The effect of large-scale or global business on the migration patterns of its executives is described in detail in this New York Times article, using the experience of one family in Atlanta as an example. The Link family lives in Alpharetta, a upper-middle class suburb north of Atlanta whose residents share many of the same challenges, wishes, and situations as the Links do.
I could never imagine being in an analogous position, where my fate and that of my family hinges so precariously on the strategizing of such a big company, where I have to essentially trade economic security for rootlessness. Not to say that the Link family lives dangerously: they live in a comfortable bedroom community where schools are excellent, the job pays well, kids are active, the home is modern and comfortable, etc. I grew up in a neighborhood ultimately not so different from Alpharetta in ways, but certainly not categorized by the inevitable and relentless mobility and the high degree of changeover of the residents. What's new is the degree of the mobility and how commonplace is has become to live this way.
I wonder about the growth of these kinds of lifestyles with regards to the nature of place. I suppose on the one hand, places like Alpharetta are not new; what could be new is the degree to which they are interchangeable with the other places these corporate managers are shuttled around to. It's essentially a upper-middle class company town, a sort of ready-made place to land that has all of the trappings that people in this demographic could want. Plug in and consume. In some ways it really is an ideal. But how to address the yearnings for feelings of home?
Place or locality in the article is reduced to commodities: house, car, rigorous schools, athletics, a collection of upscale shopping destinations. These take on increased significance as people like the Links, as a result of their mobility, are unable to really connect to the clubs and community organizations that would otherwise bind them to place, and help them establish personal relationships. On a base level Alpharetta satisfies all of the criteria that the Links and others in their socioeconomic situation use to find a hometown. Yet the well-appointed homogeneity of Alpharetta and the other places like it exert a negative impact on their residents.
With the spread of global industry's new satellite office parks, the relos churn through towns like Alpharetta; Naperville, Ill., west of Chicago; Plano, Tex., outside Dallas; Leawood, Kan., near Kansas City; Sammamish, Wash., outside Seattle; and Cary, N.C., which is outside Raleigh and, its resident nomads maintain, stands for Containment Area for Relocated Yankees.
If this lifestyle is genuinely becoming more common (which I believe it is and will, given the predisposal toward constant mobility of my generation) I am curious how a sense of the local is constructed in these otherwise insulated, "placeless" places. Otherwise the experience of Alpharetta or Naperville is just an unending stream of material and cultural signifiers. Institutions, places, and even people (the article notes how Republican Alpharetta is) merely exist to meet pre-packaged conceptions. I should note that this can become equally true of urban neighborhoods, too; living in warehouse lofts in different urban neighborhoods could produce analogous experiences.
Where does the local or personal intervene, if at all? If the private realm (the suburban house, the SUV) continues to balloon in significance, what does this portend for architecture and urban design? Are McMansions, with their exaggerated symbols of permanence, pedigree, and significance, (reflecting our anxiety about mobility and lifestyle changes) the only answer? Is a sense of the local, whatever that may be, merely a commodity, or something else? Is design useless in such a mobile life? No one in places like Alpharetta has the time or attention span to devote to thinking about such things.
Maybe increasing mobility is really the central reason why designers, especially ones working in these kinds of places, have no choice but to look backward to an imagined, stable historical moment. Anxiety is what is driving lifestyle centers to look like whatever the local vernacular used to be; anxiety is driving New Urbanism. Modern architecture becomes a niche, static "style" while a veneer of the old reassures us wherever we go.
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