The Urban West

Carl Abbott here: Historian and Urbanist, Portlander and Pacific Northwesterner.

I’m a specialist on the history of American cities and city planning, on the history of the American West and Sunbelt, and on the later twentieth century United States more generally.

My life has taken me to all quadrants of the United States: I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, went through school in Dayton, Ohio, college in Philadelphia, and graduate school in Chicago. I’ve had jobs in Denver, Norfolk, and Portland and visiting academic positions in Washington and Grand Junction. I think of myself as a heartlander who’s followed the trail of Lewis and Clark from east to west.

I’ve written more about Portland than any other city (four books worth plus lots of commentary), but I’ve also published articles or books that have dealt with New York, Washington, Norfolk, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago, Galena (IL), San Antonio, Denver, Seattle, Richland (WA), and Los Alamos (NM). I’ve never quite had the gumption to take on California.

In 2008 I published a “big” book that draws on more than thirty years of reading, teaching, and writing. How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America tries to place cities in their central role as the engines of economic, social, and cultural change in western Canada and the United States—change both for good and for ill.

My current research and writing is taking me toward the analysis of literary sources.

In 2003 I published Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West, in which I deal with the different ways in which the narratives of the American West are used as templates for science fiction future (think homesteading stories in the mode of the little house on the big planet). I’ve also delved more deeply into the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, and I have a current paper in process on the ways in which a variety of science fiction writers have picked on Colorado as the place of refuge against social breakdown and disaster.

A second paper is process examines the trilogy of Florida novels by Peter Matthiessen (Killing Mr. Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone) as frontier fiction, exploring the ‘western’ elements in plot, characterization, and setting.

Another project, to be a chapter in a forthcoming book edited by Darren Dochuk and Michelle Nickerson, looks at several novelists who have highlighted the role of real estate development in the cities of the American Southwest—e.g., Tucson in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and Los Angeles in T. C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain..

From time to time I collaborate with my wife Margery Post Abbott, whose own background spans biomedical research, urban planning, and teaching and writing about the Society of Friends (Quakers). We collaborated on a book dealing with the creation of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area . . . and on an article discussing the incorporation of the Quaker testimony of simplicity within institutional architecture.