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Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built since the end of World War II. This tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside is not simply an expression of our economic predicament, but in large part a cause. It is the everyday environment where most Americans live and work, and it represents a gathering calamity whose effects we have hardly begun to measure." "In The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where everyplace is like noplace in particular, where the city is a dead zone and the countryside a wasteland of cars and blacktop. Now that the great suburban build-out is over, Kunstler argues, we are stuck with the consequences: a national living arrangement that destroys civic life while imposing enormous social costs and economic burdens. Kunstler explains how our present zoning laws impoverish the life of our communities, and how all our efforts to make automobiles happy have resulted in making human beings miserable. He shows how common building regulations have led to a crisis in affordable housing, and why street crime is directly related to our traditional disregard for the public realm." "Kunstler takes the reader on a historical journey to understand how Americans came to view their landscape as a commodity for exploitation rather than a social resource. He explains why our towns and cities came to be wounded by the abstract dogmas of Modernism, and reveals the paradox of a people who yearn for places worthy of their affection, yet bend their efforts in an economic enterprise of destruction that degrades and defaces what they most deeply desire." "Kunstler proposes sensible remedies for this American crisis of landscape and townscape: a return to sound principles of planning and the lost art of good place-making, an end to the tyranny of compulsive commuting, the unreality of the suburb, the alienation and violence of downtown, the vulgarity of the highway strip, and the destruction of our countryside. The Geography of Nowhere puts the issue of how we actually live squarely at the center of our ongoing debate about the nation's economy and America's future.… (more)
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The reason it's important to view the Geography of Nowhere as
However, for those who are already a bit sickened and perplexed by the Sprawlscape affecting our nation Kunstler offers an explanation and a diagnosis. His first question is "How did we end up here?"
He begins with the Massachusetts Bay Colony in order to answer this question, and from there gives us a brief survey of the building and architectural trends that have developed since. What emerges is this: although the suburbs we are now familiar with first began to develop alongside railway and trolley lines, it was not until government, business, and the planning industry combined forces after WW2 that things really took a turn for the worst.
This is a familiar narrative and using it Kunstler goes on the describe the process by which we came to create a society and an economy scaled for cars rather than humans. I don't think there is anything particularity objectionable about the broad narrative, even if its become hackneyed.
What I found most interesting were some of his specific cases in which zoning laws literally forced asinine construction. This is something I was mildly aware of, but the examples Kunstler cites really helped to bring the point home. By creating nearly uniform sets of zoning regulations for communities big and small, urban and rural we've chosen convenience and perceived safety over any sort of contact with reality.
I do worry a bit about the some of Kunstler's broad conclusions. For example, it's just not obvious to me that living in one dimensional office park to mall to tract home communities is necessarily BADfor us. It's a lifestyle I find terribly unappealing, but I wonder whether or not it's really as psychologically damaging as Kunstler would have us believe. Are all the dramatics about "spiritual suffocation" and lives of "quiet desperation" any more true of today's gated communities than the similar but probably false claims made about the residents of Winesburg, Ohio? For my part, I'm loathe to paint my cultural and aesthetic adversaries as folks that subconsciously desire to trade in their lives for mine.
I also wonder how Kunstler might justify the claims he makes about disengagement from civic activities as a direct result of suburbanization. What he says fits all my preconceptions, but he doesn't bring any hard data to the table when he makes such claims.
Finally, all criticism aside, for a book written in the early 90s The Geography of Nowhere is remarkably prescient. Kunstler is flat out correct that we cannot keep building communities focused around cars, because it won't be long before we literally cannot power the cars in an effective or affordable manner. Tying up our property and our economy at large with a fleeting car culture is perhaps the biggest mistake in recent American history. In order to get ourselves out of this mess we're going to have to fundamentally revise our lifestyles and large parts of our economy. I can't help but think that the coming metamorphosis will be a painful process.
As is often typical of American books, it looks
I also think Kunstler was a bit too credulous about the promise of "new urbanism", but again in fairness it was one of the few hopeful models he had to look to.
Throughout the book he talks about the importance of place, and how our relationship to our built environment shapes our entire civilisation.
Overall a prescient and compelling book about how the US ended up massively allocating funds to build cheap, ugly buildings and highways as part of a suburban society that depends on everyone driving everywhere in cars fueled by cheap gas... and the doom that is coming due to peak oil making this lifestyle totally unsustainable.
Of course, there are many people to blame for this mess we've created, most of them long dead, and therefore excused from punishment. On the other hand, the mess just tumbles along in the name of profit and growth.
I was assigned chapters from this book for a college course on Cities and Suburbs. I've always meant to read it in entirety and I'm glad I did. I remember reading an article of Kunstler's (an excerpt from a book, actually) from The Long Emergency, which is no less uplifting.
If only we could reverse time's hand by about 200 years, perhaps we'd have an entirely different place to observe. Then again, maybe not.
"Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of a cancer cell." - Edward Abbey
I agree with him on almost all these things. Kids in suburbs are kind of trapped with no place to go unless mom drives them. There is no corner store or movie theater a few blocks away they can walk to. If you need a carton of milk when you live in one of those developments, you have to get in the car and drive to the nearest shopping center, which sits in a sea of parking spots. Because stuff is so spread out, public transportation won’t pay for itself, and no real community is built between people.
Modern zoning doesn’t allow mixed use- there are no apartments over little stores so people can live close to a job. There are no small factories in between eating places and stores. When faced with undeveloped or farm land, planners think to preserve the rural feeling by making building plots of 5 or 10 acre minimum, but this doesn’t work. It’s really hard for a farmer to keep using that 5 or 10 acres when it’s fenced off from other plots, and is bisected by a driveway, and has a house in the middle with a lawn and garden. We face that where I live; owners want their 5 acre lots hayed but farmers find the odd shaped plots that are left after people build too difficult to maneuver cutting and baling equipment in. It’s green space, but it’s not feeding anyone anymore. And it’s not green space that the public can use, either.
Written more than 20 years ago, Kunstler’s observations are still valid. Nothing has changed other than that we’re even closer to running out of fossil fuels and urban slums are getting bigger. Municipal buildings and shopping areas are still ugly. More suburban developments have been built. More big box stores have run small business out. The problem with the book are two things: one, the author presents few solutions although he does show a few; and, two, he’s a bloody snob. He puts down the majority of the population as not having any taste or class; he makes statements about the poor that make me, a poor person all my life, wish I could have a few harsh words with him. But despite these things, I feel his book should be required reading for anyone going into architecture, city planning, or being a small town/county politician. What he points out should be obvious, but people just don’t see it because they are so used to it. There *are* options to the way we live today.