You have caught on to something in my writing. I grew up in a tiny speck of a town Northwest of Ft. Worth in Wise county and for the last 15 years have watched as Fort Worth has expanded it’s boundaries unchecked in it’s own manifest destiny of tax payer dollars into that other Texas….there was no fight put up against it. Farmers simply cashed their fat checks from the developers and watched the dozers roll in. Some of my earlier paintings even dealt with the sprawling suburbia of North Texas, especially in the Alliance Corridor.

You are correct, Dallas will never catch up to Shanghai. Yet as I walked through the city I had a feeling that this could be Dallas in 50 years. Not necessarily the culture and politics but the city as a physical object…and yes L.A. is already far ahead of us on the that same path. Dallas might not have a major sea port but it is working on creating an inland port that will serve as a major trade hub, especially with our proximity to Mexico along I-35 and position along I-20 smack dab between the East and West Coast. However some of these former geographical city makers don’t seem to be as important anymore in the technology/web based industries of the future. Also our lack of a coastline means that we are not trapped by geographical barriers, rather Dallas is locked in by the surrounding cities, which is forcing it to build up instead of out as we are all witnessing with our latest building boom. We also need to always think of Dallas as part of the metroplex and not a separate entity, it is difficult to separate it from its neighbors, especially as we all grow in unison. Dallas and the metroplex will continue to grow and there will be plenty of growing pains along with this, but we have a much different social financial structure then large cities in other nations and even here in the U.S….of course that could all change in 50 yrs.

……and really, I just love to see the new shiny buildings

Your comments on Dallas’ relationship to St. Petersburg and to Shanghai have been very informative and engaging. I agree that we are a city of the future (and I know that I have too readily and blindly advocated its futurity without investigating and learning its history.) Despite that, I still wonder how Dallas can in any way capture the breadth and expansion of a Shanghai. Without its being a port city, and one deeply implicated in China’s political and cultural formation, it would no doubt be smaller and less visible. How does Dallas compare with Shanghai’s physical and political importance?

And how can we measure Dallas, a less than 2 million-person city, alongside a 20 million-person metroplex? Equally, where will Dallas expand to? Certainly it has no physical limits for miles, but it has domestic boundaries–neighborhoods that’ll refuse tear-down, districts that won’t allow for new zoning, etc. And there’s all that farmland coming in off of 20, even as you see the city some 25 miles away, that speaks to a separate Texas–one that’ll keep the encroachment of the city at bay for a long while yet. No doubt the economy will prevent some of this gigantism from occurring too.

But my main question is whether or not you’re advocating this hyper-pollination, or if you decry its rabid consumption of the landscape, built environment, and people of the city? I sense that there’s an irony in your tone–as if Dallas is already so glutted on glib self-approbation that we’ll sprout and spread willy-nilly sans souci–what you call an “anything goes mentality”–laughing as our city becomes a verb for thoughtless growth–”It dallased up.” Do you applaud this shanghaification(and doesn’t Los Angeles already approximate it to a degree? or see this on Mumbai: http://www.countercurrents.org/hr-athialy110805.htm), or are we to approach it with some trepidation and real efforts at prevention?

Joan