Cookie Cutter Row

What does Gutterson mean when he says "Green Valley is as much a verb as a noun"? Point to specific places where he discusses the ways in which city laws prohibit and require residents and buildings to do certain things.

1) When Gutterson says, "Green Valley is as much a verb as a noun, a place in the process of becoming what it purports to be," he opens up the essay. Not only is Green Valley a place of cookie cutter homes, exactly alike, with cookie cutter lawns and walls and demographics and regulations, but the fact that these master-planned communities are still going, still being made, and, ultimately, continuing the concept through its denizens' lives shows just how much that could be true.

What is Gutterson's tone? How does he achieve this tone? Look at specific uses of language, parenthetical notation, and turns of phrase that you you a general feeling of Gutterson's writerly agenda.

2)Gutterson's tone is very logical and almost cold in how precise he makes his point. For the most part, instead of rambling on about his stance on places like Green Valley and what they may be doing to our cultural mentality, he lets the facts speak for themselves. He writes, "Each development inhabits a planned socioeconomic niche -- $99,000, $113,900, 260,000," (184, Seeing and Writing) and discusses how all of the houses, in addition to fitting the same cost or family income range, come in various play-ups of the same colors and similar housing types. He breaks things up by referencing Robert Fishman's Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia, which only bolster his point (and ethos) further. At the very end of the essay, after paragraph after paragraph of excruciating detail of Green Valley, Gutterson's connection to his audience is made in the midst of this Stepford Wives-esque tale. He wrote of how he met one lone sole wandering the open area, and not in the manicured lawns prepared for him: "Here I met nine-year old Jim Collins, whose name has been changed -- at his fervant request -- on the off chance his mother reads these words and punishes him for playing in Pittman Wash again." This child is the first evidence, as Gutterson describes, of anything resembling a non-master-planned life, and helps illustrate with poignancy the author's concept.

Do you agree that suburbs are not the safe, selective paradises the purport to be? Provide examples from your own experience as support for your argument.

3) Well, I feel that suburbs definitely aren't as fraught with crime as places like Flint, Michigan are, but clearly no place is free from pressure -- internal or external. I personally spent the last two years of high school in a small suburb area in that kind of town/city outside of Nashville. Before I left, there was a pretty big meth lab crackdown not two blocks away, in the same suburb. I think maybe it just shocks people more when crime happens in the suburbs, mainly because of the fact that crime rate in those areas are typically lower.