reading. At that time very little had been written about the history of the area, but the pioneering work of my colleague Bradford Luckingham and my own efforts in directing substantial research on it by graduate and undergraduate students helped me see this region in more complex terms. Myperspectivewasalsoreshapedbecausethelasttwentysomeyearshave been an extraordinary period in the city’s history. Reflecting national urban changes and especially new ideas about both western and global cities, public officials and people from many professions within Phoenix and its major satellite suburbs have thought, talked, and worked to redefine this city and the metropolitan area. And some have explicitly described this as a crucial era. In 2001 the insightful Arizona Republic columnist Jon Talton argued that Phoenix was at a “tipping point” in its development. Arizona State University urbanist Nan Ellin framed it historically, likening the era to other moments of significant change in key cities—Paris in the 1860s, New York in the 1910s, and Los Angeles in the 1950s. Prodigious amounts of construction either completed or in process have been creating a vastly different built environment in downtown Phoenix and in several surrounding cities. The building of a highway system and the opening of a light rail system have produced multiple, sometimes conflicting changes in urban form. Concerns about resources, the environment, and sheer size have stimulated greater skepticism, or even resistance, to growth on the Valley’s periphery and new approaches to development within the central areas of the city. The new built environment has provided venues for public audiences and has affected the nature of the city’s development. The arrival of major league sports teams both...