Broadcast

Google Earth continues to prove a valuable source for oddities in city planning. Here we have a beguiling set of images showing the pace and change of development in Charlotte County, South West Florida. Sprawling developments of cul-de-sacs, avenues and lanes twist neatly around manufactured lakes, all partially completed they remain ghostly neighbours to earlier, successfully populated suburbs and the region’s natural swampland.

They remind me of another fly-by photo set over an abandoned surburban development — that of California City. Founded in the late Fifties and designed around a large public park and artificial lake, it’s growth was stunted in it’s infancy and the city never came close to usurping Los Angeles as the dominant city in California.

Would these abandoned infrastructures present enough of a future archaeological puzzle, a modern version of the Nazca Lines? Or do they too clearly demonstrate the frailty and whims of the Western property market?

(Thanks to Frankie Roberto for the initial link)