The Geography of Nowhere:
The Rise and Decline of America's Manmade Landscape
By James Howard Kunstler
(New York: Free Press, 1993); 978-0671888251
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 and an end to the tyranny of compulsive commuting.