It's no news that many Americans live in a spread-out, privatized
suburban wasteland without community or centers; that much
landscape has given way to ugly sprawl; that this condition may be
due to systematic policies on the part of government and industrial
forces; and that the automobile is the engine that has driven us
there. What novelist Kunstler (The Halloween Ball, 1987, etc.) does
here is to explore and deplore these developments. Kunstler traces,
from the nation's beginnings, the implications of changing
architecture styles; the manifestations of our extreme emphasis on
private-property rights and low regard for the public realm; and
the destruction that our car-centered life has visited on American
communities in general and certain profiled older towns and cities
in particular. His discussions of specific places - chosen to
represent such concepts as an "old industrial metropolis gone to
hell" (Detroit); "how to mess up a town" (Saratoga Springs, New
York); the "most hopeful and progressive trends in...urban
planning" (Portland, Oregon); and sinister commercial
myth-mongering that distorts small-town reality (Disney World) -
lack the original ideas, cutting analysis, and stimulating insights
that characterized last year's Variations on a Theme Park (ed.,
Michael Sorkin). But for a more popular audience, Kunstler provides
an accessible overview that's all the more interesting and
effective for his frankly expressed and all-enveloping viewpoint.
If his attachment to the small towns of the past seems an
insufficient answer to the problems of the present and future, his
depiction of those problems is on target. And the author makes a
persuasive case for convicting the private automobile of a gamut of
20th-century ills: the Great Depression; the death of the cities
and of the family farm; the trashy consumerism that has driven the
economy since the end of WW II; voodoo economics; the S&L
crisis; and global environmental degradation. An informative and
well-integrated polemic. (Kirkus Reviews)
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."
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