Beyond the Crabgrass Frontier
This introductory chapter provides an overview of postwar metropolitan development. The search for the natural resources required for metropolitan growth, and for spaces to discard the waste produced by metropolitan consumption, led federal, state, and local actors to create new infrastructures. These power lines, aqueducts, and landfills reorganized economies, ecologies, and societies in distant landscapes. Once constructed, they shaped possibilities and limited opportunities for change. These infrastructures invested metropolitan actors in the transformation of distant landscapes while drawing distant people into new relationships with metropolitan centers. The result was not only metropolitan sprawl but also the reorganization of politics, society, and nature in new, far-flung regions. This book traces the development of the power lines that ran between Phoenix and the Navajo reservation through time and across space to construct a broad new map of postwar urban, environmental, and political change.