Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Urban West And The Twenty-First Century, Carl Abbott

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

In 1964 Oregon novelist Ken Kesey published Sometimes a Great Notion, the impassioned story of a fiercely (even pathologically) independent family of loggers on the southern Oregon coast. The novel is much admired by Oregonians, who read it as a tribute to the vanishing American pioneer. The urban West appears only by implication in the form of a fumbling labor organizer who longs to return to the civilized cities of California. My argument is that what we see is what we're going to get. That is, the coming decades are likely to see the American West continue to work through …