The American Southwest, the greatest beneficiary of Jefferson's half-mile-square settlement pattern, has recently become the most notable region to abandon the grid. From Las Vegas to Arizona to Orange County, California, there is a Bermuda Triangle of lost orthogonality, an arid territory made improbably fertile by the emergence of a new form of development: the golf course. Here, recreation is the basis for infrastructure: Golf courses are invariably the first figures to appear on the landscape – green gaskets awaiting the arrival of the next round of tract homes. As carefully cultivated carpets, courses require massive amounts of energy and resources to be maintained in a perpetual state of newness – indeed, golf space seems to transform everything around it into a desert. Through an organic alchemy of greens, subdivisions once denigrated as typical and reproducible can now be experienced as exceptional and exotic frontiers.

There were 2,641 golf courses constructed in the US during the 1990s, more than triple the number built in the '80s. Orange County alone boasts roughly 60 courses (1 per 50,000 residents, or twice as many per capita as adjacent Los Angeles). The nearby Ocean Trails Golf Club, at $120 million the most expensive in the world to build, offers residential lots (vacant) beginning at $1.2 million. Not simply an amenity, the golf course is an extraordinary investment opportunity and the most popular planning technique available today; it effortlessly combines personal security and group play, community identity and topographical variation. The 18 standard stoppages of the course set the scale for development, and the double-loop structure (two laces of nine holes each, both of which begin and end at the same point) is perfectly calibrated to a planning trend that has turned neighborhoods fully inward.

The same desire for enclosure that fuels gated developments is at the heart of the success of golf courses. Residential golf communities (invariably gated) are simply an extension of the radial and other antigrid types of Orange County and its progeny – from Disneyland to the UC Irvine campus, from the Spectrum office park to the Fashion Island mall. The new domestic courses transform exterior space into a form of interior by mobilizing the landscape not merely as a natural resource for health and adventure, but as an acquired sign of value and security.

For two centuries of westward (and Western) expansion, the grid served as a durable and generous device of speculation, planning, and development. With the passing of modernism in the late 1960s, the grid lost its pervasive power, indicted as an emblem of inhumanity and homogeneity. Now, with the rise of golf space, the grid as a neutral tool of planning has been replaced by organic figures of development such as the sand trap and the water hazard.

In retrospect, all this may have debuted in 1971 with the longest drive ever recorded by a human – when astronaut Alan Shepard used a modified 6-iron to hit a ball, he said, "for miles and miles and miles." The moon's surface had been reclaimed: the final frontier as the last resort. Three decades later, the golf course's indifference to context continues to drive the pervasive colonization of any available space, in cities and suburbs, in deserts and parking lots. Golf space offers the perfect petri dish for business transactions, a self-reproducing site where tomorrow's resorts are conceived and negotiated today. It grants people the power to venture ever inward – manifest destiny in reverse.