The Postindustrial Garden

Abstract

This chapter examines key moments and symbolic struggles in the production of the postindustrial garden in East County. The industrial garden was “a coordinated middle landscape that joined economic progress and social stability.” However, it was a model underscored by deep racism, a paternalist political structure, economic inefficiency, and environmental destruction. East County reflected the same basic idea as the industrial garden, but with different people in different places and a very different underlying political economy. When it came time for people of color to suburbanize en masse, something they did alongside many working- and middle-class whites, the red carpet laid out by the postwar U.S. government had been worn out and not replaced. Instead of fixing suburbanization so that communities of color could enjoy what they had been excluded from, newly suburbanized communities were increasingly abandoned to their own devices.