America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire

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  • America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire
  • America Town

    • In fact, Gillem sees the malignant spread of such military outposts as a dialogue in which powerful forces in the host society willfully collaborate in the creation of these sprawling, wasteful enclaves. Occasionally there are erratic attempts to produce harmony with local mores and customs. But for the most part, America towns induce avoidance rather than interaction, extravagance rather than prudence.

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    A variety of political and economic forces in host societies collude with, and profit off, these sprawling enclaves of America. Much like the dystopic exemplars of American suburbia, these military facsimiles have produced widespread environmental problems, crime, and blight, all of which are construed by host societies as affronts to local cultural mores. The sordid communities of camp followers that grow in the shadow of these outposts provide examples for some of the most troubling aspect of the uneven relationship between the military-suburban complex and its surroundings.

    🇺🇸 The decline of the American empire

    It is here that power relations are expressed in a particularly unsavory gendered manner. Prostitution appears to be most the most sought-after commodity in the uneven exchange between host societies and American interlopers. Goodwin's study vacillates between an academic inquest and a journalistic expose'. Some might find this vacillation between different genres to be a weakness.

    America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire

    I personally find it to be the major strength of his work as it supplies multiple angles for understanding the cultural and political impact of these outposts of the American empire. If you would like to authenticate using a different subscribed institution that supports Shibboleth authentication or have your own login and password to Project MUSE, click 'Authenticate'.

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    Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus. In America Town, Mark Gillem reveals modern military outposts as key symbols of not just American power but also consumer consumption. With passion and eloquence he questions the impact of this practice on the rest of the world, exposing the arrogance of U.

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    Gillem contends that current U. Throughout America Town, Gillem demonstrates how the excesses of American culture are strikingly evident in the way that the U. The defense of the United States, he concludes, has led to the massive imposition of tract homes and strip malls on the world-creating mini-Americas that inhibit cultural understanding between U. Gillem is assistant professor of architecture and landscape architecture at the University of Oregon.

    He is also an architect and planner and he served as an officer on active duty in the United States Air Force for nine years.

    • Book review: America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire?
    • .
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    Like imperialists immemorial, the United States rules by imposing its ideas of order. If the Romans colonized space with gridded encampments and the French with axial town plans, the U. America Town is a brilliant architectural and ethnographic study of the global archipelago of U. Mark Gillem has shown, with scrupulous, revelatory, clarity, that dreams-even American ones-are perilously imposed.

    Michael Sorkin, author of Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Insecurity State. America Town illuminates an overlooked effect of U. Through his perspective as a former service-member and an architect, his accessible writing, and pictorial evidence of spatial disparities, Gillem offers a disturbing depiction of how policies devised in Washington harm the lives of innocent people the world over.

    America Town

    America Town is full of intriguing facts and figures. Maps and aerial photographs vividly highlight the disparities between the bases and surrounding communities, giving deeper insights into the physical environment of the base politics. Using his unique insider knowledge as architect-planner and also former active-duty U.