Public Policy and Material Culture

The human landscape is our culture’s autobiography, reflecting our tastes, our values, our aspirations, and even our fears, in tangible, visible form. All our cultural warts and blemishes are there, and our glories too; but above all, our ordinary day-to-day qualities are exhibited for anybody who wants to find them and knows how to look for them.

Axioms for Reading the Landscape (1979)

Individuals, corporations, and governments, all with the legal rights to use the land in the United States produce goods - food, houses, land mines, automobiles, software, cigarettes and paper clips - and provide services - educations, freedom, health, safety, and welfare. In doing so, they construct artifacts that collectively comprise the visible landscapes.

Landscapes are political statement that reflect both a consensus and a compromise reached by those employed in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the federal government about the role and responsibility of a national government and so promote appropriate national goals and collective behaviors. Such consensus and compromise results in incentives - carrots - for some behaviors and disincentives - big sticks - for other behaviors.

Consensus and compromise provide cues for rational behavior by all with the legal rights to use the land, defining opportunities and imposing constraints on the exercise of those rights, and so create a context in which individuals, corporations, and governments decide to behave and subsequently act. 

"Land use in the B.W.C.A. - a study in compromise" Geographical Perspectives no.38 (1976) 5-14

Gersmehl, Phillip J, Karen Van Buskirk, and Roderick H. Squires "Environmental impact statements: keeping the hounds on the track," Law in American Society vol. 6 (1976) 23-26

Runge, C. Ford, M. Teresa Duclos, John S. Adams, Barry Goodwin, Judith A. Martin, and Roderick D. Squires, Government Actions Affecting Land and Property Values: An Empirical Review of Takings and Giving Research Paper WP96CRI. Cambridge MA, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (1996) reprinted as Runge, C. Ford, M. Teresa Duclos, John S Adams, Barry Goodwin, Judith A. Martin, Roderick D. Squires, and Alice E. Iverson "Public Sector Contributions to Private Land Value: Looking at the Ledger" in Geisler, Charles and Gail Daneker (eds) Property and Values; Alternatives to Public and Private Ownership (Covelo, CA. Island Press, 2000) 41-62

"A Paradigm for Landscapes: An Essay" The North American Geographer vol. 4 No. 2 (2002) 124 -13

“The artifacts of public policy. Public Policy and Electricity Transmission Lines in Minnesota.” Rural Minnesota Journal 2014 

Bibliography

Axioms of the Landscape: Some Guides to the American Scene

Mapped: The Anatomy of Land Use in America