The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
Author
James Howard Kunstler, born 1948, an American author and social critic.[1] Published by Simon & Schuster in 1993, 303 pages in the first edition.[2] A 20th anniversary edition adds contributions from other writers on the book's influence.[1]
Description
Kunstler examines the effects of suburban sprawl, civil planning, and the automobile on American society, asking how suburbia stopped functioning as a credible human habitat and what might be done about it.[2] The account runs chronologically from the Pilgrim settlements through the modern automobile suburb, tracing a shift from a country of Main Streets and coherent communities to one where the cities are dead zones and the countryside has filled with cartoon architecture and parking lots.[3]
The argument is that the destruction of place became the economy itself rather than a side effect of it, and that the process consumed rural land and erased the older distinction between city life and country life.[4] Kunstler tallies the economic, social, and spiritual costs of car dependence, and criticizes both modernist architecture, for privileging form over human scale, and the zoning rules that made sprawl the default outcome of ordinary development decisions.[3][5]
Kunstler points to revitalization projects and traditional neighborhood developments as working counterexamples, and argues for mixed-use zoning, walkable streets, and public transportation.[5] His position is that reviving civic art and civic life is the route to a shared idea of the common good.[3]
Kunstler's critics note that his account is uniformly pessimistic about urban development. Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City argues the opposing position, that density drives innovation and raises living standards.[1]
Contents
Scary Places · American Space · Life on the Gridiron · Eden Updated · Yesterday's Tomorrow · Joyride · The Evil Empire · How to Mess Up a Town · A Place Called Home · The Loss of Community · Three Cities · Capitals of Unreality · Better Places[3]
Related Reading
- The Image of the City
- The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
- Learning from Las Vegas
- Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
- The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
- City of Quartz: Excavating the Future
- The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society
- The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles
- Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 The Geography of Nowhere Chapter Summary, Bookey.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 The Geography of Nowhere, Wikipedia.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 The Geography of Nowhere, Barnes & Noble.
- ↑ Geography Of Nowhere, Simon & Schuster.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 The Geography of Nowhere, Blinkist.
