Few other places in the United States are as high, dry, sparsely inhabited and yet urbanized as the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada. The great majority of the population of this rapidly growing region lives in the two metropolitan areas at its edges, Salt Lake City and the Wasatch Front, and Reno and the Truckee Meadows.
This book is a journey through this urbanizing landscape. Here, the land fosters illusions of limitless space and resources, but its space and resources are severely limited; its people live clustered in cities but are often reluctant to embrace urbanity. These tensions led the author, a journalist and urban planner, to explore the developing centers and edges of the Great Basin cities and the ways some are trying to build livable and sustainable urban environments.