People have always endeavored to meet their needs, wants, and desires, and to create a world that reflects their values. We are surrounded by the artifacts of these efforts. History is filled with the visual artifacts of mankind’s values. The reshaping of the environment might be the most significant of these artifacts. What do the physical changes we have wrought in our constructed environment say about us? By studying
the march of suburbia across our land and the social and economic forces that powered it, we can understand our contemporary culture.
Human interaction with the land has long been an important factor in the social and economic history of the United States. Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States were agrarians whose philosophies were influenced by economic theories of the Physiocrats . The Physiocrats were Eighteenth century French philosophers who believed that all true wealth originated from the land and that an economic system could be based on the value of an individual’s labor. Their beliefs of the central importance of land influenced the Founding Fathers’ view of the importance of private property and the sovereignty of the individual.