Customer Reviews

Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century

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The author of this book is a novelist by trade, with eight completed works already under his belt. However, having had no formal architectural training, his understanding of the subject in general, and what we have done to the physical fabric of our country in specific, is profound, enlightening and deeply important. For despite what we might imagine, "buildings foster certain kinds of behavior in humans." And our rush to pave over the nation with strip malls, urban sprawl, industrial parks, and seven-lane freeways ("anti-places") all tend to suppress and distort our better natures. Reading this book is both humorous and disheartening at the one and same time. It is humorous and easy to read, because the author's writing style is mature, articulate, and witty - clearly one of the quirks of his being a novelist. Disheartening, because it plainly documents how American cities have devolved into bleak, relentless, noisy, squalid, smoky, smelly, explosively expanding, socially unstable, dehumanizing sinkholes of industrial foulness congested with ragtag hordes of racing automobiles. In response to the tragedy of our cities, we seek escape. After the war, most Americans jumped into the wagon and fled for the suburbs. However, even there we find no guarantee of spiritual or physical ease. Cut off from grocery stores, city-centers, cafes, and work, we end up spending half our life (not to mention half our income) "sitting inside a tin can on the freeway." We have become "a drive-in civilization," scuttling between non-descript office malls, "schools that look fertilizer factories," warehouse-like grocery stores, paved-over mega malls, and the congested cities we left behind in the first place - all because none of these places are within walking or biking distance after having fled to the suburbs. In fact, life in the suburbs is so unsatisfactory that we seek alternate escape routes, having no other place to flee. The majority of our free time is spent glued in front of the TV screen or at the theatre, where we catch glimpses of a better world. When we are not in either of those places, we "escape to nature" via a weekend camping trip (because nature knows how to design esthetically-pleasing places) or head to Disneyland. Ah, Disneyland.... "The public realm in America became so atrocious in the postwar decades that the Disney Corporation was able to create an artificial substitute for it and successfully sell it as a commodity." Americans love Disney world, as the author points out, because it is only social terrain left that has not been colonized by the car. Although we may not realize it on a conscious level, "The design quality of Disney World ... is about 1.5 notches better than the average American suburban shopping mall or housing subdivision - so Americans love it." Yet this fantasy land is "ultimately less satisfying than reality, and only deepens our hunger for the authentic."In essence, the book is one long screed against shoddy civic design, car-centered development, single-use zoning laws (a subject that enrages the author to the point of profanity), and loss of excellence and beauty in architectural design. In place of these, the author wishes to reinvigorate community connectivity, enliven the public sphere, enthrone commonsense zoning laws, and start designing beautiful, lasting structures - just like we used to. As the author reminds us, "In such a setting, we feel more completely human. This is not trival." The alternative? Continuing on the "garbage barge steaming off to Nowhere."

Biting critique of suburbia.

j.w.k.

I was enthralled by Kunstler's first book, _The Geography of Nowhere_, but extremely disappointed by _Home from Nowhere_. His strength in _The Geography of Nowhere_ was in pointing out the fatal flaws in post-war urban planning - that he is at once disgusted, cynical and passionate about city design made it a compelling read. But _Home from Nowhere_ falls flat as often happens when someone who is very good at finding problems decides to find solutions. Kunstler's proposals are often not helpful, and many (esp. in the area of property tax reform) have already been tried unsuccessfully in a few cities. Kunstler seems to have become a devotee of Andres Duany - but Duany's _Suburban Nation_ is a much more worthwhile read for those interested in eliminating suburban sprawl and poor urban planning.

This is a splendid sequel to "Geography of Nowhere". Kuntler's usual searing wit and no-nonsense style is evident throughout. It seemed to cover just about everything that ails urban & suburban planning since WW2. My only misgivings are that is does not adequately address a few issues that lie at the heart of the cancerous growth of America's hideous sprawlscape and the flight of the middle class from traditional city & town life: 1. Relentless population growth driven primarily by record levels of legal & illegal immigration, 2. The manipulation of US energy & transportation policy by parasitical corporate interests & their lobbyists, and, 3. The short term, 'throw away' mindset of the building materials industries and the residential McHome developers. The incentive to move to the suburbs is greatly enhanced by the artificially low cost of new homes due to idiotic short-sighted building codes, atrocious bldg materials with little durability, suppressed labor costs due to illegal immigrant labor, and subsidized infrastructure for single use auto use (road networks, vast prkg lots & artificially cheap gasoline).
Overall however, this is an excellent book!

This is a superbly written book, probably the result of theauthor's having toiled for years in the salt mines of fictionwriting. Leafing through it for the first time, I found every passage I chanced upon to be a delight, such as this one on p.37:

"Americans essay to cure their homesickness with costly visits to Disneyworld. The crude, ineffective palliatives they get there in the form of brass bands and choochoo train rides leave them more homesick and more baffled as to the nature of their disease than when they arrived--like selling chocolate bars to someone suffering from scurvy..."

Our homesickness, which is Kunstler's theme, stems from having destroyed our home, or a large part of it anyway. The homesickness is the spiritual devastation that follows the trashing of a beautiful country, the grand hotel razed to make way for an eyesore of a shopping center, the neighborhood raped by a freeway, the suburban children that know nothing of the city and nothing of the country--nothing at all in fact, except how to make a purchase at a fast food franchise. That is the "Nowhere" of the title. "Home From" refers to Kunstler's and the New Urbanists' proposed remedy.

I've seen this topic touched on before, but never so elegantly nor so bluntly. Strip malls and tract housing are dismissed as "dreck" and "blight" and "piece(s) of junk"... The landscape in which all is subjugated to the car is described variously as "wasteland", "crudscape", "rubbish"...The people inhabiting this nowhere are no longer citizens, but consumers. Trips through this nowhere are to be endured rather than enjoyed.

From a succinct history of how we got into the mess, to a quick outline of the New Urbanist philosophy, to dozens of real scenarios around the country illustrating what he means, Kunstler's volume packs a punch. Before this, I had found only unsatisfying and glancing treatments of this topic in such works as "Crabgrass Frontier" and Trow's "In the Context of No Context".

This is not to say I agree with all of the proposed solutions. Main Street, "outdoor room", ma and pa shops? No thanks. Main Streets give me a Mayberry RFD feeling that makes me want to emigrate. And Ma and Pa were always understocked and overpriced. It's not their fault: supplying an industrial society is too big a job for an old married couple. That's why the big box store is here to stay (at least for a few years).

But the big box does not have to be ugly, and it doesn't have to be segregated from the society it serves. I think Kunstler is right on the money with his indictment of single use zoning. He and the New Urbanists propose building apartments over commercial buildings. He'd probably laugh me to scorn at the very mention, but I think it would be great to put apartments and condominiums over big boxes.

The average Home Depot could have 20 units superimposed on it. A central courtyard on this second story with a restaurant or two and an internet café would create a hotel-like atmosphere. The Depot would reserve a couple units as demonstration models, and the rest would be rented to those people who, for one reason or another, don't wish to buy a single family house: college students, Depot employees, gay divorcees, foreigners--the perfect recipe for a yeasty cosmopolitan enclave, the presence of which almost always drives up property values.

Complete the picture with a rooftop garden of the sort so eloquently described in the writings of Dixie Lee Ray, and you have a new paradigm of development...or perhaps a return to an ancient and trusty paradigm: the market town.

This might well become the bible of New Urbanism - the notion that planners should imitate turn-of-the-century townscapes, with their high densities, mixed uses, and streets designed with the pedestrian in mind. Lengthy case studies describe success stories of New Urbanism: Seaside (Fla.), Boca Raton (Fla.), Memphis, Columbus, Providence, Corning, and Kentlands (Md.). There are also stories of where it failed due to local opposition: Lagana West (Cal.), Mashpee (Mass.), Chatham (NY), Homestead (Fla.), and Brooklyn. Oddly, there are almost no illustrations of these projects - a glaring flaw in an otherwise brilliant book. Page after page describes innovative planning initiatives in enormous detail, where the material cries out for a photo or diagram.

Kunstler has a tendency to wander: There's a chapter about an organic farmer, a chapter about African-American history culminating in the author's recommendation that many black kids should be put in orphanages (huh?), and two chapters that are essentially autobiographical. Also, the occasional use of words like "crudscape" adds spark to his writing, but Kunstler sometimes gets carried away by his own emotions. The author's description of a zoning dispute in his hometown of Saratoga Springs is so venomous and vulgar that he hurts only his own credibility. Kunstler should keep in mind that not everyone who opposes the New Urbanism is "evil" (his overused adjective), but rather are responding to the fact that people do like malls, large house lots, and travelling short distances by car, however harmful these preferences might be to the larger fabric of our metropolitan areas.

I was required to read this book for my Urban Studies course, but although I had to read it, I found myself liking it. Kunstler manages to articulate many things about suburbia that had been bothering me, but which I could not put into words. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and I now realize that there is a better way to live than the way most of us have been living. He is a candid, clear, and persuasive writer and I look forward to reading more of his books in the future.

This book started out on a strong note, with Kunstler's typically searing rhetoric and a well-written overview of what's wrong with American city and town planning. However, it soon deteriorated into undisciplined discussions about farming and the political saga of Saratoga Springs. Eventually, the book peters out almost completely, as Kunstler waxes nostalgic about his boyhood in New York and ends with a bizarre, egocentric soliloquy that has something to do with painting a McDonald's and biking to the YMCA.

I was disappointed with the unevenness of this book, especially after such a powerful, interesting beginning. Also, Kunstler's personality and opinions on certain issues are likely to turn some readers off; he frequently seems almost crotchety and bitter as he frowns on things like "teenage rebellion," rock & roll, and "black Nationalism." Although Kunstler's commitment to sound planning principles is admirable, his views on more complex sociopolitical issues are so simplistic as to just make him seem stupid (for example, he essentially denies the significance of systematic racial discrimination). Unfortunately, Kunstler makes it seem like he wants to go back to the ultimate '50s version of small-town life, complete with corner five-and-dime stores, ballgames in the Ramble, and cheery milk deliverymen. He does *not* seem to favor exciting urban development like the kind happening in Europe, since it might contain people "dressed in high top sneakers and a sideways hat."

I would recommend Kunstler's "The Geography of Nowhere" to this sequel. Or if you must read this book, maybe you could follow it up with something like William Upski Wimsatt's "Bomb the Suburbs," which at least shows an appreciation for the vibrancy of *modern* city life.

If Ownership Society (G.W. Bush) instead of Great Society (L.B Johnson) sounds good to you, then US Suburbia is right for you.
"Home from Nowhere" by James Kunstler, however, predicts the demise of suburbia in the near future and lays out principles and detailed suggestions how future cities, towns, and settlements by humans living in today's borders of the USA should be outlined.

The book is rich in details and enables both US citizens and immigrants such as me (from Germany) to understand what went so wrong with suburbia and its emphasis of providing a life in solitude. The ideas of "New Urbanism" are covered extensively and quite illustratively.

"Home from Nowhere" describes how cities and towns can be built or rebuilt that enable its residents to live in a social density traditionally associated with urban life (and in my country, Germany, the term "urban" had and has a positive connotation, socially mixed, culturally mixed, accessible, walking distance, public transportation).

James Kunstler has offered his own view on why Suburbia is such a wrong way of life - and I recommend highly his previous book "Geography of Nowhere". "Nowhere" means "Suburbia". The title of this book "Home from Nowhere" hence means "Home from Suburbia", meaning home back in the urban life within a city - returning from the wrong life in the outer rings and returning to the city - once the US cities are walkable, enjoyable, livable again. How to make the cities livable again ? This is the topic of the book.

Here are my own thoughts about US Suburbia as a German immigrant(who arrived here in 1998):

In the US, social interaction in Suburbia is mostly limited to church and schools (in case of parish schools, the two are practically identical). Church and school alone, however, do not substitute for "Community".

In Germany, I was raised in a single-family house with a sizable lawn and access to a public bus (10min to downtwon) in a 250,000 city (Moenchengladbach, west of Cologne, 15 miles from the Dutch border). As a child, I effortlessly visited my friends, the school, the church, the theater, the cinema, etc. by bike, by bus and also by walking.

Retail and affordable housing was mixed, residential villa areas (such as the one of my parents) were interspersed with rent complexes etc. Buses were used by teachers, academics, students, workers - and still are. Public transportation in Germany is truly used by the entire public.

To understand better, why a focus on urban life is so important and why suburbia - home to half of Americans - is such a wasteful life (socially, resources-related, etc.) it is important to understand why so many Americans have chosen to live in barren, cloned, residential confinements: the unwillingness of US Public High Schools to differentiate by academic merit and merit alone.

This is, however, in my view the one crucial difference to the US which might explain why the mixing is still there in Germany and why suburbia is so pervasive in the US: It is possibly for the very same reason why American cities were mixed until 1954.

In Germany, schools are segmented by merit. After mandatory elementary school (Grade 1-4), each child in Germany is assessed on its academic potential at age 9 or 10 and then send to either "Main School" (to become a craftsman), "Real School" (to become most likely a very skilled worker) or to "Gymnasium" which is in essence a public (!) prep school with grades 5-13 whose graduates at age 19 then go to University.

In conservative states (Bavaria, Baden-Wuerttemberg), 40-50% go to Main School, 20-25% to Real School and 20-30% to Gymnasium (before 1963 it was 5%).

In left-wing states (notoriously Bremen and Berlin), 60% go to Gymnasium which has, of course, caused a collapse in quality. (German parents take great care to live outside the city-state of Bremen to take residence in either near-by Lower Saxony or Schleswig-Holstein - a rare example of suburbia behavior similar to the US).

If you mix people in habitats, you need to separate students in schools based on their potential. Without that willingness, any attempt to resurrect urban life in the US will not take-off as an option endorsed wholeheartedly by Americans. German "Gymnasiums" are in essence "Advanced Placement Schools" where every subject is taught for every student for nine years on AP level. The beer kegging red-neck segment is relegated to the "Main School" (I know that in the US many children with affluent parents are beer-kegging as well - just another sign of the social deterioration so prevalent in suburbia). As a matter of fact, merit segmentation often reflects social segmentation and much has been written in Germany to rectify this.

In German gymnasiums, the emphasis on academics and much less emphasis on school team sports is resulting in free space for geeks and nerds. "Jocks" do not exist. As a result, every boy and girl that likes school flourishes already in school without having to wait for the Promised Land of College.

As the history of America shows: If you mix public schools - after 1954 - adults refuse to mix any longer and settle in socially homogeneous habitats. At school, their children will then encounter neanderthals and primates, but how fortunate that their parents are in the same income percentile!

It is this move to social homogeneousness that gives Suburbia its fake ace: it is so easy to erect all those segregated zoning cages - the rich - the affluent - the true middle class - the delusional middle class - the upper trailer trash (who also are made believe they are middle class) - the zoning area you never entered. Teachers do not segment by academic potential: not a problem - then the parents do their job (but parents usually fail miserably at mixing their children socially - but again, this is what cities and towns are for).

Cities and towns, in turn, are very bad at segregating people (and after all: why should they do it ?) Yes, there are neighborhoods that tilt one way or the other, but usually they are too small to support a whole school: Therefore, students from different social backgrounds mix and therefore, teachers must do the separating by assessment based on merit.

If you allow public schools being strictly segmented by merit, adults are ready to stay and accept and invite different people around them. Parents must be reassured that social mixing - in cities - does not lead to indiscriminate student mixing of bright and dumb students in the same school buildings. In Germany that means not mixing white dumb students with bright students of Turkish descent.

As the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said: "Differentiation means progress".

US public high schools do not differentiate by merit (enough). As a result, parents differentiate by income. Welcome to suburbia.

Yes, I am aware that in Germany the terms "selection" or segmentation are contaminated for a very valid reason. In your country, the term "segregation" is. Still, I offer this line of thought to you here, since I think it really matters and it helps both bright and not so bright students better to reach their potential when taught separately.

I remember how stunned I was during the first two years here (1998-2000). I could not believe the miles and miles of singe-family houses with no boardwalks, no cinema, no theater, no concert hall, no auditorium, no restaurant, no retail. Quiet confinements with adults sitting in front of flickering tv screens or computer screens (with or without children). Does this sound like a fulfilled life to you ?

It can be done better - in Germany, but also in this country which has a very rich tradition of mid-size and small-size towns that have resolved the task of building a humanly scaled habitat very well.

Back to the author of the book to review: James Kunstler offers his ideas and ideas from active architects of how compelling new ideas - and resurrecting old ones - can be implemented in a very detailed way. Make zoning your ally. Read: "Geography of Nowhere" as well. - The ICE (formerly INS) should give this book as a free hand-out to any immigrant arriving in the US and considering moving to Suburbia.

I have also read "The Long Emergency" in which Kunstler spells out the predicted events when cheap oil will cease to exist. The first casualty will be US Suburbia - and rightfully so in his view. "The Long Emergency" is laudable for its uncompromising bluntness (see such subtitles as "sunset for the sunbelt"). "Home from Nowhere" is valuable for its constructive advise how humans in the US can live instead.

There is a Society beyond the mere Ownership Society. We all can do better.

Somewhere between Celebration, Florida and the current state of many American cities is the often elusive ideal for how towns and cities should be designed. The former, as some critics have pointed out, might seem a tad artifial and too hampered by covenenants and restrictions. The latter, Kunstler eloquently contends, have become even more void of vitality in their dependence on the automobile, distorted scale, and lack of effective public spaces.

What Mr. Kunstler provides in both the Geography of Nowhere and Home From Nowhere is a comprehensive understanding of what we have done wrong in modern towns and cities, what's to blame for these problems, and what can be done to make our cities, streets, and neighborhoods more livable again.

I have found the book to be an effective recipe in making necessary changes to our local zoning and subdivision codes and, thereby, provide a framework for recreating a neo-traditional environment.

I would suggest complementing a reading of this book with Kunstler's earlier work as well as Christopher Alexander's more technical "A Pattern Language". And to see how some might argue that these precepts are taken to excess, it would be useful to also read Celebration, USA by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins.

I read Kunstler's work on New Urbanism because it resonates with me. I used to drive an hour each way through work through mind-rending traffic, and I lived in subdivision where I could only leave by car, although most destinations were within 1 mile. I know the suburban sprawl of which Kunstler speaks, and it is refreshing to read a point of view that gels with my own experience. I see some issues in what he writes about, particularly in that many solutions are feasible only for the well off, but much of it strikes me as true. It may be polemic - although Home from Nowhere is packed with facts compared to Geography of Nowhere - but this polemic speaks to me at times.

Home from Nowhere has several chapters with tangible plans for civic improvement, including both urban renewal and `greenfield' development. Concrete examples are given to demonstrate the principles of New Urbanism, as well as examples where New Urbanism failed to make an impact.

Sections of the book seem like a rebuttal to responses to Geography of Nowhere. He mentions that he has traveled more and acquired an education in architectural principles, and his facts and research do make the book more worthwhile. If you have already read Geography of Nowhere, this book can fill in some of the gaps between the rhetoric.

The last several chapters began to drag. First, the reader spends some time in Florida with a like-minded developer. Then there is the scathing chapter on local politics in upstate New York. Finally, an interesting chapter on organic farming seems tacked on without connection to the rest of the text. Most amusing of all was the autobiographical segment, where we learn the author was teased in his inner-city high school. One might draw the conclusion that the author's early experiences formed many of his opinions. While I am sure that was the intent of this chapter, I doubt he intended some of the conclusions I drew from his early life.

I might mention some of the stereotyping that may offend readers of this book, and in fact, may lead me to write a letter to Mr. Kunstler. I will mention a few incidents. In one chapter on Memphis, Kunstler painstakingly reproduces the southerner's dialect, although he does this for no one else. In another chapter, he discusses muggings in NYC, and describes a typical mugger wearing hip-hop fashions. He apologizes in advance and then continues to discuss the problems of the inner-city poor. He mentions WASPs and all the evils they proliferate in passing. Finally, I was most shocked by his stereotyping of women. He writes: "An unmarried schoolteacher could not afford to live near the schoolchildren she taught, not to mention the cleaning lady." Apparently the author associates teaching and cleaning with women - their traditional roles. He should take more care in his use of gender pronouns.

If you took the good parts of Geography of Nowhere and the good parts of this book (particularly the first few chapters, which were very fact-filled), you would have an excellent book on the principles of New Urbanism. The writing style can be very appealing. However, this book is not perfect.