Page 32 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

16 Place, Space, and Geography

world embodied a political power relation between the genders. The differ-
ence between downtown Philadelphia, where wealthy whites live, and
uptown north Philadelphia, where poor blacks live, is remarkable; it is the
difference between the glitz and glamour of commerce and the blight
of closed stores, between neat clean streets and littered broken ones.
The cultural difference is a physical, economic, and racial difference.
Cultural history can be read through landscapes. One sees there a record
of past decisions that express values. The American superhighway system
is a record of a choice made in the 1950s, when conservatives from the
business community were in power, to privilege profi table car production
over more useful but much less profi table public transportation, which in
subsequent decades was dismantled after having thrived for decades before
the 1950s. America, as a result, became a culture of cars rather than a
culture that expressed and addressed a community need (as in Europe
where socialists assured that public transportation would survive and
thrive). Differences in landscape indicate differences in cultures or changes
within the same culture. As the US became more urban and industrial, the
farmland around cities was eaten up by suburban housing developments

first, then later by large industrial “ parks. ” If one walks through areas of

American cities that are in the process of being gentrified, that is, refur-
bished in order to attract wealthy renters or buyers, one sees residues of an
older culture embodied in the architectural details of the buildings. Those
details are often ornate and purely decorative rather than functional; they
pertain to a cultural moment when wealthy people could afford to decorate

houses. The gentrified equivalents lack all such decoration. Theirs is a
culture that is more given to cleanness of line and an ideal of the effi cient
and profi table use of materials – much like the new culture of wealth that

makes the gentrification possible. It too thrives on reducing costs (often
wages and the value from enterprise assigned to labor instead of the inves-
tor class or the business management class), and that reduction appears in
the physical buildings in the form of sheets of cheap metal that perform
functions that in the past would have been performed by now expensive
brick construction.
Human labor on landscapes takes place over time, and as a result, it is
always layered. One generation ’ s meanings will usually be constructed on
top of those of previous generations. Built landscapes often consist of
several levels, each with its distinct historical feel or meaning. In urban
landscapes, very different kinds of buildings, for example, can exist side
by side, with each often embodying very distinct historical meanings.