“The idea of development stands like a ruin 

in the intellectual landscape.” 

(Wolfgang Sachs) ¹

Urban designers rarely get the opportunity to stage a deep dive into the cultural forces shaping a place before preparing plans. Contemporary planning in the US has been captured by a totalizing market logic, where home and public space have been financialized to serve investment interests. Since the 1930s when cities solidified their role as modern services providers with sole control over their land uses, planning has conformed to regulatory development templates designed to ensure growth rather than good placemaking. American cities, as urban historian Eric Monkkonen reminds us, are public corporations that came to see themselves as “economic (not social) centers” ² for capturing growth.

Arguably, their overcommitment to debt financing, liquidity in property exchange, marketing, and capital formation eclipse old concerns for the social. Their planning regimes leave little room for important minor histories related to informality, indigeneity, vernacularity, working class solidarity, and other traditions structured around cooperation. These traditions constitute the pluriverse or the world conceived through multiple economic and social narratives. As planners understand, the contemporary city has become a stubborn socio-technical system resistant to change in its capital-oriented mindset. But what is to be done when the planning goal is reparative? How do we restore social, economic, and environmental functioning for the many populations left behind by our neoliberal economy? One first step is to revisit once-orienting cultural capital and voices lost to appropriation by settler mentalities motivated by financialization. Cultural mapping aims to improve models of interdisciplinary cultural inquiry in urban design and planning – a prerequisite to reparative planning.

The fifty-seven cultural maps reveal a fascinating story. Retirement community magnate Del Webb is credited with having created the retirement community industry based on his well-known development of Sun City, Arizona – an age-restricted retirement community opened in 1960. In her history of the post-WWII age-restricted retirement community, housing historian Judith Trolander celebrates Webb’s use of innovative market segmentation techniques, including subsidized mini-vacation packages and direct-mail marketing, in convincing seniors nationwide to relocate to his sunbelt leisure community.⁶ But John Cooper had already accomplished this six years earlier in 1954 when he opened Cherokee Village, a planned retirement-based recreational community in the Arkansas Ozarks. Cooper targeted both senior and young households (average property purchaser age was 47) ⁷ who would vacation in and eventually retire to this forest community.

Cooper did not employ age restrictions and even donated land for the construction of schools.⁸ According to Trolander, Del Webb and his management consultants reacted with skepticism to these new demographic segmentation techniques in marketing when they first learned of the retirement community concept through a 1957 NBC show featuring nearby Youngtown, Arizona. Youngtown, the first age-segregated retirement community was developed in 1954, the same year as Cherokee Village. However, Cherokee Village differed from both Youngtown and Sun City. The latter Arizona communities reflected a deliberate generic suburbanism to attract home buyers from all regions across the US. While all three progenitor planned communities were marketed around the trope of the vacation, Cooper’s vision was unique in combining influences from both modern and folk/regional development traditions. Cooper was particularly drawn to the long-established camp meeting tradition throughout the Ozarks with its emphasis on social pluralism and family in civilizing this highlands landscape (Fig. 2). 

Alas, the plural land traditions celebrated by Cooper were never reconciled with the unyielding economics of the midcentury automobile-oriented subdivision, singularly committed to the single-family home and its rigid social arrangement in the nuclear family. Nonetheless, Cherokee Village’s origin story offers a compelling repertoire of land traditions connected by their commitments to hospitalityas a planning episteme. Here, cultural mapping unearthed subaltern influences from camp meetings, revival grounds, healing resorts, scouting camps, and countercultural leisure and performance spaces as powerful but nearly forgotten proto-urban forms deployed to civilize the Ozark frontier. These urbanized forms of hospitality offer a viable urbanism (and livelihood) for renovating Cherokee Village’s calcified living environments. Hospitality is the ultimate social resource for reasons that will be examined in the form of a conclusion after review of the cultural mapping project. 

Following William Least Heat-Moon’s self-coined notion of thedeep map from his PrairyErth (a deep map)¹²to sketch a memoir of Chase County, Kansas, performance studies expert Mike Pearson and archaeologist Michael Shanks define the plural logics underwriting deep map constructions. Their notion of the deep map’s polyvocality is especially useful as a tool for making sense of Cooper’s own reach across cultural traditions.

Reflecting eighteenth century antiquarian approaches to place, which included history, folklore, natural history and hearsay, the deep map attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might ever want to say about a place.¹³ 

Likewise, City in the Woods as a cultural mapping project cuts across dominant histories (developer economics, middle-to-upper-class homeownership, and modernism) and minor mostly hidden histories (Native American ontologies, camping and youth scouting, and Ozark subsistence settler and folk culture) in imaging Cherokee Village. The map is no longer the smooth data-oriented product of professional cartographers because the deep map invites co-creation of cultural inquiry among community stakeholders, artists, and allied design professionals. Embedded knowledge among inside stakeholders is negotiated with the professional orientations of outside folklorists, historians, and design professionals who are more reliant on disciplinary models in conducting cultural-historical analyses. This inquiry was collaborative yet critical, entailing a three-pronged process of engagement, research, and advocacy. First, with technical assistance from the National Endowment for the Arts, community leaders in the arts and development constructed Cherokee Village’s story using the five cultural frameworks – Native American heritage, Ozark pioneer and folk heritage, camping and scouting, midcentury planned communities, and regional modernism. This story was essential in organizing further research by others, confirming Michel de Certeau’s important observation: “What the map cuts up, the story cuts across.” ¹⁴

Second, local stakeholders and design professionals researched oral histories, primary sources, archived folklore material, and published histories of Cherokee Village and area highlands culture accordant with the five cultural frameworks. Political theorist Clarissa Hayward observes that who we are as both individuals and collectives is a function of narrative construction. In her examination of the “narrative identity thesis,” Hayward asserts that: “Identification is unavoidably selective, exegetical, productive, and evaluative. Narrative as a discursive form captures and mirrors these qualities.” The narrative production of identity, especially its uncritical institutionalization and reproduction, as Hayward summarizes, may take the form of bad stories ¹⁵ (like playing Indian and other mythologizations of race and ethnicity) that warrant deconstruction and/or transformation into good stories. Cultural mapping is especially useful for communities aiming to examine detrimental social narratives difficult to decode once they are socially naturalized.

Third, from community-based research, design professionals constructed multimodal drawings, projecting cultural-historical narratives that tell multiple and sometimes divergent stories. Mapping iterations invited community feedback giving professionals direction in refining development of the five cultural frameworks. More than autonomous or fixed statements, deep maps are open exegetical tools generating inquiry (it was difficult to know when to stop) useful for later scenario planning. Professionals ventured into topics typically disassociated from planning and design, amplifying the public relevance of the otherwise rootless professional. Cultural mapping positions design professionals to be facilitators of larger cultural exchange beyond their role as simply creators of end‐of‐the‐pipe planning solutions.

Change requires storytelling. Cultural mapping provides new perspectives on blind spots in what seemed to have been promising development models at the time – that is, automobility, single-use zoning, lack of services, or the overemphasis on recreation as a social glue. City in the Woods curates multiple perspectives across two temporal frameworks: diachronicdevelopment – those evolutionary relationships which develop over time, and synchronicdevelopment – those relationships considered at one moment in time (like in conventional cartography). Such archaeological imagination is a productive tool for opening discussion around otherwise unconsidered planning possibilities, while cultivating greater collective awareness about Cherokee Village and its good and bad stories.

John Cooper recognized an emergent market opportunity in the new generation of retirees as postwar retirees were the first to enjoy full social security benefits, pensions, unprecedented mobility, extended life expectancy, and new notions of self-actualization. Cooper tapped into emergent sociological thinking that countered entrenched, often grim, conceptions of aging through the notion of active lifestyles. Cooper’s research fully grasped this scope of change, observing that “every twelve seconds a man would be retiring; every twelve seconds a man would be receiving a gold watch.” ¹⁷ Cherokee Village’s sales force – over 130 at its peak in the 1970s – was the first to deploy new marketing techniques including free vacation packages to tour home sites and direct-mail advertising. Within a 21 sq. mi [54.4 sq. km] area, Cooper dammed headwater streams creating seven lakes as nodes for organizing 25,000 home sites while preserving the area’s forest. This capital web of reservoirs and roads created a distributed order for selling home sites across the Village’s expansive territory. (Fig. 6)
Cherokee Village attracted thousands of property owners from all fifty states and twenty countries to this Ozark foothills community. Cooper’s encounters with Ozark land traditions are sampled below, while the entire cultural mapping project can be viewed at https://uacdc.s3.amazonaws.com/UACDC_Cherokee-Village-Cultural-Mapping.pdf.

Indeed, Spring River basin camps and resorts – the area’s frontline for pioneering permanent settlements – thoroughly Indianized the resort and summer camp landscape after WWI. The idealization of a seemingly primitive, timeless, and purifying Native American ethnography provided a counter to modernization processes that were felt to be more alienating than liberating. Playing Indian was mixed with the era’s progressivist tendencies to seek redemption in nature, both underwriting the social reconstruction of modern childhood and national identity. The veneer of Indian lore and motifs deployed in camp life – what Leslie Paris calls “camp’s arcadian fantasies” while “sheltering children from the wilderness that they extolled” ²⁰ – migrated to permanent developments like Cherokee Village. The White search for authenticity is a distinctly modern condition; a quest for this otheras Deloria argues that “can be coded in terms of time (nostalgia or archaism), place (the small town), or culture (Indianness).” ²¹
Like most economic and social relationships in America, even for non-Indians, these relationships oscillated between destruction and creativity, or “bad stories” as Cooper’s conflation of tribal cultures in a pan-Indian imaginary shows.²² Nonetheless, Deloria consistently shows that the social construction of Whiteness cannot be disassociated from the social construction of Indianness. Cooper’s association with the Cherokee was mythic, confirmed by Ozark historian Brooks Blevins who ironically observed: “There never were any Cherokee in Cherokee Village.” ²³

Ozark Pioneer and Folk: Arcadian Imagery – Tourism and Real Estate Transform the Ozarks

The designation of Oklahoma as Indian Territory directly to the west prevented Arkansas from becoming a settler migration route westward, atrophying its frontier development processes (Fig. 8) and creating what Blevins calls the “millpond effect.” ²⁴ Only with the rise of steamboating on the White and Black rivers in the 1840s did the region open to increased trade and settlement. However, the absence of coal, and lack of waterpower, hindered the influx of large-scale industrial capital and early modernization experienced by other highland regions in the US.²⁵ Despite the lack of urban centers in the Ozarks, nature tourism, heritage, and land development became major economic development forces, beginning with resort development around the area’s springs in the 1880s. 

Camping and Scouting: The City in the Woods

“In manufacturing a new type of wilderness out of what – in many cases – had been farmland, summer camps (and to some extent, other rural resorts) seemed to turn back the clock, reversing the westward motion of the advancing frontier and returning the landscape to something that evoked its pristine natural form. Indian names suggested that the land had passed into the hands of camp organizers directly from its indigenous inhabitants, and thus worked conceptually to scrub the land clean of its earlier productive manifestations…” ²⁸ Abigail A. Van Slyck

Construction of the long-haul Frisco railroad through Hardy in the 1880s fueled expansion in residential summer camps and resorts, attracting a new type of investor class that later reshaped the Spring River basin through real estate development. Cooper was drawn to the uniquely American institution of the camp meeting and its role in civilizing the Ozark frontier. Hunting, fishing, and healing camps based in pragmatism and cooperation shared the woods with transcendental religious and educational camps, both giving way to twentieth-century seasonal social resorts. In Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space, Charlie Hailey indexes the camp’s range of purpose, from subjugation to discovery and self-expression, through a variety of forms. At their best camps are generative cultural forces. Mythic and ritual-bound “spaces of play outside societal norms”, ²⁹ camps enact important life transitions. “Combining field and event, camp is in effect spatial practice. Camp spaces also lie at the confluence of mental and social space… camp is both field of research and a kind of contemporary field research.” ³⁰ 

Trolander recalls that camping and hoteling by “tin can tourists” wintering in trailer courts were accessible retirement strategies before the institutionalization of pensions and postwar retirement communities.³¹ The American camp meeting movement, popularizing community experiences in the woods, from religious revivals to cultural exchanges, became source material for a uniquely American form of settlement – the special interest community. Though the special interest community was rarely as interesting as its informal predecessors, it included recreational and retirement communities, resorts, bungalow courts, pocket neighborhoods, trailer parks, and utopian projects. Burning Man, a nine-day event focused on community, art, and self-reliance held in the temporary desert city of Black Rock, Nevada exemplifies the camp meeting’s social potential. 

The camp meeting has its roots in eighteenth century Scottish Presbyterian outdoor ceremonies, later becoming extensive religious revivals, where families built a canvas city around a shared lawn landmarked by a tabernacle for preaching and assembly.³² Camp families sustained themselves, sometimes over an entire summer. Early camps, some accommodating 10,000 people, were the size of neighborhoods, serviced by planned circulation networks, urban blocks, segregated slave quarters, stables for livestock (pre-railroad era), and porches for socializing. By the late nineteenth century with public lighting and modern conveniences, popular revival camps became secularized magical forest cities whose purposes were more social and leisure oriented. The poshest camp meeting was the popular Wesleyan Grove and neighboring resort Oaks Bluff on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. In chronicling Martha’s Vineyard’s transition from camp meeting to resort community and eventually incorporated city, Ellen Weiss in City in the Woods writes: “Themes of astonishment, of having been transported from the mundane world into a fairyland, the shock of a miniature city dedicated to joy, pervasive religious feeling, nature, and social density permeated the new decade (1870s), even with the resort’s blatantly commercial edge.” ³³ Popular revival camps like Pitman, Mount Tabor, and Ocean Grove in New Jersey enjoyed significant infrastructure investments over time and too became incorporated towns.

While modern camp derivatives saw civic, education, and leisure interests displace religious ones, the atmosphere of the carnival persisted. Camp meeting derivatives included the Chautauqua camps franchised across the U.S. (founded in 1874 as a summer camp for Sunday school teachers at Lake Chautauqua, New York), along with health retreats popularized in the 1880s followed by the resort hotel and the summer youth camp. The Chautauqua movement became an American institution, a center for new ideas combining the arts, the sciences, and public affairs with concerts and theatrical performances attended by tens of thousands of summer residents seeking self-improvement. Cottages were the primary housing form clustered in camps, though sites later accommodated dense hotels and multifamily dwellings compatible with the pedestrian-oriented layout of resort camps. Regardless of meeting purposes, camps shared a common objective to renew the individual through a communal-based retreat to nature.

Similarly, river-based resorts and camps in the Spring River basin reconnected social and natural lifeworlds alienated by the industrial city (Fig. 10). This was especially important in the socialization of middle-class urban youth through summer scouting and the Young Men’s Christian Association/Young Women’s Christian Association (YMCA/YWCA) camps prominent around Cherokee Village. The national rise of the summer youth camp movement since the 1890s was directed at building capacity and character in children without subjecting them to the adult influences of the resort hotel. Memphians formed some of the first scouting troops in the nation and turned to Cherokee Village for camping opportunities. Youth improvement pedagogy combined emulation of frontier soldiers and pioneers with enactment of Indian roles in recovering a sense of authenticity lost to modernity. Scouting was a Progressive Era organization that mixed pioneering ethics and Native American heritage with new skillsets needed for modern commerce and, originally, military service. Scouting was spawned by the fear that skills of survivalism and communal traditions were being lost among city-dwelling youth.³⁴ (Fig. 11.) 

As mentioned, Native American motifs like the council ring and tipi became permanent imagery in the camp landscape. In tracing the design development of summer camps, Abigail A. Van Slyck found that after the New Deal in the 1930s, summer camps were thoroughly modernized, though planners worked hard to make them look natural. Camp layout started to reflect the suburb more than the dense urban neighborhoods of the nineteenth-century camp meeting.³⁵ While the camp is an age-old urban form, it uniquely served Americans as a training ground for prototyping new conceptions of social life in an industrializing democracy. Like their northern brethren, popular Ozark camp meeting centers evolved into incorporated cities like nearby Branson, Missouri – now a popular eco-tourist destination nationwide. 

Sports activities included hunting, swimming, floating, archery (bowfishing still practiced), and horseback riding through mountain streams and alongside lakes, golf courses, equestrian facilities, marinas, and an airstrip. Cooper pioneered other planning concepts which became standard bearers in the industry. He was the first to use golf fairway frontage for middle-class housing. 

The July 1971 issue of Golf USA recognized John Cooper (not Del Webb) as “the architect of America’s land development industry, and originator of the planned retirement concept which has swept the nation.” ³⁹ Notably, Cherokee Village originated as a rural unincorporated community (i.e., not a city), entailing a novel hybrid governance system in delivering public services. Governance responsibilities were often contested among several entities – Cooper’s development corporation, a property owners association, and a state-enabled suburban improvement district – forty years before Cherokee Village’s incorporation as a city added yet another level of complexity.⁴⁰ (Figs. 13, 14.) 

Cooper became a repeat client. Like his mentor Frank Lloyd Wright, Fay Jones mastered the coordinates with which modern architecture struggled – earth and sky, street and garden, novelty and familiarity, and monumental and human scale. Jones grounded his buildings through a highly formal earthwork of masonry bases and retaining walls that shaped courts and plazas as extensions of interior living spaces. The bustle of the ground was countered by the serenity of a simple but iconic lightweight roofwork of wood with deep overhangs for passive solar control and for sheltering outdoor space. Using natural light to shape interior space, Jones often located skylights at the heart of the building rather than relying solely on the wall for admitting natural light into interior spaces. Windows were never simply punched holes in the walls but rather syntactical systems for organizing the building envelope. Windows are operable and work with skylights and building volume to naturally ventilate indoor space, important before the age of central air conditioning. He skillfully used symmetry to create typologically clear building organizations in service to expressing a poetics of construction fitting of the Ozark landscape. Paradoxically, Jones’ buildings create a convincing environmental continuity often cited as organic architecture yet also stand out as powerful landmarks. He was the Ozark’s signature architect. 

Just as camp meeting formats inspired new urban adaptations of rural cabins, cottages, and lodges, Cherokee Village motivated a regional modernism in its first generation of residential design. Alongside the organic architecture of Fay Jones, early homes in Cherokee Village tempered an orthodox modernism with the rusticity of cabins and lodges, like the A-frame typology. The first generation of residential design in Cherokee Village reflected the optimism and newness of modern architecture in their open floor plans, spatial transparency in the use of floor-to-ceiling glass, light-filled rooms, and orientation to a forested lake edge as well as the street. Modern design expressed new functional relationships accompanied by concerns for authenticity and economy in the use of material and transparent expressions of structure, all while incorporating standardized building components. Homes incorporated passive solar strategies to condition indoor environments. Outdoor decks, responsive to lakefronts and hillside topography, integrated with house forms to extend domestic living space. Architecture brought the outdoors inside. (Fig. 16) Critical regionalism resisted debased and sentimentalized consumer trends through modest interpretations of local forms. Aside from Crestwood Hills in Los Angeles, Hollin Hills in Alexandria, Virginia, and Arapahoe Acres in Englewood, Colorado – all from the late 1940s (see Fig. 3) – Cooper’s Cherokee Village was the rare development in the first generation of postwar community development projects to connect design thinking with placemaking for middle-class housing.