In the mid 90’s as a teenager, I lived in a subdivision of Brunswick, a city sprung wholecloth out of pristine Ohio woodland. Three decades before I lived there, the sleepy little town still had some gravel roads. Brunswick, a name picked randomly during its christening in 1815, is entropy made physical. I spent most of my teenage years in that town and along with a friend, for a brief time were its sole suburban ecoterrorists. My brief teenage rebellion against the suburban sprawl of my hometown taught me no one is coming to save us. We’ll have to build the future on our own, with or without permission.
The city sprawls in no direction whatsoever, consuming land to plop down more gas stations, tattoo parlors, sports bars, and of course, more subdivisions. Brunswick exists because of a curious 35% uptick in population in 1970 and is 94% white. The credit boom of the mid-90’s made sprawl super-cheap, and boy did it flourish. I wonder what else was going during the late 1960’s that caused a bunch of white people to move out of Cleveland. As I stroke my beard inquisitively, I must wonder why indeed.
Now in the dystopia of 2019, I have to pass through the long stretches of strip malls, fast food joints, and crappy big box stores and wonder, is this what it was all for? Thousands murdered in imperial wars? The destruction of the ecosystem? A society whose most successful product is superhero films and mass shooters? It’s for this? This.
Edward Burtynsky
The American aristocracy made the decision to destroy millions of lives and 1 life-sustaining planet so we could have shoes with lights in them, a 32 count box of frozen corn dogs, cars shaped like hamburgers, and an endless stream of garbage distraction so vast and wide we couldn’t enjoy it in 100 lifetimes. Why?
The answer I get is the silence of the dead mall’s parking lot.
A tombstone to a project begun decades before with the rise of the suburbia: an end result of the modernist style championed by men like I.M. Pei, who recently passed away at 102. His most famous claim to fame was a collection of depressing concrete buildings, glass dildos to house office workers, and other filing cabinets for disaffected, lonely people.
He’s the designer of Boston City Hall Plaza, a public place so depressing no one would even want to commit suicide there. He’s responsible for many landmark dystopian buildings in Washington D.C., such as L’Enfant Plaza, Town Center Plaza East, and the Chinese Embassy. He’s most famous for fucking up the Louvre in 1988. The Louvre Pyramid is emblematic of his legacy: refusing to acknowledge a history of architecture in order to awkwardly shove in his impersonal steel, glass, and raw concrete.
Boston “Shitty” Hall Plaza 
Doomspace known as L’Enfant Plaza 
A glass box to kill rodents in? 
Embassy of America’s creditors 
Hated by the French and me
(I.M. Pei also helped to develop incendiary bombs during World War II to terrorize Japanese civilians, whose homes were made of easily flammable paper and wood.)
In terms of psychic destruction of our sense of public space, I.M. Pei belongs in such infamous company as Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and the Levitt Brothers for the people most responsible for the oppressive, soul-crushing ugliness of American cities and towns. I’ve heard the argument for Brutalism and Modernism from the left: that its functional nature is anti-bourgeoisie and for the proletariat, or anti-fascist as they seek to return to a mythical opulent past, or even that it’s anti-socialist, due to their radical origins, to want to tear them down.
In a way, Brutalist and Modernist architecture does have a social metaphor to them: they are unornamented, industrial, and by exposing their inner workings, show how we as a society can work together. They are also ugly and depressing, because a beige concrete slab simply cannot elicit love from many people not trying to formulate a political theory while trying to buy groceries. The metaphor takes too much explanation and meanwhile we’re all wondering why our cities and towns look like shit.
A Secret World In My Backyard
In Brunswick, I lived in the Pumpkin Ridge subdivision, a place with no pumpkins or ridges, nestled against a wild and sprawling forest dotted with small farms. Just beyond is the wonderful Hinkley Reservation, one of the Ohio’s few environmental successes: the Cleveland Metroparks, also known as “the Emerald Necklace”. Behind my bland clapboard house was a place of adventure, a woodland that seemed to have no end. I spent endless hours in those woods hiking alone or with friends, making up stories, and then returning home as the sun went down. I always had a very active imagination, and the woods and hills out there felt like another world entirely, removed from the curbcuts and chain restaurants.
I was never much of a family camper, I preferred the solitude and quiet of that place, its lack of corners and rules, and it centered me in a way few other things have since. Honestly, some of the best times of my life were spent there, and I always think back on them fondly, something I will always carry with me yet can never revisit.
In the summer of 1996, I watched helplessly as the cornfields and woods were demolished by developer bulldozers to build another subdivision exactly like my own. I would only realize years later, after learning more specifically about the nature of suburbia, did I realize people may like their homes, but they don’t want to see any more of them. I also learned that we do not live in a separate world from nature, we live in nature. There is no border. I knew people who would spend hours travelling to a place untouched by sprawl to spend an afternoon just walking around in a pedestrian-friendly space, or to look at a tree that wasn’t planted outside an Applebee’s.
Brunswick was always an ugly town, but the suburban sprawl boom of the late 90’s turbocharged the expansion of cars and strip malls. South Park Mall opening nearby in Strongsville only made it worse. Brunswick’s most famous landmark is Mapleside Farms, a place distinctly un-sprawl, preserving the lush, low-rolling hills of the landscape for a working apple orchard. All the glory of nature just a half mile from a Mr. Tire Auto Service Center. Drive for a while outside of any Ohio town and you’ll see a lovely countryside. Head back in and you’ll see social failure that’s difficult to quantify.
My first taste of ecological direct action was sneaking into the Park Place subdivision building sites with a stoner friend and knocking over several piles of cinderblocks, kicking signs down, tearing up plot demarcations. We did this at least a dozen times. In the dirt walls of freshly dug basements, we wrote “TREE PROTECTION LEAGUE” in big letters with our fingers. We felt immensely proud of our accomplishment and we were never caught.
Yeah, you construction dipshits, twenty years ago? Those smashed cinderblocks? That was me, you fuckers.
As expected, our two person cell was ineffective at stopping the march of real estate development. In retrospect, it was more adolescent trouble-making more than anything else. We were just bored and hated what we saw, even if we had fumbling ways of expressing it. The irony of being suburbanites ourselves was lost on us. And also, all we did was most likely annoy some working class construction guys and briefly waste their time.
The boredom of Brunswick. Oh God, the boredom of that town: the sheer utter doldrum that drove us to drink booze and shoot firecrackers out of moving cars, to make crop circles in the middle of the night, and play a stream of video games just to kill time until we died ourselves. This was the world given to us: a depressing boring mess that was wrecking our own planet and we didn’t even really know it.
Photos of Brunswick. Thanks goodness our brave men and women died in the dirt to protect our treasured homeland.
The Futureless Future
America is now a country that is relentlessly ugly and impersonal, alienating to an extreme degree. Very few places are accessible except with a personally owned car, a tax on every person who doesn’t live in a big city. Physical spaces, like the ones I.M. Pei designed, reject a rich cultural history of walkable design in favor of functional, depressing, purely privatized spiritual cemeteries. Our sprawl landscape is dismal, an actual dystopia of brain death in exchange for awful places not worth defending or caring about. No one will miss the 2 Circle K’s on Pearl Road about a mile away from each other. No will miss the piss-reeking movie theater or the tanning salons.
The American developer machine has placed the car in a near-religious place of importance. The car has become the real citizen of America, and its desires must be held in the highest regard. Ohio will spend $865 million on transportation in 2019, with 92% going to things other than public transit. Sprawl is mandated by law in building codes that make actually healthy places illegal to build.
Our cities and towns are dead places, filled with soul-crushing misery that may not be able to be saved. Not just in their appearance, but in how they’re managed: nothing can get any better, only more or less worse. Bizarrely enough, no one seems to want any of this but feel like they have no options. No one votes for it or advocates for more of it.
There is no grandeur in another big box store. There is no meaning to be found in a gas station. The empty suits and bland smiles trotted out before us offer cosmopolitan capitalism or misogynist racist psychopaths. One is obviously more desirable, but neither is what people want.
Our public places resemble the nature of our society: crumbling, alienating, maddeningly banal but overly complicated, and always placing the corporation as the center of life.
The future of these places is there is no future for them. Just like there is no future for neoliberalism. Take away the cheap oil, take away the cheap credit, and they crumble. Back in 2008 during the financial crisis, we saw the potential for it to blow up in all of our faces. And considering literally half of America lives in these places, they are hopelessly unprepared for even the slightest disruption of comfort and convenience. Imagine how they’ll react to climate change taking away the Hot Pockets, Crocs and Grumpy Cat plushies. The reactionary right elected Trump during stable fragility, imagine who’ll they put their faith in during a real long term crisis with no easy resolution. Exactly the worst person imaginable, that’s who.
I wonder what my old hometown would do. The answer is they would simply bitch and complain until the government bailed out all the red-faced golf dads and built a $150 billion skyway over the new feudal wartorn Cuyahoga Valley.
Perhaps next time we need to knock over more than just a few cinderblocks.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.