Not Yet a Placeless Land: Tracking an Evolving American Geography

Abstract

Not Yet a Placeless Land: Tracking an Evolving American Geography By Wilbur Zelinsky Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. xvii + 356pp. Seven tables, one map, notes, references, and index. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-55840-870-9; $28.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-55849-871-6.Not Yet a Placeless Land: Tracking an Evolving American Geography is the culmination of a lifetime of one scholar's efforts to analyze, problematize, and synthesize the complex geography of the United States. This book extends, alters and further deliberates Wilbur Zelinsky's earlier books such as Nation into State and Exploring the Beloved Country. It takes up the investigation of the homogenization and the seemingly contradictory diversification of the United States. Some of the book's main topics include discussions of: American statism, national expansion via geographic diffusion, sociocultural conformity, material consumption, specialized economic clustering, pleasure seeking and place-making, unpredictable place-making, regionalisms, the Generic Euro-American Region, neo-localism, convergence, divergence, globalization, and the sorting of American places.The author itemizes and explains ten cause-and-effect mechanisms or processes in the United States that influence places to be similar to or different from one another. Eight of these ten processes influence the country to become more diversified while only two of them, the diffusion of culture, and the collusion of business and government work toward uniformity. However, according to Zelinsky, it is the influential, even overbearing power of business and government together that exert the greatest influence at the national and regional scales.Zelinsky describes the United States as having on the surface become a consistently uniform and unique country due to Americans' unsettled migratory tendencies which have worked as an overall cultural leveler. Because of this, the United States has developed a large central region which Zelinsky calls, "the Generic Euro-American Culture Region" (GEAR), where American culture is generally the most homogenous and uniform (p. 263). He characterizes GEAR as observable on a large scale over large portions of the country.On a smaller scale, Zelinsky says that contemporary American geography is one with communities split apart by municipal codes and subdivision codes which reflect the preferences of some of its residents who want to maintain distances between themselves and others who do not share similar standards and visions for their neighborhood. Zelinsky keenly points out that:At a more intimate scale and to a degree unparalleled in the past, Americans have been sorting themselves out in space in terms of class and income...age, political ideology, religious orientation, leisure pastimes, and cultural appetites in addition to whatever residential racial/ethnic segregation may still prevail (p. 79).Zelinsky believes that Americans have reacted to their perception of placelessness with a renewed emphasis and celebration of all that which is local. This collective effort supports things like microbreweries and farmer's markets. The implication here is that Americans are still looking for both the unexplored and the unspoiled (like the former western frontier) along with that which is real and local.On page 216, Zelinsky shows us his new map lacking a Midwest, West and, for that matter, an Appalachia. He has now disowned and discredited his previously published American culture areas maps. He readily admits that he omitted Alaska and Hawaii on earlier maps. On page 216, the map illustrates seventeen urban culture regions as "Metropolitan Culture Areas" and three additional ones as "Possible Metropolitan Culture Areas" (p. 216). Zelinsky says that his previous omission of urban regions is due to a bias which he picked up from Carl Sauer, who preferred the rural over the urban.In his final summary, Zelinsky asks these two overarching questions. …