Marketing the middle landscape in Irvine, California: The image of a master-planned community and the pursuit of the suburban ideal, 1959--2005

The master-planned City of Irvine, California embodies evolving notions of community and the suburban ideal in American society. By examining media representations of Irvine through Irvine Company advertisements and marketing materials, as well as through printed critiques, this study investigates the ways a master-planned city develops an identity through its projected and assigned image. Beginning with the influence of Ebenezer Howard's Garden City model of 1898, this research traces an American ideal enamored with greenery and small-scale community. Partly a reaction to the suburban critique of the 1950s, this continued search for the perfect "middle landscape" culminates in the development and depiction of the master-planned communities of the 1960s up through today. What results is a portrait of the master-planned city as a tightly-regulated, though nicely landscaped, enclave. This suburbanization of urban life raises issues of "otherness" and the aesthetics of control in contemporary American society.