Book Review: "Geography of Nowhere" and "Home from Nowhere"


On my commute lately I have been reading absolutely the most interesting books. It is the one good thing about commuting, for sure. Recently I’ve finished Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere, both by James Howard Kunstler – they were written years apart and not formally intended to be a set, but obviously treat similar issues.

For a while I have felt very torn regarding where I want to live “when I grow up,” or, haha, where M and I want to settle semi-permanently to raise a family. Coming from a very rural area I have always aspired to similar – and I think I still do, although there are merits of quasi-city living that I can certainly see and enjoy now. What I don’t think I can abide by, however, is the suburbs. Until reading these books though, I have never been able to quite articulate why!

Both of these focus on the economic repercussions of how we’ve chosen to build and expand in America post-WWII – and the ways that life is divided into places people live and work. Kunstler posits that our whole geographic way of life is dependent on a virtually unlimited supply of cheap gasoline – which we all know won’t be around forever, and that the places we’ve built to live in now are highly unsuitable for long-term community, life, and economic health.



Geography of Nowhere
The points that he really drives home in this one are: lack of respect for the public domain and its uses, and an economy founded on private automobile ownership will not endure in the future. Despite being an auto-owning, farmland-craving conservative, I very much agree with him.

When it comes to the public domain, public space, and public usefulness – Kunstler is probably accurate in saying that nothing of functional beauty has been built in the past 50 years. All the beautiful and functional civic buildings (like the Boston Public Library or the public gardens) were built prior to WWII. As suburbia has taken over, nearly everything has become privatized – everybody owns one of everything just for themselves. Hundreds of thousands of houses in suburbia come with garages, 2 cars, yards with jungle gyms, and pools. With all that at their immediate disposal, there is virtually no need for a family to seek out anything outside their immediate private realm – and therefore they have no desire to put money or effort into communal civic places. Over the decades this has led to a real decay of community fabric in many areas – cities abandoned and desolate (like our recent trip to Buffalo, for example) as people move out to the suburbs with a “me and mine” mentality.

And when it comes to private automobile ownership, the suburbs are really the worst. In groups of houses set apart, each with some parcel of land, there are no sidewalks, or the sidewalks go to nowhere, and shopping, eating, and commercial venues are not in walking distance. Life thus necessitates that each family have at least one car so that they can drive everywhere – which then necessitates that each commercial venue be surrounded by a virtual ocean of parking, which further down the line usually ends up with clogged roads. This is what I experience when going into the outer suburbs of Boston – like going to Natick, or Burlington. There is just simply not enough road space to make for pleasant passage of that volume of cars, and the virtual miles of parking that is needed to accommodate them makes the landscape ghastly and concrete. Those suburbs feel artificial, as if anything natural there was actually planted, rather than naturally occurring. Without a car, one is unable to get to these places, and with a car one is subconsciously encouraged to buy endless amounts of stuff – since you have a handy vehicle to haul everything home in and it requires very little physical hardship.

As an aside, we’ve found one of the best ways to curb needless spending at the grocery store is to walk there. It is only a ten minute walk from our house and it’s amazing how much less I buy (and I don’t even miss it later) when I’m returning on foot.

Reading this made me think of our last visit to Chicago – out in the burbs where we were visiting M’s family, there is just nothing but wide open, multi-lane, flat road – populated by thousands of cars, and large strip malls on each side. Strip mall after strip mall after strip mall. It really seems like there is nothing else to do out there than shop….and when we met up with an old friend and the jaunt of choice was walking around the mall, my suspicions were confirmed. I really do not think I’d be comfortable living in a place so thoroughly dedicated to commercialism. Minimalists, raise your hands.



Home from Nowhere

The points that Kunstler makes here are on the smaller scale – that in our quest for single use everything, our houses have become undignified buildings. Now I am no architect and I can not tell what-all is mumbo jumbo – but even I can think offhandedly of two sorts of very undignified structures that exist in the suburbs. One is the house with the large garage facing front – in many cases the garage and its blank doors put more square feet towards the street than the front of the house itself. This is not only unattractive (IMO, your mileage may vary) but I agree with the author that it is visually unwelcoming. A house that looks like its primary entrance is through the garage is a close-off, very private house – neighbors are not to be privy to the comings and goings of the family. Now I’m no peeping tom, but I do say good morning to our next door neighbors almost daily, as our open driveways are adjacent.

The other undignified suburban structure is the split level home. I always thought it ugly because it’s a boxy monstrosity – all rectangles and no triangles, things moving only horizontally and never vertically. Kunstler posits that this structure is undignified because of the horizontal windows – that vertical windows draw a house upward and make it seem standing tall. Horizontal windows subconsciously make us think of sleeping, having sex, or being dead (all relatively undignified things). Is that horse crap or real mental science? Who knows.

The other point of Home from Nowhere is that the author worries that we have become a heavily divided nation, divided by class. In the suburbs house prices are similar to those around them – clustering together people of certain income levels. You can take this one step further and you have your gated communities. The most effective and long lasting cities in the world have a mix of people in all areas – by providing different types of housing. A row of box houses in the burbs means that everyone is the same. Mixed use housing, such as a small neighborhood – will have big single family homes, small single family homes, duplexes and townhouses, and finally apartments over stores and garages where people of lower incomes can live and work. By promoting mixed use housing it helps to “de-ghetto” certain areas (because when around law abiding citizens, others will elevate themselves, and vice versa) and it will promote class diversity, rather than just the racial diversity we’re all so concerned with.

In a nation obsessed with government funding, school vouchers, and equal opportunities for everyone, I do think that restructuring our zoning laws could go a long way towards mixing up our communities and giving different types of people a fighting chance. Depsite their apparent necessity here, cars are not cheap – so living outside the cities and depending on cars has been a very effective way to segregate people by class and to make sure that certain types of people are precluded from certain types of establishments and communities. Overall this has not been effective – our taxes get sucked up to elevate the lives of people in areas that need help, and Kunstler implies that giving them money isn’t going to help them as much as it would to give them intermingled areas to live in and to show them how to live. The way we’re doing it, we’re just producing ghetto-peeps with spending money, we’re not actually promoting a class elevation to function in a working society.


If anyone has actually read all this or even read those particular books, I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts.