Crossing Great Divides: City and Country in Environmental and Political Disorder(Urban Life, Landscape and Policy)

Ranging across two centuries of American history, Crossing Great Divides argues that the habit of construing city and country as opposites is at the root of our current environmental and political disorder. This oversimplifying dualism has distorted how we planned cities, our patterns of production and consumption, how we deal with waste, and how urban and rural populations perceive each other. Conventional urban environmental reform has made modern city life possible, but it has done little to limit the despoliation of distant places. Nevertheless, the successes of urban environmental reform remind us of what is possible. John Fairfield concludes with a case study of Phoenix, Arizona to demonstrate this dysfunctional relationship between city and country while developing a sympathetic critique of the Green New Deal. He suggests how we might bridge the “great divide” as we face the daunting challenges the twenty-first century is pressing upon us.

About the Author :
John D. Fairfield is Professor of History at Xavier University. He is the author of The Public and its Possibilities: Triumphs and Tragedies in the American City (Temple), The Mysteries of the Great City: The Politics of Urban Design, 1877-1937, and Oakley: From Hamlet to the Center of Cincinnati, as well as the coeditor of Bringing The Civic Back In: Zane L. Miller and American Urban History (Temple).

Review :
“The perceived dichotomy between city and country is one of America’s most persistent and problematic cultural touchstones. In this important book, John D. Fairfield knits crucial historical, political, and ecological analyses together. He convincingly shows how serious the problem is and creatively identifies ways forward. He opens the way to achieve truly regional sustainability and justice through the reciprocal connections between city and country that we have too long neglected. Not only is this a work of deep and synthetic scholarship, but it also reflects clear-eyed lived experience that brings city and country within a single vision.”-Steward T. A. Pickett, Urban Ecologist and Distinguished Senior Scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, and coeditor of Science for the Sustainable City: Empirical Insights from the Baltimore School of Urban Ecology “John Fairfield does an excellent job of explaining how our cities and rural areas became separated (to the detriment of both), what the far-reaching consequences of this disconnect are, why it matters, and how we might go about repairing this broken relationship. His historical approach, which puts our present-day urban-rural predicament in social, political, economic, environmental, and technological context, is particularly effective, helping readers understand the conditions and mechanisms that got us to where we are today. Drawing again on our past, Crossing Great Divides offers a roadmap that might bind us together again, both regionally and as citizens.”-Geoffrey Buckley, Professor of Geography at Ohio University, and coeditor of The American Environment Revisited: Environmental Historical Geographies of the United States "[T]his is a useful work for its (re)introduction to many of us of John Dewey’s Pragmatism with its emphasis on intellect and experience conjoined with an appreciation of the contingency of knowing, and for Fairfield’s insistence that we live in a world of intrinsic as well as instrumental value.... It raises interesting questions, offers a direction for at least partial solutions, and invites us to further discussion."-Journal of Urban Affairs