One of my major projects is the study of the representation, meaning and sense of places so I found this very interesting (I would appreciate any good sources on identity/place/memory/community):
Masco, Joseph. "Desert Modernism." Cabinet Magazine #13 (2004)
An Excerpt:
"Las Vegas is currently the fastest growing city in the United States, consuming water as if it were surrounded by ocean. It is also an island of public commercialism within a military-industrial crypto-state, that vast section of Nevada backcountry where secret military technologies are designed, atomic bombs detonated, and chemical weapons and nuclear waste stored. Nevertheless, the desert can still today take on the appearance of pristine possibility, unrolling toward the horizon as a rugged tabula rasa, a dreamspace for spectacular progress. This ability to reinscribe desert "purity" requires constant effort, as the pursuit of utopian potential is predicated on a continual emptying-out of dystopian realities— in this case, those of nuclear weapons, waste, and war. Thus, if the desert in the post-Cold War American imagination still signifies hope for an endlessly renewable frontier, such migration from self and nation remains fraught, as escapees to the western interior run headlong into an equally imaginative military-industrial economy that constructs the desert as a hyper-regulated "proving ground" for the super-secret, the deadly, and the toxic. To negotiate these conflicting approaches to the epic West, both citizens and officials have come to rely on tactical amnesias, temporal sutures enabling a precarious—if addictive—cosmology of progress, fueled by high-octane combinations of risk, silence, utopian expectation, and paranoid anxiety. It is this dual process of mythologizing and monumentalizing through cognitive erasure that I call "desert modernism."
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