This article originally appeared at Landscape, Joanna Guldi's blog.

When the geographer Peter Gould sat down to write his autobiography in 1990, he looked over a career of mapping the perceptual spaces of Swedes, Tanzanians and college students. Over that life, he had repeatedly claimed that his major contribution to knowledge had been primarily in the service of the state. Gould was the man who figured out how to draw a picture of the version of the nation in a given individual’s head: ask the person to name all the cities they can in the United States; map those.

The results remind us that human beings live in worlds of constructed of personal experience, not in atlases.

Across the Midwest, the stimulus package is encouraging very strange things: cities are using it to demolish capital instead of to build it.

The signs are everywhere if you know where to look.  In the Polish Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, I’m pitching my tent in a vacant lot. Until a few months ago, an abandoned house stood in the space where I’ll be sleeping tonight.   A journalist was squatting in this house, free of rent, much like artists who took over empty factories and abandoned houses in the 1990s.  The landlord didn’t bother to evict her: times were hard and few tenants were available.  The house was falling down, and the journalist was doing basic repairs and making sure that no one damaged the property.  The agreement suited everyone.  Valuable housing stock was maintained; meanwhile, a woman was able to keep a roof over her head.

Last year, however, the city seized the squat, which was $6,000 overdue in back taxes.  Rather than leaving it standing, the city spent about $5,000 in federal funds to bulldoze the house.  The vacant lot is not likely to be rebuilt anytime soon.

For twenty years now, the consequences of this course have been hard to see: hard, because whenever the signs of damage appear, the free market was quick to label a “culture of dependence.” A term that originated in the 1970s to attack American blacks’ use of welfare, the term “culture of dependence” has been extended to a broadening sphere of parties that have any relationship with government or law. New Orleanians’ ruined houses were the result of a “culture of dependence” on federal infrastructure funds.