Trapped in a Tin Can, Going Nowhere Fast
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The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
by James Howard Kunstler
Annotation
In this "eminently relevant and important book" (Library Journal), the
author traces the evolution of America's landscape, where every place
looks like no place in particular, and where accommodating the
automobile jeopardizes the individual and the environment.
From the Publisher
Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built
since the end of World War II. This tragic landscape of highway
strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and
ravaged countryside is not simply an expression of our economic
predicament, but in large part a cause. It is the everyday environment
where most Americans live and work, and it represents a gathering
calamity whose effects we have hardly begun to measure. In The
Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler traces America's evolution
from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where
everyplace is like noplace in particular, where the city is a dead
zone and the countryside a wasteland of cars and blacktop. Now that
the great suburban build-out is over, Kunstler argues, we are stuck
with the consequences: a national living arrangement that destroys
civic life while imposing enormous social costs and economic burdens.
Kunstler explains how our present zoning laws impoverish the life of
our communities, and how all our efforts to make automobiles happy
have resulted in making human beings miserable. He shows how common
building regulations have led to a crisis in affordable housing, and
why street crime is directly related to our traditional disregard for
the public realm. Kunstler takes the reader on a historical journey to
understand how Americans came to view their landscape as a commodity
for exploitation rather than a social resource. He explains why our
towns and cities came to be wounded by the abstract dogmas of
Modernism, and reveals the paradox of a people who yearn for places
worthy of their affection, yet bend their efforts in an economic
enterprise of destruction that degrades and defaces what they most
deeply desire. Kunstler proposes sensible remedies for this American
crisis of landscape and townscape: a return to sound principles of
planning and the lost art of good place-making, an end to the tyranny
of compulsive commuting, the un
From the Critics
From Library Journal
In this spirited, irreverent critique, Kunstler spares none of the
culprits that have conspired in the name of the American Dream to turn
the U.S. landscape from a haven of the civic ideal into a nightmare of
crass commercial production and consumption. Kunstler strips the bark
off the utopian social engineering promoted by the machine-worshiping
Modern movement of Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright and
skewers the intellectual camps (e.g., Venturi) that have thrived on
making academic glory of the consumer wasteland. With the fervor of an
investigative reporter and in the vernacular of a tabloid journalist,
Kunstler exposes the insidious ``car lobby'' and gives case studies of
landscapes as diverse as Detroit, Atlantic City, and Seaside, Florida,
to illustrate both the woes and hopeful notes. The ideas in this book
are not new (Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte Jr. were bemoaning the
loss of civic life a quarter-century ago), but Kunstler gives their
case an urgent, popular voice. An eminently relevant and important
book; highly recommended.-- Thomas P.R. Nugent, New York
From The Atlantic
Mr. Kunstler believes that the automobile and suburban developers have
combined to destroy cities, countryside, and community coherence. His
diatribe against the villains is provocative and supported by examples
of misguided moves such as the abandonment of rail transport,
contrived through an alliance ofoil producers and car manufacturers,
and building codes that make certain sensible and traditional types of
construction impossible. He describes a few--a very few--examples of
recent communities designed to be working towns rather than vast and
isolated dormitories. . . . One can hardly dispute his claim that the
fossil-fuel supply will eventually be exhausted and that an oil-based
economy will be stopped dead by that event.
From Michael Romain - National Review
The atrophying of America's man-made landscape is the central concern
of this book. Despite the tepid prose style of James Howard Kunstler
and the irritating absence of an index, one turns the pages in a state
of appalled fascination. Sprawling freeways, monstrous shopping malls,
towering corporate fortresses, high-tech elevated streetcars, glaring
neon billboards, K-Mart ubiquity, inner-city dereliction--as Lancelot
'Capability' Brown, the eighteenth-century architect of the
picturesque landscape, would have concluded, there is 'great
capability of improvement here.'
my opinion:
i may not agree with all of his solutions, but kunstler's diagnosis of
he problem is spot on, and damn disconcerting. i learned a lot about
the history of american architecture and the treachery of
transportation industrialists, and enjoyed reading his basic
'architypes' (my coinage) of failed urban and suburban models,
including especially his "capitals of unreality'' like disney world
and atlantic city. at times i found his nostalgia for times of the
past a bit distracting, but overall, the subject and its handling kept
me entirely engrossed. highly recommended. (obviously)
s.w.
reviews from:
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buy it here:
http://www.epinions.com/book_mu-2381559