Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Declineof America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler

The Geography of Nowhere traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where every place is like no place in particular, where the cities are dead zones and the countryside is a wasteland of cartoon architecture and parking lots.

In elegant and often hilarious prose, Kunstler depicts our nation's evolution from the Pilgrim settlements to the modern auto suburb in all its ghastliness. The Geography of Nowhere tallies up the huge economic, social, and spiritual costs that America is paying for its car-crazed lifestyle. It is also a wake-up call for citizens to reinvent the places where we live and work, to build communities that are once again worthy of our affection. Kunstler proposes that by reviving civic art and civic life, we will rediscover public virtue and a new vision of the common good. "The future will require us to build better places," Kunstler says, "or the future will belong to other people in other societies."

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 un

Table of Contents:

CONTENTS

Chapter

One SCARY PLACES

Two AMERICAN SPACE

Three LIFE ON THE GRIDIRON

Four EDEN UPDATED

Five YESTERDAY'S TOMORROW

Six JOYRIDE

Seven THE EVIL EMPIRE

Eight HOW TO MESS UP A TOWN

Nine A PLACE CALLED HOME

Ten THE LOSS OF COMMUNITY

Eleven THREE CITIES

Twelve CAPITALS OF UNREALITY

Thirteen BETTER PLACES

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Review Quotes:
Robert Taylor Boston Globe A wonderfully entertaining useful and provocative account of the American environment by the auto, suburban developers, purblind zoning and corporate pirates.

Bill McKibben author of The End of Nature A Funny, Angry, Colossally Important Tour of Our Built Landscape, Our Human Ecology.

The New Yorker A serious attempt to point out ways future builders can avoid the errors that have marred the American landscape.

James G. Garrison The Christian Science Monitor Contributes to a discussion our society must hold if we are to shape our world as it continues to change at a dizzying pace.

Michiko Kakutani The New York Times Provocative and entertaining.

James Howard Kunstler is the author of eight novels. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and an editor for Rolling Stone, and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Sunday Magazine. He lives in upstate New York.

Free Press

Pub Date: July 26, 1994

0.81" H x 8.39" L x 5.5" W

304 pages

paperback