Scanscape:

by Peter Marcuse, Peter Marcuse, Elizabeth McNeil

Essays by Elizabeth McNeil, Peter Marcuse, and Marc Rder. On first glance, this book seems to be a collection of photographs of a carefully crafted scale model for a tract housing developer. Looking closer though, the barren fields, hills topped with cows and power lines, waterfalls and fountains, and sections of half-completed houses indicate that indeed these are real places where real people live. Yet the feeling of its being a model subsists. It's uncanny. Documenting the gated communities that have begun to sprawl into peripheral areas of the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles (and for that matter, identical developments all over the U.S.), German photographer Marc Rder shot these images in such a way that the foreground and background are mashed together, giving the sensation that these are photographs of miniatures. These images invite repeated inspection into the detailed minutia of fabricated living environments, and are a powerful, thought-provoking commentary on these artificial, fenced-in housing divisions. Scanscape also includes an essay by Elizabeth McNeil wherein she poses questions to members of these communities, an essay by Peter Marcuse titled "Commodifying the Garden of Eden," and telling photos of assorted trappings and signage. "The protection that is needed is mental as much as physical. It would spoil some of the pleasure of living in a new Garden of Eden to know that it is built, unlike the old, on the labor, the sweat, the poverty and hardship of many millions of others." Peter Marcuse

96 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2000

About the author

Peter Marcuse is Professor of Urban Planning at Columbia University.
Peter Marcuse was born in 1928, the son of book sales clerk Herbert Marcuse and mathematician Sophie Wertheim. They soon moved to Freiburg, where Herbert began to write his habilitation (thesis to become a professor) with Martin Heidegger. In 1933, in order to escape the Nazi persecution, they joined the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung and emigrated with it first to Geneva, then via Paris, to New York.
He attended Harvard University, where he received his BA in 1948, with a major in History and Literature of the 19th Century. In 1949 he married Frances Bessler (whom he met in the home of Franz and Inge Neumann, where she worked as an au pair while studying at NYU).
In 1952 he received his JD from Yale Law School and began practicing law in New Haven and Waterbury, Connecticut. Peter and Frances had 3 children, in 1953, 1957 and 1965.
He received an MA from Columbia University in 1963, and a Master of Urban Studies.
From 1972-1975 he was a Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA, and since 1975 at Columbia University. Since 2003 he is semi-retired, with a reduced teaching load.