What Americans Build and Why

What Americans Build and Why examines five areas of Americans’ built environment: houses, healthcare facilities, schools, workplaces, and shopping environments. Synthesizing information from both academic journals and the popular press, the book looks at the relationships of size and scale to the way Americans live their lives and how their way of life is fundamentally shaped by the highway system, cheap land, and incentives. This book is timely because although Americans say they crave community, they continue to construct buildings, such as McMansions and big box stores, that make creating community a challenge. Furthermore, in many ways the movement toward teleworking, discussed in the chapter on office environments, also challenges the traditional place-based formation of community. Although focused on the United States, the book also includes reference to other parts of the world, especially regarding the retail environment.

Ann Sloan Devlin is the May Buckley Sadowski '19 Professor of Psychology and College Marshal at Connecticut College. She has taught at Connecticut College since 1973 and has received the John S. King Faculty Teaching Award (2006) and the Student Government Association Excellence in Teaching Award (1991). In the spring of 2009, she taught at the Pantheon Institute in Rome in a Study Away Teach Away (SATA) program sponsored by Connecticut College. While in Rome, she gave an invited seminar at La Sapienza (University of Rome). She is on the editorial review board of the journal Environment and Behavior and has been a Board Member and Secretary of the Environmental Design Research Association. She is a Fellow of Division 34, Population and Environmental Psychology of the American Psychological Association. She has two previous books: Mind and Maze: Spatial Cognition and Environmental Behavior (2001) and Research Methods: Planning, Conducting, and Presenting Research (2006). Her articles appear in journals such as Environment and Behavior, the Journal of Environmental Psychology, and the EDRA (Environmental Design Research Association) Proceedings.