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America
Town: Building the Outposts of Empire by Mark
L. Gillem.
While the imperialist motives and
actions of the United States are heavily researched, watched,
and disseminated, the exportation of America's suburban
sprawl to foreign soil via the construction and planning
of military bases is devoid of the attention it deserves.
The subject deals not only with the physical make-up of
the housing, retail, and other subsidiary functions servicing
the military personnel and their families, but also with
the relationship between the United States and the foreign
country, the host. Mark Gillem -- and architect, planner,
professor, and former U.S. Air Force officer -- approaches
the subject from a multi-disciplinary background, and he
naturally makes the study multi-disciplinary in its scope
and conclusions. Rather than focusing on one particular
aspect of an already narrow topic, Gillem broadens his approach
to embrace the social and political, as well as the architectural.
After a couple brief and cursory
chapters on Empire and American imperialism, Gillem takes
aim on the subject at hand: the effects of the physical
planning and construction of military bases in Japan, South
Korea, and Italy. Numerous effects stand out, many of them
subsidiary to the planning practices of the military, like
the proliferation of prostitution and other "services"
aimed at the primarily male and single personnel at some
bases. But the effects that do stem from planning practices
paint a picture of a government that, as a guest, treats
its host in a manner that could best be described as terrible.
From making the host pay for most of the construction and
infrastructure to taking more and more of the host's land
to enable the construction of sprawling residential areas,
beyond the highly consumptive landing strips and other pure
military elements, the US stubbornly perpetuates a practice
of inefficient, automobile-dependent land use and the consumption
of more and more land for ornamental lawns in the name of
security.
Certainly these practices will come
as no surprise to people who pay attention to suburban sprawl,
as won't the juxtaposition
of the "void" of American bases with the "solid"
of the adjacent local buildings. Additionally, the actions
the military has undertaken since 2001 -- when the military
was in a period of declining presence in foreign lands,
only to be reversed by acts of terrorism -- are disappointing,
if not shocking; namely, the decision to further insulate
the base from its context. In effect this decision makes
the host an enemy, as terrorism can arise from anybody anywhere,
supposedly. It's an unfortunate trend that goes against
gains made in Italy, for example, where housing for military
personnel blends extremely well into the surrounding context
and offers an alternative to the continued, insensitive
exportation of American practices in foreign lands.
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