The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of 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."

The Geography of Nowhere has become a touchstone work in the two decades since its initial publication, its incisive commentary giving language to the feeling of millions of Americans that our nation's suburban environments were ceasing to be credible human habitats. Since that time, the work has inspired city planners, architects, legislators, designers and citizens everywhere. In this special 20th Anniversary edition, dozens of authors and experts in various fields share their perspective on James Howard Kunstler's brave and seminal work.

Genres: Nonfiction, Urban Planning, History, Urbanism, Architecture, Geography, Sociology

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

James Howard Kunstler (born 1948) is an American author, social critic, and blogger who is perhaps best known for his book The Geography of Nowhere, a history of suburbia and urban development in the United States. He is prominently featured in the peak oil documentary, The End of Suburbia, widely circulated on the internet. In his most recent non-fiction book, The Long Emergency (2005), he argues that declining oil production is likely to result in the end of industrialized society and force Americans to live in localized, agrarian communities.

Source: Wikipedia

Reviews

[Leftbanker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Happiness is a place. Someone said that, I don’t now who. Perhaps a lot of people said it. I have. I went looking for it. I found happiness in a place.

The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler probably had more of an effect on me than any book I've ever read. This effect can be measured by my choices of living environments. I moved in constant search of livable cities, from suburban Washington D.C., to Miami, then to Seattle, and now Valencia, Spain. This book has shaped my own writing as well and I hope to publish a novel that is centered on the American suburban landscape some time soon.

The problem in America is that few people know anything other than the strip mall model of urban-suburban architecture. However, when presented with what seems like an attack on their lifestyle, they become defensive and refuse to even consider an alternative. Too many people have accepted a life in which the automobile is responsible for effecting 100% of their transportation needs (in my current model, car use represents 0%). I don’t think these people are making a choice, I don’t think they ever felt they had a choice. We have allowed the exigencies of Chili’s® parking requirements to dictate our urban planning with no voice given to the citizens. I feel that the need for a healthy and social living environment is the single most important factor in defining our happiness.

I have found Valencia to be about as close to urban perfection as I could ever imagine city life to be. The city has good public transportation as well as a fantastic network of bike trails in and around the city (as well as having wonderful weather almost year-round for cycling). Almost every urban block in Valencia is like an island capable of sustaining life for those citizen castaways who call it home. My apartment is less than one block away from a major supermarket, a green grocer, a half a dozen bars and restaurants, a shoe repair shop, a tailor, several hair dressers, a tobacconist, a pharmacy, a bakery, and a pizza take-out joint—among a few other businesses. Why anyone who lives in Valencia drives a car is beyond my capacity for understanding.

I’d like to think that my life in Spain will serve more of a purpose than just entertaining me for all of these years. On top of everything else that I’ve gained from this experience, I feel that there is one essential lesson that I can take away from all of this as an American who was influenced in my late teens by Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and my own subsequent quest to seek out how to live my life. As much as I love the great outdoors, I never looked to the wilderness as a place to suck the marrow out of life, but rather sought to fight against the urban explosion which had been sending people farther out into the suburbs and away from city centers. I slowly began to learn the importance of our man-made geography, the way we make our cities, the way we live our day-to-day lives, and I wanted to live mine better.

In fact, for a good portion of my life I never really had a adequate understanding of just what made up a city. For too long, I defined it as simply a conglomeration of homes, and businesses, and schools, and everything else necessary in our lives, all stitched together by a fabric of roads. What really defines many people’s lives is the automobile, although they’d be loath to admit this. It took me a long time to realize that something was wrong in my life, that something was missing, that I needed a change, or possibly that I needed to change. Both the realization that something was wrong and the solution came about in increments and almost by accident over the course of many years and a few different time zones. Now it’s impossible for me to imagine living in any other manner.

Here is something I wrote about my city and neighborhood here in Spain:
https://leftbankview.blogspot.com/201...

I lived in downtown Seattle for eight years before I moved here and life in that city was similar to how I live now. I had a car but it was more of a recreational vehicle, like a jetski, something I used on weekends to get out of town. Here I can take the train (on the local trains, I can take my bike).

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

In describing a certain way of viewing the landscape, Kunstler makes the observation that a Jacksonian student of landscape can study a fast food place (in his example a place called the Red Barn that looks like a red barn) and "never arrive at the conclusion that the Red Barn is an ignoble piece of shit that degrades the community." There is the thrust of Kunstler's book, a stirring if somewhat flawed look at our degraded landscape.
The book takes us on a whirlwind tour of the history of the United States, from the puritans through the evil that was modernism. We learn about early town planning, how it varied from state to state depending on the prevailing community values. As we pushed ever further into our growing land mass, we lost that community and turned inward. It really turns to shit though when we arrive in modern times and that dastardly movement known as modernism rears its ugly head.
Modernism is a sort of favorite punching bag these days. Kunstler is very hard on it, pretty much blaming the artistic movement for the disaster that is suburbia. In that respect I find Adam Rome's The Bulldozer in the Countryside more convincing. In that book we get a more solid, less "ignoble piece of shit" based argument. Rome lays out the economic conditions in a more methodical way and takes apart your average suburban house to show why it is an ignoble piece of shit. Kunstler just seems to hate how it looks. The tone changes a little later on and he elaborates on why suburbia is bad and what exactly is bad about it(height restrictions, lack of mixed uses, set back requirements). I also find the arguments put forth in David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity to be instructive. Harvey argues (and this gels with Rome's argument) that much of the "modern aestetic" came, at least in part, from the discovery of new building materials and techniques. Harvey agrues that the return to ornamentation in the postmodern period is a result of a refinement of those techniques. Kunstler also ignores the fact—again brought up by Rome—that the traditional way of building houses was not up to the task of dealing with the postwar boom, and that it was not so much an embrace of modernist design as an embrace of economical building practices.
Oddly enough, it is his relentless attack on aesthetics that provide this book with its relevance. While Rome's book is more technical (it has a lenghty chapter on the problems of septic tanks), Kunstler focuses on ecology and how we interact with places. I don't think that I agree entirely on the aesthetic principles he seems to favor (I don't think the garish colors used on Pinkberry locations harms the fabric of the Village), but I do agree that the look of a building (and how it "interacts with the street") is important (I lean more towards the iteraction aspect).
The last part of the book deals with efforts to bring back this sense of community, or at least provide us with pretty things to look at. We learn about Traditional Neighborhood Design (part of New Urbanism), land trusts (to save farmland), and what sounds like Transit Oriented Design (though it isn't called that in the book). He does a good job of not focussing too much on the look of buildings in Seaside (the TND posterchild), instead focussing on community. (This book came out too long ago to evaluate how successful that project has been, perhaps there is an updated edition?) He also points out the oft-forgotten part of the Seaside development, that it could only have been built in the middle of nowhere because of the zoning regulations that were present in Florida at the time. Many critics harp on the remoteness of Seaside (and the fact that it is a new development, which means it isn't exactly preserving open space), claiming that it is a glorified suburb. I like that Kunstler focusses on the functioning of this town and the difficulties the developers had in bringing it about. He also makes a point of referring to it as a demonstration project. He does however mention other developments in the same vein, but fails to address the fact that these are also entirely new developments. A few pages later he expresses his desire to see a new, more "sustainable" form of development. Surely filling up more land with deveopments cannot be considered sustainable. I guess what I wanted was more talk of rehabilitating broken places (if it is possible to save suburbia) and reusing abandoned cities (of which there are many).
Many of the faults are minor (his hatred of modernist architecture is forgivable and not too central to his argument), so I do recommend this book. It is entertaining and passionate; passion for city planning is something we need to see more of in America. I can't really blame him for his indignant tone. After reading about all the ways in which compentent city planning is actually illegal in this country, one can't help but be angry. Kunstler provides a great introduction to the issues that doesn't get bogged down by dry analysis. It moves along quickly and will hopefully inspire readers to learn more about the issues that are brought up.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Howard Kunstler, prophet of doom, blogger ("Clusterfuck Nation"), author, novelist, wrote this book way back in 1993, but it has that timeless feel. Not a whole lot has changed, except apparently we've pushed doom a little further off into the future. "The era of cheap gas is drawing to a close," he warned us, meaning death for the suburbs as many people would no longer be able to afford to drive. Well dang it if cheap-ish gas prices aren't here again, after their scary highs of '08.

Kunstler's concern is the built environment; specifically, how horrific it is. The world around us is designed for cars, not people. We owe our environment to the metrics of traffic engineers, the zoning boards who listen to them, to government policies that subsidized cars and interstates but allowed streetcars and trolleys to die out. Even where zoning boards have tried to limit sprawl and encourage charm - say, by forcing houses onto 2 acre plots - they've only encouraged sprawl by pushing dwellings further and further out from towns, in 2 acre increments. And many of the most beautiful and historic homes that still stand in small town America would be illegal by current zoning standards. Living in a world designed not for us, but for our cars, engenders feelings of alienation in us. It's why office parks sit amid vast lagoons of cars, why split level house facades feature huge gaping garage doors, why Ramada Inns are unashamed to have loading docks and metal fire doors front onto the streetscape. If you've ever tried to walk somewhere in the suburbs, or the exurbs, where there were no sidewalks, maybe just a little grassy rut next to eight lanes of traffic, you'll want to read this book. If you've ever walked through a charming New England town with buildings on a human scale and old growth trees lining the streets, and then a fringe-urban warehouse district cinderblock moonscape, and wondered why one made you feel good and the other didn't, and how they both managed to get built, this book is for you.

Kunstler writes in a biting vernacular. Suburban stores are "shopping smarm." Individual houses sit on "big blobs of land." And everywhere, there is crud: "commercial highway crud," "creeping crud architecture of suburbia," "the modern crudscape." Our human habitat is "trashy and preposterous." The Swissman Charles-Edouard Jeanneret "took the hocus-pocus name Le Corbusier." (Kunstler despises Modernism.) The Red Barn fast food restaurant "is an ignoble piece of shit that degrades the community." All over American suburbs "there are the dreary voids we call front lawns and dull exercises in miniature vignette-making known as landscaping with shrubs."

In a chapter devoted to the glumness of fakery, he visits Atlantic City. "Standing on the Boardwalk this mild October Day, one beheld the Trump Taj Mahal with that odd mixture of fascination and nausea reserved for the great blunders of human endeavor." At Disney World, "after paying $32.50 for admission [in today's dollars a one-day ticket costs $79:], you are efficiently herded onto a ferryboat for a short ride across an artificial lake to the entrance of the Kingdom. This will be the first of many crowd-control experiences - and resulting lines - that add to Disney World's air of fascism. The boat ride is also a psychological device. Making you enter the place by stages, the Disney "imagineers" emphasize the illusion of one's taking a journey to a strange land - as if driving over 1500 miles from another corner of the nation was not sufficient..."

There are moments when his judgments come a little too close to snobbery for my comfort. It's not the snobbery of wealth or education but of aesthetics: people whose aesthetic choices are subpar - say, someone living in a ranch house with a rusty auto and a torn plastic wading pool in the yard - are to be pitied. "You could name a housing development Forest Knoll Acres even if there was no forest and no knoll, and the customers would line up with their checkbooks open. Americans were as addicted to illusion as they were to cheap petroleum." Or, maybe they don't have many choices. Maybe Forest Knoll Acres was affordable and close to work and its buyers were well aware that it wasn't some pastoral Eden - but knowing they were participants in a developer's illusion wasn't the most dire fact of their daily life. I prefer not to tie individual aesthetic choices so closely to virtue or lack of it. Not everyone can live in Seaside, Florida, or on Walden Pond.

He treats the built environment holistically: geography is related to architecture, which is related to economics, which is related to sociology. I have to admit I'd never thought of ecology and economy being as closely related as their roots would indicate. Ultimately it all has to do with private ownership vs. public responsibility. It's the story of America. I'd also never directly related the expenditures of the interstate highway system to anything else, but "because the highways were gold-plated with our national wealth, all other forms of public building were impoverished. This is the reason why every town hall built after 1950 is a concrete-block shed...and other civic monuments are indistinguishable from bottling plants and cold-storage warehouses."

This is an utterly harsh indictment of the way we live, and the manner in which we've surrendered decision-making unthinkingly. It's a plea to heal our "spiritual deformities" (yes, it really is that bad) by maintaining and building better communities and actually caring about them.

[M0rningstar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kunstler's analysis of the sad suburban situation is mainly right-on. Unbridled private enterprise has destroyed public transit. Roads and buildings designed predominantly for private car access create problems for the human inhabitants of that environment, making it impossible to do without a car for the simplest of tasks in many places. Local zoning laws are often inane and archaic. Ditto building codes. Sprawl and congestion go uncontrolled because city planners are blind to the big picture.

Thus, it's very unfortunate that Kunstler stuffs this book with such bombast and sanctimoniousness (occasionally segueing into moist-eyed sentimentalism) that it's often difficult to take him seriously. His failure to divorce personal preferences from factual arguments hurts his analyses tremendously, rendering them shallow, inconsistent, and incomplete. The resulting proposed solutions are largely simplistic, and even oddly idiosyncratic, in some places. In other places, things descend into outright "WTF?" territory--speaking of the advantages of mixed income neighborhoods: "The children of the poor saw how sober and responsible citizens lived." Seriously.

Thankfully, Kunstler just reads like a very angry Mr. Mackey ("Modernism and cars are baaad, mmmmkay?") most of the time. His anger is understandable, however; you'd be pissed too, if you lived in a town where people beautify their front yards with large plywood cutouts of urinating children and butt cracks.

In the end, this book is still a worthwhile read. It outlines a very important but unsexy problem, lays out some interesting ideas, and hints at a way forward. It's depressing to see how little the North American transit/planning landscape has changed since the '90s, when this book was published, that despite our growing energy woes, the toll of lengthening commutes, and the increasing fetishization of the private to the detriment of the public. Read it with a hefty lump of salt, and be prepared to roll your eyes a lot.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is nothing like a little James Howard Kunstler to make you feel like a complete asshole and Capitalist whore. His newest prophesy is that the American suburb is dead, but this book only predicts that with its strangely-plausible sounding doomsday warnings and vehement attacks against anyone so blind enough to want the myth that is the American Dream.

The book takes a fascinating look at the forces that drove the rise of individual landownership and the suburb as currently accepted in modern society. his examinations of human psychological and anthropological tendencies are depressing, but spot-on as far as this non-psychological/anthropologically -challenged reader can tell.

While I can heartily agree with him on the bulk of his logical reasoning, I just don't like that I put the book down feeling guilty about growing up in suburbia and being raised with the virtues of "typical" suburban life instilled in my brain. I'm trying to break free, but the concept of a backyard keeps sucking me in! don't look at me, I'm hideous...

I highly recommend this book to anyone who happily lives alone in a house in the suburbs and commutes to work alone in an automobile every day. prepare for your world to be rocked.

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The Geography of Nowhere" tends towards the polemic, but through most of the book I found myself agreeing with Kunstler's ideas. His basic premise is that the fundamental American bias towards private property rights has created a culture weak in community- and this bias has combined with an over-reliance on the automobile to produce "nowhere" places- suburbias with no-center, endless highways of stripmalls, and millions of units of crap-housing. He's not optimistic about the future of this civilization we've created: once the oil runs out, or the environment goes bad, or we go insane from spending weeks every year in our cars, he believes we're going to be somewhere beyond fucked.

His writing is at its best when he's describing specific places in America- cities that he feels have failed, like Detroit or LA, towns that he feels are broken, like Woodstock, Vermont, or weird capitals of illusion like Disneyworld. He's less good when he's giving a compressed history of architecture and urban planning in America- that part felt like a blizzard of names and styles, and with no pictures, I had to do a lot of Google image searching to understand his references. And I felt the ending of the book was pretty weak: his proposed solutions for the problem of suburbia all felt kind of half-assed, like building new, denser cores into the suburban wasteland, rather than just knocking it all down.

One other thing that bothered me about the book was the absence of any mention of Jane Jacobs or her ideas. I think that reflects Kunstler's fundamental bias towards small town living: he's lived upstate in Saratoga Spring for most of his adult life. But the problems he describes are really only solved in cities, and Jane Jacobs ideas about what makes cities work are key to understanding what makes suburbs not work. I could imagine Jane Jacobs dismissing a lot of what he has to say about saving suburbia as meaningless and besides the point- I don't think she'd find anything there worth saving.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is book is largely a rant--well-researched and eloquent--but a rant nonetheless. Overwrought with cynicism, it is hard to distinguish Kunstler's reasonable concerns from his own sense of nostalgia. He draws some erroneous parallels (e.g. holding Disney World to the standard of anything but an amusement park) but does make an effective point regarding how U.S. citizens were ill-prepared for the after effects of the heyday of the automobile.

Fundamentally, Kunstler's cynicism aside, he's an advocate for renewed interest in civic planning, decreased dependency on fossil fuels, and models of sustainability. He presents Portland, OR as the best model for a city and the community of Seaside, FL as the model for a smaller town. He sees urban planning as the opportunity to develop while respecting the present landscape and enriching sense of community and public space.

The weakness of the book lies in the author's bitterness, which disguises his very real passion for the topic. The saving grace is that given most of his likely readership, he is preaching to the choir who understands his anger. This choir will understand that Kunstler embeds important lessons in his bleak diatribe--lessons worth embracing.

[Andrew]

Sometimes people tell me I'm humorless, that I over-intellectualize, that I need to chill out. Well, in that regard, James Howard Kunstler makes me look like fucking Vinny from Jersey Shore.

The Geography of Nowhere, is, above all else, a rant. A very entertainingly angry rant, but a rant. While I enjoyed reading much of it, it doesn't exactly have an academic basis-- the foundations for his claims are shaky at best, and when he makes claims about the nature of building and space, he doesn't justify them.

To a certain extent, I agree with him-- America's suburban spaces are awful, dehumanizing, and hideous, and I would like to see them eradicated from the face of the planet. But rather than anything productive or even really very thought-provoking, he just offers us an anti-modernist screed, and promotes a wishy-washy sort of new urbanism as an antidote-- something that really, I feel, doesn't work.

[Amelia L. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read if you’re into:
- Hating suburbia
- American cultural analysis
- Architectural history (residential and corporate)
- New Urbanism
- Diversions on upstate NY (<3)

This book was published right around the beginning of the New Urbanism movement in America, right in 1994. I’m equal parts surprised and not about some of the conclusions that this book makes— One of the conclusions is very logical but almost laughable today: Kunstler predicts that after crude oil becomes a commodity of astronomical proportions or we deplete the world of it, America will turn away from our car-centric society and come to realize the effectiveness of density, public transit, and other glorious revolutions. I think no one could have predicted the strange space electric cars take up in our society today.

I honestly loved how this book sort of acted like a “who’s who” of late-nineteenth/twentieth century urban development and I felt pretty darn accomplished having understood most of the people. For example you can’t swing a cat around here without hitting Frederick Law Olmsted, Calvert Vaux, Daniel Burnham, Henry Adams, Le Corbusier, Louis Sullivan, etc. Right around 1877-1916 is my favorite period in American history, and with that came some very interesting sociological observations based around the cultural landscape. In that vein there was some interesting analyses comparing the “Old” American immigrants culturally (puritans, Western Europe, Dutch) with the “New” immigrants (Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia). A lot to be said about the entrepreneurial or innovative character that many try to characterize American people by.

Kunstler’s writing is sometimes equally annoying and enlightening. Part of the problem that I found with this perspective is his tone carries a very strong luddite/nihilist bent that indicates distaste for political progress. City planning is inherently a political practice, and while there were some conclusions that could be seen as an expression of values, it came off as more of a series of frustrated observations of a journey than a manifesto. CRP books don’t necessarily need to be directed towards change or a end goal, but to me it helps. I think it’s a really great introduction and worthwhile expansion into the study of the built environment from a historical, cultural, and physical perspective. So that alone makes The Geography of Nowhere a valuable text.

Another annoying part (to me at least) is Kunstler’s virulent hatred of Modernism, as a architectural discipline and a mindset :(. He goes as far to call it “fraudulent and barbarous” and posits that it’s a “worship of machines.” And sheesh, if early Modernism worshipped machines we should look at our current cultural moment with AI. While I also hate Le Corbusier for a variety of reasons, I’m afraid there’s no need to use it as representative of the entire movement. You can't point to modernism as a reason for ugly houses-- I feel that the more modern concept of "enshittification" also has been embraced by Big General Contractors as well... but that's for another day and maybe some academic research.

[Tracey · Rating 2 out of 5]

In this book, Kunstler covers the history and development of town planning and suburbification with a definite chip on his shoulder. Starting with colonial times, he examines how we have used (and misused) land for individual, rather than group purposes. The great expanse of America was ours for the taking, and take it we did, throwing aside the concepts of villages and civic harmony.

He vilifies the automobile industry, blaming it for the banality of suburbia and the destruction of community, gobbling up farmland in the name of urban sprawl. Examples of exploitation include Detroit, Saratoga Springs and Atlantic City. Las Vegas and Disney World were other obvious targets, of course. Only rarely does he point out who's doing it right: Portland Oregon, and Seaside, Florida are two of his examples.

While Kunstler has many valid points and does an excellent job of bringing together disparate elements of our history to show how they shaped our idea of neighborhoods and communities, he does so with such negativity and smugness that I found it difficult to take him seriously at times. The repetition of such slangy phrases as "scary places", "jive-plastic" and "crap" also detracted from the gravity of the discussion. I'd be interested in seeing the same material covered a little more dispassionately, and with more suggestions on how to make small changes in the right direction.


Recommended to those interested in community planning from the viewpoint of everything that we've done wrong.

[Andrew Elsass · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great, now I'm a snob about urban planning too.

[Casey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started to listen to this as a way of passing time on a long drive (which is a bit ironic). I enjoyed bits a pieces of this, but the way the author describes underprivileged and oppressed communities rubbed me the wrong way. It felt very elitist, as if he is the only person that understands the truth, and everyone else is stupid for not automatically knowing what he’s thinking.

I.e. “I interviewed a bunch of people about what they enjoyed about the park, and no one said the lack of cars there! They are stupid to not realize that that is the real reason they like the park” type beat. Annoying.

The number of times he said something along the lines of “[insert poor population] doesn’t know any better!” made me want to bite his head off.

Highlights included the tongue in cheek Disney commentary, and prolific 21st century predictions.

[Adi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kunstler almost had something brilliant, exploring how short term profitability lead to inefficient and spiritually dead landscapes as a consequence of how we structured civic engineering after WW2 - learning he kept lurching further and further into right wing crankery explains his severe lacunae in his analysis.

It's not a bad read, but it's a dry read that only pays off in the latter third only to fumble the bag in making a meaningful conclusion. Kunstler's latent conservatism explains the dryness of this diatribe.

[Sarah Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

This will be one of my top books of the year.

Wildly eye-opening to how American society got to where it is and why that matters and what we can/must do about it.

For a book on “urban planning” (don’t let that scare you away) it’s incredibly intriguing and written in a very readable way, drawing all sorts of insightful connections, pointing to examples I’m familiar with but in ways I haven’t considered before, and oddly-enough speaks to my heart in a relatable way.

Let’s just say that if you’ve ever felt even a little bit depressed being surrounded by the typical cityscape of busy streets and ugly shoebox stores with glaring fluorescent signs
Or by the feeling of being surrounded by so many people yet being completely disconnected
Or man, even if you’ve ever bemoaned traffic
This book will resonate.

I would say it’s life changing, but honestly it’s hard to know where someone like me can go with this knowledge. I foresee mulling over it for quite some time.

“The immersive ugliness of the built environment in the USA is entropy made visible. It indicates not simple carelessness but a vivid drive toward destruction, decay and death: the stage-set of a literal ‘death trip,’ of a society determined to commit suicide. Far from being a mere matter of aesthetics, suburbia represents a compound economic catastrophe, ecological debacle, political nightmare, and spiritual crisis — for a nation of people conditioned to spend their lives in places not worth caring about.”

“The great suburban build-out is over. It was wonderful for business in the short term, and a disaster for our civilisation when the short term expired. We shall have to live with these consequences for a long time. The chief consequence is that the living arrangements most Americans think of as "normal" is bankrupting us both personally and at every level of government. This is the true meaning of the word deficit, which has resounded so hollowly the past ten years as to have lost its power to distress us. Now that we have built the sprawling system of far-flung houses, offices, and discount marts connected by freeways, we can't afford to live in it. We also failed to anticipate the costs of the social problems we created in letting our towns and cities go to hell.
A further consequence is that two generations have grown up and matured in America without experiencing what it is like to live in a human habitat of quality. We have lost so much culture in the sense of how to build things well. Bodies of knowledge and sets of skills that took centuries to develop were tossed in the garbage, and we will not get them back easily. The culture of architecture was lost to Modernism and its dogmas. The culture of town planning was handed over to lawyers and bureaucrats, with pockets of resistance mopped up by the automobile, highway, and real estate interests.”

[Taveri · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a drab book about a bleak subject using bland language. Somebody or something peed on the author's cornflakes as he got up on the wrong side of the bed. And it was the automobile. Instead of harping on the negative consequences of vehicular life I would have like to have some visionary solutions to get us out of the abscess. One chapter would have been more than enough to point out how a lifestyle dependent on automobiles is detrimental. There were two good chapters: #6 Joyride and #11 Three Cities, which gave a few accomplishments. For instance citing Portland as a positive city.

Being a quarter of century since the book came out it might have been insightful (or just discouraging) on how things got worse. I wonder what the author might have thought of the Detroit RecCen now being a GM complex (from Ford roots), or big box stores in many communities being the same so there is little community identity, or kids no longer walk to school as they are dropped off and picked up.

Mentioning how porches used to be useful or how balconies need to be more than six feet in depth is not going to attain the kind of turn around we need. How about cities with huge complexes void of automobile traffic or just communities of a score of homes not needing a driveway to each residence? What would they look like? What needs to drive their development? Kunstler does note that developers need/could be the driving force to overcome restrictive requirements. For instance in Calgary they overcame the requirement to have to provide parking for a downtown complex (as people downtown didn't need cars) reducing the construction costs and thus reducing the rents.

Things could be better but how do we get out of the faulty cycle of vehicular obsession? The bonus would be less CO2 emissions.

[Elizabeth Dorr · Rating 3 out of 5]

it insists upon itself

[Zach Shulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I don’t think we will be able to have much of a civilization in the future unless we build proper places in which to dwell… In the meantime, the standard of living in the United States is apt to decline sharply, and as it does the probability of political trouble will rise… Decent housing is already beyond the reach of many ‘average’ families and individuals, and unless we change the rules of building, the situation will get worse.

Imagine the resentment this will breed. Some talented mob-master may arise among us, promising the American people that he can bring back the good old days.”

[Bryan Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Things you might hate after reading this book: automobiles, parking lots, garage doors, flat roofs, building codes (the ones that don’t make sense), zoning laws (some but not all), and tourist attractions. Kunstler makes a compelling argument about how towns have lost their relationship with individuals due to the automobile replacing walking as a primary mode of transportation. This has allowed for the spreading out of individuals, which can be seen as negative as we lose pristine land to development and fill our environment with toxic waste from cars and corporate expansion. That is just at the surface level, but he dives deeper into issues that are behind the factors of these changes and how to address them. His history of architecture and change of style overtime (dry at times but once you get through it, it will all make sense in the end) is interesting and explains the different styles that we see today, why they developed, the shift from wood to brick and stone as a building material, and how this factor into the aspect of a “no-place,” which is probably one the most interesting geographical discussions ever. Read up on the idea of a no-place as it is absolutely fascinating.

Kunstler hits on various socio-cultural and human geography aspects. The first being this idea of separation that results in cycles. This separation is caused by the spreading out of individuals who decided to leave areas that then become low-income housing areas; areas now faced with challenges of redevelopment and revitalization in an attempt to bring back those who have left for the suburbs (see his Three Cities chapter and the section on Detroit, Michigan). Most cities are trying some aspect of mixed incoming housing (Nashville, TN being an example in the news recently) and wait to see the results.

The second being the idea that the car has become so prevalent in American society that those who are seen walking the streets today are stereotyped as poor or must be “up to no good.” He does not dwell on this point, but I think it is important to recognize the shift made as we went from walking as the primary form of transportation to cars, and how that impacts our thinking of other individuals.

Finally, he repeatedly mentions that, “...commonly, the experts do not live in the communities they are paid to advise.” This issue remains a big topic of discussion as communities going through post-industrial redevelopment are advised by outside corporations that do not take the time to understand the communities in which they advise and therefore the impact projects may have on these communities. Bottom-up redevelopment still struggles to prevail in a lot of places.

My main criticism of this book is that he provides a lot of examples of places that have had success in pedestrian-friendly development, however, those are the shortest sections. A lot has changed since the book was published so more could be written today, but I wish the section praising Portland, Oregon for its developmental success was just as long as the section critical of Los Angeles. What I enjoy most about Kunstler’s writing is his sarcasm, which will literally have you laughing. He is absolutely biased (what author isn’t) and has a clear agenda here, but regardless of “tone,” he presents facts while appropriately displaying his opinions.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kunstler:

'Born in 1948, I have lived my entire life in America's high imperial moment. During this epoch of stupendous wealth and power, we have managed to ruin our greatest cities, throw away our small towns, and impose over the countryside a joyless junk habitat which we can no longer afford to support. Indulging in a fetish of commercialized individualism, we did away with the public realm, and with nothing left but our private life in our private homes and private cars, we wonder what happened to the spirit of community. We created a landscape of scary places and became a nation of scary people.'

Try to read this book and have any love for this country! Though I now have a deeper love for livable pockets like the IC.

[Gaylord Dold · Rating 4 out of 5]

Second Look Books: The geography of nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler (Simon and Schuster, New York 1993)

The great modern classic, “The geography of nowhere,” by James Howard Kunstler, describes the American predicament of having nowhere to go, at least nowhere to go that looks any different than any place else. Everyplace (and any place, and anyplace) has, in this country, been built mostly since World War II, a “tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities and ravaged countryside that is not simply an expression of our economic predicament, but in large part a cause.” Underlying this predicament is the Automobile, the corporations who manufacture it, the people who rely on it, the politicians who make special provision for it in the laws. Beyond that are the city councils and state legislatures that zone, tax and legislate to give primacy to the Automobile. What more perfect expression of the primacy of the Automobile than Suburbia—that bland, visionless, pathless, sidewalk-less, porch-less, soulless wasteland? Front and center—the TV, the huge three-car garage, the cul-de-sac given some English foxhunt manqué name.

Like most people my age (70), I fell in love with cars early on. Getting one’s first car meant freedom, defined as speed and absence—not being chained to responsibility, parental control and the grid of eyeballs inspecting one’s every move. As a kid, my town was a fantasyland of brick streets over which huge elm trees created tunnels of shadow and shade; massive and mysterious Drive-in theaters where couples went to neck, lively downtowns full of kids “dragging” to be seen and see, hundreds of wiseacres, cheerleaders, nerds, hoods, jocks and wannabees, some with their own cars, others (like me), with daddy’s. There was, actually, someplace to go.

No book explains better how this all came to be than Kunstler’s. In it he argues that the great suburban build out is “over” and that it has been a disaster for our civilization and we “shall have to live with its consequences for a long time.” The spread-out cities, vast suburban and now ex-urban tracts composed of curvilinear streets lined by faceless cheap housing, malls and parking lots, has “bankrupted” us both personally and at every level of government. A further consequence, Kunstler argues, is that “two generations have grown up and matured in America without experiencing what it is like to live in a human habitat of quality.” Slowly but surely being lost are whole bodies of knowledge and sets of skills that took centuries to develop and were “tossed in the garbage”, chief among them a culture of Architecture lost to Modernism and its dogmas. Also lost was the culture of town planning, early on in the modern era handed to lawyers and bureaucrats dedicated to the automobile, the highway and commercial real estate, and lately lost to the burden of suburban born and bred “conservatives” whose ideologies do not include aesthetic insight.

We all now live in what Henry Miller early on called “the air-conditioned nightmare”, though even Miller, a genius with antennae for the truth, probably didn’t foresee the full implications of the destruction of our built and natural environment.

It is worth quoting at length Kunstler’s concluding observations:

“But let’s assume that we now face the future with better intentions. The coming decades are still bound to be difficult. We will have to replace our destructive economy of mindless expansion with one that consciously respects earthly limits and human scale…We’ll have to give up our fetish for extreme individualism and rediscover public life. In doing so, we will surely rediscover public manners and some notion of the common good.

We will have to downscale our gigantic enterprises and institutions—corporations, governments, banks, schools, hospitals, markets, farms—and learn to live locally, hence responsibly. We will have to drive less and create decent public transportation that people want to use. Will have to produce less garbage (including pollution) and consume less fossil fuel. We will have to reacquire the lost art of civic planning and redesign our rules for building.

There is a reason that human beings long for a sense of permanence. This longing is not limited to children, for it touches the profoundest aspects of our existence: that life is short, fraught with uncertainty and sometimes tragic. We know not where we come from, still less where we are going, and to keep from going crazy while we are here, we want to feel that we truly belong to a specific part of the world.”

Amen, brothers and sisters.

[Garrett]

Oh boy. I was really enjoying this(and did). But about 200 pages in I googled the author and did not expect to see what I saw in his Substack. Note that this book was written in 1993, and most of what I read was around 2020 to now.

He says that the covid vaccine will cause "instant cancer".

Says that Donald Trump is the closest thing to Jesus Christ that this country has ever seen.

Predicts that the government will turn off the heat of anyone who does not take the vaccine.

He writes Joe Biden as "Joe Biden" everytime(with the quotes?)

Says that the US goaded Russia into invading Ukraine and calls it the "US war against Russia" often

Believes that "Joe Biden"(okay kinda fun) gets a call from Obama every morning telling him what to do.

Says that George Soros didn't even have to pay a dime for the LA fires (I went and read some very recent posts.)



You can get the thesis and ideas that this book gives from a different source because I feel like Mr. Kunstler has gone a bit off the deep end since the writing of this.

[Louis G · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don’t be spoiled by his realistic lense that can be seen as pessimism, he is hopeful and spells out the wrongs in our society because he among few educated in his field is privileged enough to see them. To discuss this book to others is to seem a downer, when you are arguably not so. This book challenges every bit of the system that we are born into, from accepting incompetent design as the norm, to letting ugly buildings be “beautiful, to letting highways dictate our travel: an imposed system made by a few rich people with an American rugged, individualistic, self profiting, private enterprising, consumer mindset. So don’t let this book spoil your view of society, consider it a privilege to see the issues, and be inspired by it to make anew, and to tell others that there are possibilities, and that sometimes you have to be aware of the bad in it all first, to understand solutions.

At the end of the day; prescriptive zoning rather than proscriptive zoning.

A great read, enlightening, and a reminder of the times that we have so muhc that is beautiful, and to care for our urban centres is to care for the environment, and each-other.

[CHAD BOSEL · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book, lots and lots of highlights! Kunstler does an excellent job of teeing up the modern problem of car-centered places, then gives brief histories on how we got here, and real place examples of good human centered design (Savannah, GA), good transit (Portland, OR) and the bad (Detroit and LA) that will have very different paths to ‘fix’ the sprawling suburbs model we’ve accepted must continue without considering if it’s actually good for towns and communities. He weaves in history, explanation, and enjoyable commentary all while constantly reminding the reader that other countries and communities have chosen to not succumb to the suburban 6 lane strip-mall model.

He does a great job of describing general ideas about architecture and systems of places working together while giving specifics that any non-architect nerd has felt but lacked the vocabulary to put their finger on.

I have a list of places I’d like to visit and see these examples firsthand, and find myself noticing and asking more from the places I spend my time. Highly recommend the read.

[Amy Hansen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was very entertaining, and had a lot of interesting historical vignettes on architecture and city planning. The binding thesis of the book is his curmudgeonly distain for cars, and he seems to think this has absolute explanatory power for all social ills. This is obviously not true, but definitely is a big part of what made the book so entertaining. Also, this was published in the early/mid 90s, so there was no what we call “technology” to complain about, which also adds to the interest.

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Should be required reading for any urban planning or architecture student.

[Eva · Rating 3 out of 5]

ronald reagan always at the scene of the crime

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is place?

I ask myself that often, because it's something I notice and can never nail down. It's always been easiest to notice a vacuum of place, normally when I have to toddle off to a Target in the Big-Box shantytown on the periphery of a city.

"Why do people like this? It's all the same."

Next to the Target is a Costco which neighbors a Best Buy that shares a parking lot with a Jiffy Lube and Toys 'R Us. If you're hungry, your choices are fast food, la-di-da fast food (Panera), or a sit-down restaurant that's weirdly expensive ($15.25 for chicken marsala at Olive Garden! It's not that Olive Garden sucks, it's that fifteen bucks is way too much to pay for something that came pre-made in a Sysco catalog).

Every town in America seemingly has this district, and that is weird. I personally find it repellent, ugly, and damn inconvenient ("You mean nobody installed a sidewalk for the half-mile journey between stores!?") I didn't always hate it, but the more I live in a city with unique food, shops, and scenery, the more I loathe the trek to the concrete flatlands of chain stores.

James Kunstler hates it too, and in far less kind terms. His book is angry and bitter at the unwalkable world we've built in the name of the automobile, and yearns for locality and the stability it brings to a town. Besides it being a labor of love for a disappearing world (and perhaps more so a screed against the ugly landscape in its place), he also examines the zoning laws that often mandate acres of parking, and how those statutes lack nuance for the community they serve. Zoning laws are often imported whole hog from other suburban developments, which is why each suburb and WalMart is nigh identical.

I knew we lived in a world of carefully measured easements and borders, but I didn't appreciate how restrictive those are, and how that prevents a close-knit community. Houses must be x feet from the sidewalk (thus you have no need for a porch and cannot talk to neighbors on the street). Parking must be available in front of the building (meaning no storefronts that open to the sidewalk). Land may only be sold in x acre parcels (which minces farmland while salting the earth for a small business owner). They're all small things with good intentions, but the end result is a world that is only accessible by automobile.

I realize that much of this is personal taste, and I'm fighting forces much larger than myself (which may well be the theme of the book). A lot of people love shopping at Macy's and eating their Subway sandwiches. That's fine, even if my last trip to Subway tasted like onion and lukewarm mayonaise (never again). The more I read, the more I'm learning that the American identity is one of self-reliance and utter independence. GoN notes that the American household is a pretend manor house devoted to the production of comfort. This house is isolated from others so we can have our space and back yards, and we drive alone in our cars to our offices, which are far away from home, which is far from the places we shop. It's dualism, but of the daily functions of life.

This book is educational, but it is not at all objective. It's one man who is upset at the vast nothings we build because we lack creativity or foresight for better. I agree with him, so I liked it, despite its heavy-handedness. If you enjoy the mall, you might not take kindly to his labeling of such as "ugly". Aesthetics play strongly in Kunstler's theology of space, and these rules are not always well defined. But he does make a call for a definite urban plan, and presents examples of successes, rare as they may be.

This is not a set of instructions for life in the future. It's pessimistic. It has none of the save-the-world glamor of a TED talk. But it is achingly honest and human.

I came for the cranky man yelling, but I stayed to learn why the landscape is shaped as such.

[Anna Bouchard · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I am concerned because I don't think we will be able to have much of a civilization in the future unless we build proper places in which to dwell. And it seems unlikely that we will move to do this anytime soon in a conscious and systematic way. Sooner or later, absolute necessity will compel us to give up our present habits, but by then the cost of rebuilding may be more than we can bear. In the meantime, the standard of living in the United States is apt to decline sharply, and as it does the probability of political trouble will rise. It may become too expensive for ever-broader people to own and operate cars. Decent housing is already beyond the reach of many 'average' families and individuals, and unless we change the rules of building, the situation will get worse. Imagine the resentment this will breed. Some talented mob-master may arise among us, promising the American people that he can bring back the good old days—if only we have the guts to invade some region with deep oil reserves." (1993)

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prince Charles accused them of being artless, mediocre and contemptuous of public opinion. The old joke was that they had inflicted more damage on London than the Luftwaffe, but it wasn’t funny and nobody was laughing.

‘They’ are the post-war urban planners and ‘they’ have a lot to answer for. But the bumbling British versions are as nothing compared to American counterparts reinforced by ludicrous zoning restrictions and lunatic laws.

It’s why the simplest of tasks here almost always require a journey by car. It’s why strip malls brutalize the landscape, appalling ‘architecture’ abounds and attempts to escape become an engine of urban sprawl.

Try buying a loaf in the suburbs, or looking for a corner shop that sells fresh fruit and veg. Honestly, don’t bother. It’s a fool’s errand. The closest you’ll get is non-food at the nearest gas station.

More than 20 years ago author James Howard Kunstler poured his rage onto the page about the state of America’s “crudscape” and in the intervening years not much has changed.

His withering invective is a delight to read. He’s beyond grumpy. This is a crimson-faced man ranting in foam-flecked, spittle-spraying fury as he pours contempt onto anyone and everyone who has contributed to the monstrous blight

Here’s a sample: “Eighty per cent of everything built in America has been built in the last 50 years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy and spiritually degrading – the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin-village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the “gourmet mansardic” junk-food joints, the Orwellian office “parks” featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call “growth”.

It wouldn’t be much of a book if it was just a rant, though. Kunstler takes a scholarly stroll through 400 years of New World development, points out features of special interest, changes that could, and should, be made and makes a delightful, spiteful, opinionated companion along the way.

As he explains, the rise and demise of America’s man-made landscape has all the usual venal underpinnings you’d expect, but the book also includes some of the well-meant but subsequently disastrous efforts to create idyllic surroundings.

As far back as the 1950s economist JK Galbraith was suggesting that the US had become a nation that tolerated “private affluence and public squalor” and there are echoes of this throughout Kunstler’s assessment.

Civic pride has been supplanted, individual rights have trumped wider public benefits and coherent communities have been ghettoized by wealth apartheid.

Kunstler reserves most of his bile for the effects the car has wrought on everyday life and the landscape, but there’s plenty left for the automobile’s “master builder,” Robert Moses, who favored the car over public transit at every opportunity.

When he wrote the book in 1994, Kunstler thought rising gas prices and environmental concerns would force the US to rethink its ideas about urban planning and community. Not so. Fracking will keep the wheels turning for a long while yet. And while our heads are buried in the tar sands the temperature keeps on rising.

[Bruno Romano · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a critical story of how the American landscape went from age-old agreements between city and country, agreeable walkways, and shared public spaces built on a people-size scale, to a modern auto-suburban wasteland nation, devoid of life, humanity, civic beauty, mysteries and cozy shadows on crooked streets.

The theme is not new. A bunch of history is told in it, and Kunstler will attempt to explain how this came to be. The historical argument is: America before industries was nice, although, because of the independence war, property ownership to Americans always meant freedom and capital gain, not stewardship. When the industries come, mass scale, workers, pollution and slums set in, which creates a “yearn to escape” the city. This happened in the XIX century, the age of romanticism. Get all that together, and you have the idea of suburbs: close to nature, away from city.

So this is the American paradox: suburbs are not towns, but they try to look like they are. They depend entirely on the cities from which their residents are fleeing. So, on a Monday morning, suburbs are emptied when people go to the city to work, and they become wastelands (the same happens in the city when everyone goes back home). Suburbs are, in a way, a fake – lovely houses that look like a home in an awesome place, but are detached from a community or a strong public space, and are repeated one house after the other, in tedious, monotonous, fragmented, identical and scary repetitions. They are, of course, only possible because cars enabled enormous gains of mobility, which turned America into a constant mobility nation. In the end, urban planners were given the functional task to make all that work, and they invented zoning codes. Hence you have ultra-large asphalt streets in suburbs, wastelands of empty parking lots, constructions with abysmal space between them, billboards, highways, gas stations and car dealers everywhere and so on. When everything is mobility, everyplace becomes noplace.

This story is told in a quite friendly way, but this does not account for the book’s most interesting and controversial moments. This moments are, of course, Kunstler judgments on this situation. It’s important to point that, however much history is put in it, the discussion on how bad American landscape actually is always falls often short on supposedly self-evident truths. I agree with most of them – in fact, they changed my whole way to see cities – but I don’t know if you would. Kunstler’s critic is very subjective and personal – not technical or philosophical. So American cities are “scary”, endless avenues with car dealers decorated with colorful flags and billboards are “cartoonish”, suburbs where people walk two or three hours without seeing anyone are “inhuman” – but is this all objectively true, or he’s just a nostalgic?

There is no aesthetical argument to prove that this criticism is objective reality and not nostalgia. Also, no discussion is made to prove that, with industries and oil, America could ever have developed in another direction. You won’t get those two questions answered in this book. So, if you've never felt anything odd in American landscape, or you’re not already conservative regarding your aesthetic judgment, I recommend you not pick the book. If you have one or both of these qualifications, you should read it, and you’ll see it as a very powerful and enriching book.