Geography Of Nowhere: The Rise And Declineof America'S Man-Made Landscape

I am a great fan of the writings of James Kunstler. That is not to say I totally agree with his point of view. However, suburban development in the US is something in dire need of challenge, and Kunstler is the one who stepped up and make that critique, and did a good job of it. Having enjoyed his recent writings, I never had read this earlier book, and I now finally have read it, and found it very enjoyable. I think the one main weak point in Kunstler's writings, and I already felt this way before having read this book, and this book is consistent with that view, is his tendency to muddle aesthetics and economics. I would say he has two key assertions: 1). The suburban style of development which dominates in the US is extremely ugly 2). That style of development is economically unsustainable In general I always get the feeling that he views those two as one and the same. And he does make a good case that there is a considerable tie-in between the two. However, I do believe that in some cases what is ugly is not necessarily economically unsustainable. Let us take a central example of what he finds nonviable- the heavy reliance on the automobile for transportation. In his recent writings, he has been extremely dismissive of the potential for society to continue to rely heavily on automobiles. I believe in Peak Oil and I do believe that fossil-fuel based automobiles do not have a long-term future. What about cars that run on alternative energy? I believe Kunstler tends to be too quick to dismiss that possibility based on his aesthetic objection to an auto-based culture. I do believe that it is quite possible that new generations of automobiles may have much less capability than current ones, however. I think probably the "worst case for the car" is that most people in the US will have something along the lines of a motorized golf cart. Certainly electric cars will at least be able to provide that level of functionality, in my view. In that case, I would expect that Kunstler may be wrong that communities in the future must be designed on a scale that walking can be the primary mode of transportation. With golf cart-style tranpsortation, communities could be spread out somewhat further. However, they would still have to be far more compact than the current suburban pattern of development. In other words, I could imagine future communities being somewhere in-between what we have now and what Kunstler envisions. Another area where I think Kunstler somewhat muddies the waters between esthetics and economics is in architecture. His comments on architecture strongly focus on his view that design needs to intelligently integrate the building with the surroundings. He makes a compelling case as to the aesthetic poverty of current architecture which is oblivious to this, and the fact that current architecture stymies the creation of public places that allow a healthy interaction between citizens in a community. He makes a less compelling case in my view, however, in linking ugly contemporary architecture to economic unsustainability. Clearly his critique of parking lot-centric architecture does provide a clear link between aesthetics and sustainability. His critique of specific features of the design of individual buildings, however, I believe often are strongly rooted in aesthetics and aren't necessarily too germane to sustainability. ----- In summary: Our suburban approach to land-use is something that was in desperate need of criticism. Kunstler is the one who stepped up and made that critique, and did so in a powerful and entertaining manner. Consequently, this book is an extremely important contribution to a reasoned debate about where our society should be headed.

My first intro to Kunstler was watching his equally informative speech on Americas urban design nightmares on You.Tube TED talks. He made a strong case as to why the suburbs are so pat ethic and American architecture can be cruel to the people it's supposed to serve. This book was a marvel to read also because it was written over twenty years ago and is still dead on in its analysis. Post 2008 recession who could argue credibly otherwise? My hope is that millennials will wake up and break the cycle of suburban home buying. My awakening began in the early 2000 when I got a job working housing construction then later landscaping and later again installing storm doors and windows. Entire suburban neighbourhoods throughout the Midwest are essentially empty and lack any character or soul. There is no community, and no one is around except on weekends. It,s a social and economic disaster. Everyone just works or stays inside getting fatter, more diabetic, and watching their TVs endlessly. It,s time for an overhaul. Washington, D.C., NY, and Portland hopefully are leading the way. The future of urban design will about creating the framework for organically grown towns, cities, and communities. The suburbs are death and dying.

This is a book that details how America came to have giant suburbs where there’s no third space and everyone is distant from each other with no community for children, teens, or adults to congregate and really connect with each other. There is reflection on his time growing up in the suburbs, how it differed from his time in the city, and what he felt when he came to a more natural town that had grown instead of cultivated by profit margins. I think the Lebanon thing is what turned me against the book. Because I live in New Hampshire, and listen, I think suburbs are bullshit too, but I can assure you that teenagers are doing plenty of drugs and rotting in their homes in these “more ideal” towns, and we also lack a lot of the old community. That said, there are things we have within walking distance to do, and he had some interesting points. To why New England towns actually have these more natural towns with a city center, places to congregate, and generally just be around. To the cities that people wanted to escape due to smell, sound, and just unsanitary living. The people who were catered to were naturally the rich. If not the most wealthy, then those with enough money to buy houses in what architects saw as efficient housing that allowed for cars to comfortably navigate. This author has a lot to say about how architecture changed especially in the Modern era. About what happened once cars were not just invented but then became a commodity everyone needed, even more than they needed houses. Which, in New England you need cars usually as well. I live in a small town. There are only so many jobs in a walking or biking distance. One of my jobs is in walking distance, but the one that does make money is a twenty-minute drive and that’s the one I love. Anyway, I actually think the reason I was so critical of this book because there’s more I can complain about, is mostly because I was in a bad mood myself. It made the authors very distinct voice come across as… well, I felt like I was getting defensive over a thing I had no reason to get defensive over. So I’ll try to read this again, much later, but for now my review is: very informative, a little rose-tinted glasses over the past, and I’m in a book bad mood.

As a student and professional of urban planning for nearly 20 years, I really wish I'd read this book in the mid-90s. Nevertheless, I walked away from this read yesterday, when I finished it, with a much broader perspective on where we are as a society and why. For anyone who has ever tried to figure out the source and reasoning for their dissatisfaction with post-WW2 city growth, urban sprawl, and our reliance on the auto - this book is the Rosetta Stone to all those questions. Kunstler puts the whole picture together for you, and explains where we're at, and the political mechanisms that put us here. Most of the read involves historical perspectives, but if we want to understand our present state of matters, retrospect is necessary. There's a few matters you want to keep in mind when diving into this book... First, it's harbored in a time right before the internet took off...and that's a good thing, as book's release in the mid-90s couldn't have been timed any better. It allows for a clean perspective of societal development before email and web access, which would obviously have been a game-changer on the author's view. Secondly, it focuses on historical perspectives to the effect that there's very little offered in terms of solutions...but solutions aren't the point here, even despite the fact that New Urbanism (part of the solution, it would turn out) hadn't taken full form at the time of this book's release; at least in the way that we understand it today. For solutions, you need to read the companion book "From Nowhere to Home." Lastly, Kunstler takes no prisoners in terms of assigning blame to those responsible for the grievances spelled out in the book...and I was very pleased that nobody was spared, as it makes the read that much more real and honest. Politicians, developers, planners of the pre-New Urbanism era, Big SpOil, and captains of industry all get skewered, and rightly so...to know how to proceed with the future, it's essential to understand who goofed in the past, and what the motivations were. My favorite parts of the book were the ends to many of the chapters, which were summed up with genius dialogue. Many of the chapters end in amusing and venomous rants, some of which left me pumping my fist in the air and engaging my treadmill to expire the energy. As I indicated previously, this is essential to anyone interested in the arts of city planning...for those of you out there jobs related to the planning field, the content in here is a great way to have a more informed approach to land use recommendations, planning policy, and engage better in heated discussion during those painful public hearings...or just impress the director and commissioners over lunch. In any event, this book will answer questions and paint a clearer picture for those who have pondered society's urban form and where it went wrong. Anyone will walk away with a much more informed, broader depth of knowledge. For the price, that breadth of knowledge can't be beat.

Underrated and fantastic book on probably the most ignored and far reaching problem in the US.

I've been stumped for a category for this book ... it's not journalism, not architectural criticism, only partially travelogue and fitfully humor ... but closer to sermon, a really entertaining sermon, with flashes of yearning, learning, and flat-out rant. I've settled on prophecy. As a prophet, Kunstler makes sense. Not just on a superficial level, though when he writes about how the skyrocketing oil prices (of the '70s, mind you; this book is 15 years old) are about to cause the implosion of suburbia, he's writing no more than what you read on the front page of today's New York Times. He saw it and got it right. Also his visceral reaction to ugly buildings, to pompous architects of our unuseful and unlovely cityscape, to highway scars and stupid civic planning. It's a "Howl" that still works, because much of our built landscape is still hideous, and will remain so for many lifetimes. I live in a city and state where the horrors he describes are starting to retreat, but "Geography of Nowhere" could do us a great service by making sure the retreat continues, and still faster. I don't hold it against him that he never heard of the "new urbanism" and never saw transit hubs, multi-use dwellings, successful downtown core revitalizations, carpool lanes, green buildings, urban infill, and (most significantly) the Internet come to pass. Jeremiah never saw Zion, either. Two things in this book are harder to take. One, a reflexive anti-suburb, anti-middle-class snobbery that keeps Kunstler from seeing the vast majority of his fellow citizens as having desires and values every bit as meaningful as his own -- and of having needs different from, but not inferior to, his. Suburbs grew because people hated crime, overcrowding, filth, lightless dwellings and stunted horizons in the established cities (and what made those cities sacred? Should everyone feel guilty because Detroit died, or did Detroit lose its reason for existing?). Wanting more room in a healthier environment is not only universal but commendable. It's fatuous, it's adolescent, to whine about "the suburbs" -- they are, after all, cities themselves, just newer and in many cases more justifiable cities than the ones from which they sprang. If the automobile created most of them, many exist for their own sakes now. They have both the jobs and the homes -- the economic raison d'etre that Kunstler identifies as crucial to the life of a community. Take away one's prejudice for certain traditional patterns of urban life, and you realize that anti-suburb bias is, like the endlessly unspooling freeway of mid-century, an outdated idea. The other problem is a lack of ideas. Again, if Kunstler is a prophet, these aren't serious sins. It's a prophet's job to goad and to warn, not to rewrite the building code. But in a crucial way he can't see the city for the buildings. It's too easy to mock flaking vinyl siding in a dead Northeastern mill town, to shake a fist at the lit-all-night convenience store that ruined the harmony of a moribund Main Street. That vinyl siding didn't kill the town -- economic obsolescence did. Mourn the village if you want, but dreaming of long-gone grand hotels and bandstands and furniture workshops won't bring it back to life, or bring its lifeblood back from India, China, or wherever it's flowed. A prophet really committed to his message would need to say that yea, and verily, that genteel way of life is gone and not to be retrieved by a few deep porches or walkable sidewalks. I like Frank Capra, too. But this isn't 1946. And occasionally a sneer gets in the way of fact. Kunstler is miffed that Woodstock, Vermont, though picture-perfect, is a "fake" burg because it lives off tourism. Someone should point out to him that tourism is a real economy, too, just like the water-driven industries and barge transshipping, manufacture (not exactly clean in those halcyon 1920s, but never mind), mining and milling (oh yes, quite traditional occupations of the vanished small town, and also quite destructive), and small farming (often inefficient and a very poor living)of the places he remembers. It's an exchange of goods and services for money, i.e., an economy. In fact, tourism can be a very good economy because of its power to preserve scenery and buildings, clean air, and public peace. But Kunstler is too busy frowning at the stereotypical, pale "middle class" souvenir shoppers, in their shiny new Jeeps (today he'd say Hummers), to notice that Woodstock, Vermont, has pretty much got it made. The author plays reporter by parachuting into Disney World and Atlantic City, but the less said about these feints the better. These are second-rate Rolling Stone articles. Could have been closer to first-rate if he'd explored more of what Disney wanted to do with EPCOT and did to in Celebration, Fla., and might have found something of genuine interest to readers of this book. He doesn't get past Main Street USA, other than noting that it seems to be Disney visitors' favorite spot. He gets a cynical riff out of this. He harpoons a few more white, unsophisticated suburbanites. Kunstler instead could have seen in Main Street USA the germ of the residential-over-retail developments clustering around transit nodes in today's big cities. Maybe Walt was a bit more practical about the past than Kunstler understands. If you're going to take on Disney, you should at least get back the price of admission. I miss streetcars and civic identity, too. I wish every home were a craftsman bungalow or a trim midrise, that all the street trees met in the middle, and that my job was a brisk stroll down the lane. (I also love googie roadside architecture, which Kunstler loathes, presumably out of dislike for civic whimsy.) But it's not that way, and in most of the country never was -- and even where it was, it was highly unlikely to last. Mill towns, and barge-canal towns, and cities where the factories lost their reason to survive decades ago, will need more than porches and friendly shop windows to bring themselves back to life. I don't think Kunstler lifted himself far enough out his nostalgia, his sorrow and his prophecy to lead the way forward out of the geography of nowhere.

Kunstler is not too happy with how we've built our cities, our suburbs, and our society. And I can't blame him. This is an important consideration of how the landscapes of America have changed, and not for the best. The decline of American cities, the rise of the never-ending suburban sprawls, the addiction to cars and to oil and highways, all contribute to the decay of social fabric. It all sounds deep, but Kunstler is clearly onto something. Himself transplanted to the suburbs of Long Island, Kuntsler is angry at what he sees as an America that is less and less concerned with maintaining any lasting community, anywhere. All you have to do in this country is go to a few different cities and look around. First off, you can hardly distinguish most big cities from each other in the US--you have a downtown (in some cases among the worst part of a particular city, and often deserted and bland) and you have the endless suburban sprawl. What you find is isolation, isolation, isolation. Pick a big city, and you see the problems still being faced decades after population shifts, demographic changes, cultural changes etc: Detroit, Atlanta, St Louis, Miami, etc, etc. Architecture is in the dumps, as short-term profit is the motivating factor behind flat, faceless and featureless buildings. Suburbia has long been the answer for many: miles of designed streets with identical houses, cut off from undesirables by miles of highway, encouraging an inefficient life where everything is separated, the car has replaced the PERSON as the unit we build for, to say nothing of the cultural wasteland half of America becomes with the influx of 100 fast food chains, a Walmart, a mall, an 'entertainment complex', etc, destroying anything that once gave a place character. The notion of public space is different in America than elsewhere. Here, we don't seem to think much of it. While it may enrage some folks to compare ourselves to Europe and its cities, Kunstler points out that European cities are built to last, so to speak. Public space is respected and cherished, cities are built around people and for people, and so what if you don't have a Chili's, an Outback Steakhouse, a Radioshack, a Best Buy, a Wal Mart, etc, etc everywhere. Even in New York you see the chains have moved in to stay, the blandness extends to every facet of life. At least you can walk out the buildings here and walk on a street and see people, unless of course, you don't want to see anyone except those who are exactly like you. Important stuff, and God-forbid, thought-provoking.

Good.