With a greater metropolitan population of more than two million, Las Vegas has in a generation transformed from desert resort to urban center, and city planners, at least until the current recession, expected another two million in the next decades. Such phenomenal expansion has provided opportunity for many newcomers, and the city’s boosters are legion. Las Vegas is now a sophisticated urban environment, combining high-end entertainment and recreation with the dining and shopping amenities of “lifestyle” economies. As such it is a complex 21st-century city. But it is also a simple boomtown, in the tradition of the American West — of towns that grow quickly with multitudes coming to strike it rich in industries like mining, but rarely staying to attend to the social or environmental costs. The ideology of manifest destiny, the old belief that America was destined to expand westward to the Pacific, may truly be superseded by a 21st-century belief in the endless growth of tourist destinations. But as the historian Patricia Limerick reminds us, we need to learn not only from the successes of urbanization, but also from the “landscapes of failure” that remain when the boom goes bust. 1 Limerick prompts us to ask: What makes urban development succeed or fail? What does success look like? And failure? Images of a radiantly successful Las Vegas abound in popular culture. Harder to find are images of the more mundane desert settlement — the workaday infrastructures and zones of disinvestment not so easily reconciled with the luminous city of the famous Strip.
Las Vegas contains many landscapes of failure, where the spatial and physical manifestations of earlier social, cultural, and economic practices have been swept aside by newer practices without regard to the loss of memory and identity, or to the disruption of viable social and cultural networks. Landmark resorts of the 1950s and 1960s — the Frontier, Dunes and Stardust — have vanished. The long-neglected Moulin Rouge — constructed in 1955, and celebrated as the first desegregated casino — was torn down in May 2009. The Las Vegas celebrated by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and mythologized by the Rat Pack, Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley, can now only be eulogized. Most of the famed casinos featured in Learning from Las Vegas have been imploded, their memories and histories erased almost as easily as the many trailer parks that have been bulldozed as land values skyrocketed. At the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, in 1893, in the celebrated Beaux-Arts “White City” on the Midway, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner lectured on the “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” defining it as the “meeting point between savagery and civilization,” and lamenting that the Census Bureau had declared the frontier officially “closed.” 2 In today’s Las Vegas, the New Frontier — one of the last surviving mid-century casinos — was demolished to make way for a multibillion dollar “French Renaissance” resort modeled on New York City’s Plaza Hotel. 3 With this ironic echo of the White City, we might declare the “closing” of the postwar city that so fascinated Venturi and Scott Brown. As if this were not enough, the extravagant $8.6-billion CityCenter complex, a joint venture of MGM Mirage and Dubai World that is about to open on the Strip, has been being marketed with the tagline “Into the New.” In a place where people gamble on the future to recoup past losses, the stakes are always exceedingly high. The American West, Limerick has written, “has long been home to a cult of ruins,” but this cult has little purchase in the Las Vegas Valley. It is fitting that Las Vegas’s first building by a signature architect is the Lou Ruvo Institute, designed by Frank Gehry, and dedicated to the study of Alzheimer’s disease.
Las Vegas is located in the Mojave, one of the great deserts of North America, and the expanding city and the desert ecosystem reveal interconnected contradictions. There is the spectacle of the Strip and the dreariness of the everyday city that surroun