A new documentary, Making Sense of Place:
Phoenix, the Urban Desert, uses the Arizona megalopolis
to illustrate what happens when suburban sprawl goes unchecked.
Historical and current footage shows how cheap land and even
cheaper water have encouraged Phoenix to sprawl over more than
1,700 square miles of Sonoran desert. But the resulting generic
suburbs, miles from jobs and stores, and the traffic-choked
highways and crumbling downtowns aren’t unique to
Phoenix. Similar problems plague Denver, Albuquerque, Salt Lake
City and other Western cities.
The film was produced by
Northern Light Productions and the Lincoln Institute of Land
Policy, which studies land planning and economics. The film reveals
the compromises and contradictions of Phoenix’s massive
growth spurt: Community activists reclaim access to a beloved
mountain park cut off by trophy homes. A determined group of
residents revive their dying downtown neighborhood. And new
homeowners celebrate buying their dream homes, while behind the
scenes, the cheap labor of impoverished Latinos fuels the
construction boom.
The documentary presents some crucial
questions. Do we value land for its intrinsic beauty, or as just
somewhere to build? What gives us a true sense of place and
community? Without laying blame, the film also shows us the basic
paradox of the American Dream: The choices that please us as
individuals, like a big house and a big yard, can lead to
collective results we don’t like — traffic,
pollution, congestion. As the film’s narrator notes,
“When we build the homes of our dreams, we put the place we call
home at risk.”
For more information, see
www.makingsenseofplace.org .
Making Sense of
Place: Phoenix, the Urban Desert
58 minutes,
$25.95.
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2003
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The wages of sprawl.
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