> More seriously, I guess the hotels' presence makes me feel like I'm back in Arizona, with pattern-stamped community planning fraught with unoriginality.

The majority of neighborhoods, districts and office complexes of Anchorage can easily be described the same. There is little that gives this city genius loci - a sense of place. Prefabricated, contractor designed (lack of design) homes, windowless strip malls, big box stores - it is all a direct, homogeneous result of a society completely dependent on the automobile and cheap energy. Architectural vernacular is no longer dependent on form that was derived from the functionality of passively heating and cooling a space - high ceilings that direct humid air out of clerestory windows in the southeast are no longer necessary. Pump up the A/C, maw! My point is that nowdays it is easy to construction cheap, shitty buildings that do not reflect the climate and geography of the local region...giving the build environment a distinct identity. Our homes and offices are not crafted from local supplies responding to local conditions.

It's a much larger discussion on the build environment, and thankfully an awareness of the costs, uses and depletion of energy sources has a direct influence on what and how we build. Designers are understanding that people want to live in these spaces, not just exist. And that means create identity, often born straight out of regional geography and historical context. Santa Fe crafted extremely strict building codes - way back in 1912 - to regulate the look and feel of their city. As a result the town attracts tourism purely for it's colonial pueblo style.

I imagine if someone was placed in midtown Anchorage in the middle of a hot summer day, with no context and identifiers (licence plates, signs, etc), they would not be able to determine where the hell they were. Just as someone would at a strip mall in Texas.

tl;dr: this isn't a problem unique to Anchorage