Teachers looking for a good way to portray urban sprawl, for geography and history classes, should take a look at this photo essay at the New York Times; unfortunately for teachers, Christoph Gielen’s stunning aerial landscapes cannot be copied for PowerPoint.
Gielen’s work is well known, and many of those same images can be found at other sites. Images to illustrate “urbanization” and “urban sprawl” from internet sources generally carry a lot more punch than the stock photos delivered with textbooks. Mind the copyrights.
(Caption from New York Times presentation): Untitled XI Nevada, 2010 This Vegas-area community was built by the same company that designed the circular communities on the outskirts of Phoenix in “Untitled X / XII / XI.” Credit: Christoph Gielen (Go see the presentation at the Times site to see the other photos)
More resources:
- A Gielen exhibit at Culturehall
- Architect Alex MacLean also created stunning images of human developments on land, as portrayed in Harvard Magazine, in the January/February 2009 issue; MacLean’s book, Over: The American Landscape at the Tipping Point
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
[…] Earlier at MFB: What does urban sprawl look like? […]
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If each roof were painted white, that part of Las Vegas would be visible from space on a sunny day.
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Whoa. As someone who writes about wide-open spaces, just looking at that impacted picture makes me feel the need for more air!
And of course if each roof in that picture were painted white, it would save serious amounts of energy….
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