zukin1991landscapes

Argues Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” never accounted for local communities. In the face of market changes and the “post-postwar period of economic growth” Schumpeter’s ideas of progress are harder to square with economic realities today. “These days,” she writes, “workers are important because they consume, not because they produce anything the culture values.” The result is that “abstract market forces that detach people from social institutions have overpowered specific forces of attachment identified with place.” (4)

Says that postindustrial society and the idea of decline and decentralization (deindustrialization) doesn’t capture the “simultaneous advance and decline of economic forms.” (5)

Draws on economic historian Karl Polanyi to look at the “landscape as a social, cultural, and political product of creative destruction” that is defined by “a fragile compromise between market and place.” The market is embedded in American’s identity as a “peculiar sort of social equality,” but as market culture is exported internationally it now “poses most danger to the cultural values of place.” (5)

Historically market and place are tied together. Market was “both a literal place and a symbolic threshold.” They were often intertwined with local communities, which meant that the “denseness of interactions and the goods that were exchanged offered local communities the material and cultural means for their social reproduction — that is, their survival as communities.” In other words, market and place supported one another, evident in the spatial and temporal arrangements of marketplaces. Markets were frequently defined by streets, plazas, and daily life. (6)

Up until the nineteenth century, markets were not separate from place. When the separation of market and place first emerged, so did the labor market. The rise of an entrepreneurial role was identified with employers, whose motivations were poured into cutting production costs. Between 1815 and 1900, “both employers’ claims and workers’ counterclaims began to echo the distinctly quantitative rhetoric and symbolic language of market forces.” Markets became divorced from place, instead becoming an “internalized market culture.” (6-7)