Public Space and the Ideology of Place in American Culture (review)

Immense man-made landscapes springing from a pastoral environment, American cities are marvels of technology. Creating, defining, and redefining urban space continually inspires questions about the relationship between place and person. This collection is expressly rooted in the interdisciplinary American studies field and in dialogue with a broader spatial turn, engaging familiar topics through the lens of place and space. The volume's organization reflects the goal of achieving a diverse, yet focused, dialogue. The eighteen essays are grouped into three sections: "Public Space as a Symbol," "Contesting Public Space," and "Mutability of Public Space."

A shared concern for exploring the evolving form of public spaces and deciphering the influences behind their constructed meanings unifies these essays. Each author uses different cases to probe, untangle, and decode the creation of public space, both in the physical sense and as a constructed meaning. As is common in American studies, the essays generally place technological advances in the background of each narrative. Thus, while reshaping physical space is central to the narratives in that it provides a context in which to examine social interactions, technology largely remains a distant, if looming, influence. Where technology is discussed directly, both details and analysis are generally sparse.

There is one notable exception. Jeffrey Meikle's essay, "Pasteboard Views: Idealizing Public Space in American Postcards 1931-1953," presents an analytic structure that will be familiar to historians of technology. In examining specific changes in printing technology and economics, Meikle considers how a major postcard publisher created a new form of printing that both offered economic advantages to the firm and connected with aspirations for what urban spaces could be.

In the other essays, historians of technology will likely have to read between the lines to recognize how infrastructure (true to its etymology) constitutes the assemblage that makes urban existence possible. Without recognizing the traditions of the American studies discipline, it would be tempting to be disappointed that the development, applications, unrealized potential, and alternate outcomes of technologies are not explored.

There is, however, a value to these essays for historians of technology precisely because technology is so invisible in them. By treating technology as just another part of the backdrop of urban space, the work provides an unfamiliar perspective on a central topic in the history of technology. Having eighteen perspectives in a single source provides a stimulus to consider varied analytical and aesthetic approaches to urban technology. More broadly, these essays challenge historians of technology to reexamine topics through the eyes of outsiders who neither have an intimate understanding of the form and evolution of complex systems nor are informed by Kranzberg's laws of technology. Considering technology as an indistinct part of a larger wave affecting physical space and shaping human lives provides an alternate lens to understand how the redefinition of space is interpreted.

By placing technology at the background, this collection of essays compels the reader to consider a social and humanistic interpretation of what might otherwise be seen as a fundamentally technological topic. In this role it has the potential to further interdisciplinary explorations of a familiar subject.