Putting Parsley Around A Pig

A FIELD GUIDE TO SPRAWL by Dolores Hayden

New York, W. W. Norton: 2004 307.76 HAY

You are looking at an aerial photograph of a golf course in Palm Desert, California. The 'parsley' is the pink foliage that protects golfers from seeing the ugliness of the surrounding area. "Putting parsley around a pig" is a term used to describe how developers disguise bad projects.

Architect and historian Dolores Hayden's field guide to development run amok, illustrated by Jim Wark's aerial photography makes appalling, and, at the same time, humorous reading - gallows humor, that is. Who knew that urban planners were such a zany bunch? Maybe it's to keep from weeping at the desecration of the landscape, the trash buildings that sprout relentlessly, and the unintended consequences of well-meaning programs and subsidies, all of which Hayden lays out in her useful introduction.

But you will remember what you've read because of the nicknames. Zoomburbs are suburbs that grow even more metatastically than Boomburbs. They are filled with Tract Mansions and Starter Castles and for the less well-to-do there are Snout-Houses (pigs get little respect from planners), those disorienting rows of garages jutting out from the houses that are barely visible behind them. New gated communities are Privatopias and for those who like their money and their homes old, there are Valhallas, charming old towns that attract the new rich, who proceed to engulf what first attracted them with...you guessed it...Tear-Downs and Starter Castles. And for your home away from home, there's the Rural Slammer, should you be unlucky enough to go to one of those new prisons.
Commercial developments have their own terms of art. In this lingo, a Duck is a building that looks like what is being sold within, as in the lemonade stand in the shape of a lemon. Billboards are known as Litter On A Stick. And Ground Cover is not pachysandra but, rather, easily bulldozable large scale buildings like self-storage colonies.

And then there are the acronyms. Most of us are familiar with NIMBY, meaning 'not in my back yard.' Add to that LULU, a locally unwanted land use with consequences unforeseen when it was approved, and TOAD, a temporarily obsolete, abandoned, or derelict site. Anyplace experiencing hard economic times will be home to many TOADs.
If, after reading A Field Guide To Sprawl, you want to find out more, visit http://www.doloreshayden.com/.