Customer Reviews

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

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Geography of Nowhere is a wonderful, life-changing book. I wish I could make every developer, every SUV owner and every town council read this book. Its main topic is the physical environments that Americans live in, in contrast to our historical environments and to overseas. Kunstler shows how the advent of the automobile has changed the face of cities, small-towns and birthed the suburb. The choice to live without an automobile is now a very difficult one for most people, and also comes with certain social assumptions. Yet, after reading Geography of Nowhere, I am seeking ever more ways to take public transportation and reduce my reliance on a vehicle that both pollutes the natural environment and despoils the man-made environment.

Some chapters in the book focus on cities gone wrong, such as Detroit. Others discuss the ideal community, involving mixed-use neighborhoods (both purpose - commercial, residential, industrial - and class - working, professional, wealthy). Kunstler makes the case that prior to the development of suburbia and the reign of automobiles as our primary form of transportation, we had a kinder, cleaner, and happier world. Disney World's Main Street was used as an example of how car-free neighborhoods have become an American dream, and at the same time, few people understand why cars have had such a negative effect.

Geography of Nowhere has confirmed my choice to live in a city with public transportation, in a mixed-use neighborhood, within walking distance of most of my needs. It may be more expensive and it may be unconventional, but I now have the evidence to back up my convictions.

Last night in his State of the Union speech, G. W. Bush pointed out the obvious fact that America depends far too heavily on oil to support its lifestyle. Whoever programmed him to say that must have been reacting to the mounting unrest over the crises associated with big oil: war, pollution, corruption, and extreme flabbiness.

Most of the problems associated with oil are problems associated with cars, and cars are the focus of J. H. Kunstler's book. Published in the early 90s, The Geography of Nowhere describes the impact of automobiles on the development of the U.S. Apparently, things started to go south during the Depression, when people were driven out of cities by poverty and the diminishing quality of life in the tenements. Fueling the flight to the suburbs were New Deal programs to build roads and cheap houses. In the ensuing decades the American landscape was built to serve cars rather than people, and that is what Kunstler is angry about. His main criticisms are:

1) A lot of the architecture, both residential and commerical, is very ugly. Buildings are constructed quickly and cheaply, and without regard to their surroundings. After all, what's the point of worrying about your surroundings if people are just going to drive directly to their destination? On this point, Kunstler is angry and sarcastic, though often funny. However, his tone is unfortunate, because ugliness is ultimately a matter of opinion, and I would bet that most people would say they are quite happy living in their suburban boxes. Kunstler argues that people are happy this way because they don't know any better, and he's probably right, but as far as I know there is no good way to force people to appreciate beauty.

2) When you step back from the individual buildings, and look at the organization of towns and cities, things start to look really grim. Here Kunstler's got a good point. Throughout most of America, the landscape is zoned into residential and commercial districts, which are separated by long stretches of four-lane roads. The residential zones are further divided by income (and to a lesser extent, by race and ethnicity), impeding the development of anything like a genuine community. The result is a weird mix of intolerance and paranoia that pervades the culture of what has historically been a relatively progressive nation.

3) At an even larger scale, the impact of cars on the nation and on the world seems absolutely dire. The Geography of Nowhere was written before car companies had figured out how to trick yuppies into buying pick-up trucks, and by now there is a broad scientific consensus that the Earth's climate is getting warmer as a result of human activities. Yet people continue to buy bigger and bigger SUVs, and to drive them longer distances to get to work or to buy their microwaveable burritos. It's like a hideous inversion of the idea of public transportation, in which every individual drives his or her own bus to work. Here it's not merely a matter of personal preference -- it's only possible for an individual to drive an SUV if other people subsidize the cost of cheap oil and environmental degradation. In all likelihood these other people haven't been born yet.

Ultimately, someone has to make decisions about the development of towns and cities, and there's no reason in a democratic society why these decisions have to be based on short-term economic interests. Although most suburbanites are probably not miserable in their surroundings, I doubt if anyone would consider their dependence on cars to be ideal. The Geography of Nowhere is a good way to start thinking about kicking the habit.

No, this book isn't the most scholarly approach to urban planning. But is a much needed book. One of the problems with the myriad of books that have emerged lately on the topic of modern urban design is that they are written in academic speak, not readily understandable by the layman or laywoman who is attempting to make a difference while serving on town boards. Although no one has mentioned it in these reviews, it was gutsy of the author to propose that a building could be objectively ugly. This is important to those of us who are sick and tired of trying to tell developers that we don't want another McDonalds because the golden arches don't relate to the spacial relationships of our sidewalks. Damn it, we have the right to reject it because its plug ugly. His comments on Disney were wicked, accurate, and entirely true. Read this book.

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.

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 throws alot of punches in this book, many of which are on the mark.

The general idea is one thats as old as humanity: that things are going to hell. In this case, the built environment.

Modernists, Highways, the automobile, suburban sprawl- all these get a chapter of scathing criticism. As an architecture student, I thoroughly enjoyed his blasting architectural critiques, which were occasionally hilarious- of Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's Learning from Las Vegas, he says: "They were like stoned graduate students on a road trip, critical faculties up in smoke!" (saying that they should have been MUCH more critical of Vegas).

I read this book before I read Jacob's Death and Life of Great American Cities, and I found Jacobs to be a heck of a lot more restrained and academic (yet also very funny at some points). Also, Jacobs would probably condemn some things that Kunstler advocates- things like Seaside, Florida, which to me seem to be simply more exclusive and better-designed sprawl. Sprawl is still sprawl, pretty or not. The solution lies in bringing life back to cities, not more Seasides. Kunstler is from a small New York town, so perhaps he has a fondness for small towns (which certainly have their place), but re-invigorating cities or lessening automobile dependance isn't going to be achieved by a thousand Seasides.

Anyhow; pretty good book. Give her a read if you're concerned about the built environment. Jacobs says alot of the same things though, and she said them what, 30+ years before? Kunstler adds a sense of desperate, almost angry urgency to it. Understandably- all the perscriptions for curing cities laid out by Jacobs weren't followed at all- the only thing that will change the way Americans build will be massive economic changes.

This book is a treat. It's one of those books that helps give you words for what you've always felt, but haven't articulated. Kunstler approaches the topic of why America is so GoshDarn ugly from many different perspectives. The parts of the book that focus on the histories of human habitats are not as thigh-slappinlgly funny as the parts in which he describes (with a dead-on accuracy that might make you cry) our own late-twentieth century American (ridiculous) landscape, but are compelling nonetheless for the sheer volume of information. Certain passages in the book are so elegantly written you will read them out loud to friends. Others are so funny you will laugh to yourself. Read this book with a pen to underline all the good stuff. It will no doubt change your perspective.

I believe that many of the ways we view our lives and live it is directly related to the relation of space, especially where our homes are and what we do daily.

Kunstler points out very cunningly and sometimes with anger how horrible America has set up its cities - cities of which I usually refer to as 'Suburbia World' and America, for a large part, really has turned into a world of suburbia, of endless homes stacked next to each other in a large sea, of which all its inhabitants commute to a Office park some 30 miles away.

Anyway, although Kunstler does not cover as in-depth as I believe he should, he points out many architectural and planning elements that even I, as an architecture student in Los Angeles, have never truly observed. He so well argues against suburban development that I am, even more than before, inspired to work on architectural projects that have nothing to do with suburban qualities (although this shall be very difficult).

If you are looking for a book to explain how horrible our cities really are (especially in the suburban world) and have never had the vocabulary to express that please read this book, it is something I wish everyone could understand and react to.

This is something of a sightseeing tour through the depredations of modern urban design. Highly anecdotal in its approach, choppy in style, it covers no real new ground. It is, however, a useful survey of current criticism of urban planning. I was distressed to see his bibliography contained no mention of Jane Jacob's 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities'-- the seminal work taking to task the concepts manifested in suburban wastelands and decaying inner cities. Kunstler's approach swings between vague economic, historic and philosophical tracts and some fairly well traveled material on building and urban design theories. The most prominent villain in this take is the car. This really doesn't provide a useful starting point for designing more livable cities. Not unless you acknowledge that the car is here to stay, and that urban design will have to come grips with its presence and still aspire to build cities which provide intense community centred cultures.

Urban design reflects directly our values as a society. Answers as fundamental as Kunstler is proposing cannot be broached successfully without changing those values. That is an idealistic and realistically futile prospect. The vocal and activist polarities on this issue, the utopian and maudlin pragmatic, dictate the limited attention and action it gets in the political reality. Railing against the automobile, corporate priorities, environmental inattention or our alienation from the homogenous communities of our past will finally relegate the issue to a few academics and misanthropes. The real solution, such as one exists, is going to have to come from a consensus which realizes that population growth, economic realities, automobiles, and social heterogeneity are going to be part of our future and have to be incorporated in a far from perfect outcome. But one which will hopefully ensure human and community values have a presence and priority in planning decisions. The potential trap is that a new paradigm replaces the last with some faddish design manifesto completely inappropriate to many local conditions, imposing some sentimental pastiche on problems which are not primarily architectural in nature. Like environmentalism, city design works best at the involved community level, where unique urban aspirations can be iterated with economic and ergonomic necessity.

I am so glad I read this book. Kunstler has identified and explained why strip malls, cars, and vast paved areas can never compete with more traditional (i.e., high density) town design. Why are Paris and San Francisco, or even the traditional American small town, so much more appealing and human than where you live now? Because they are designed for people, based on well-understood, time-tested principles, instead of being designed for cars! This book explains things that have been nagging at us for years but have been hard to quantify or nail down