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Book Reviews
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Home from Nowhere
by James Howard Kunstler
(Touchstone Simon & Schuster, 1998; $14 Paperback)
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James Howard Kunstler wonderfully articulates one of the most the grievous and horribly ugly consequences of the post-war boom — suburbia, and all of its related ills such as strip malls, traffic congestion, drab architecture, and mile upon mile of parking lots. Not to mention the lack of real livable community centers designed for people.
What emerged with the onset of the automobile as the major means of transportation and commerce, he argues, was one of the ugliest and uninhabitable landscapes imaginable on the planet. Suburban sprawl, with its endless seam of highways, roads and shopping centers, grew like a cancer, eating away forests, grasslands and marshlands, leaving in its path the decimation of cheaply built, charmless domiciles with little plots of grass, exotic trees and a place to park the car.
Kunstler doesn’t mince words. He calls what most Americans know as home “the geography of nowhwere.”
His book, Home from Nowhere, is a biting indictment against a system of community building that lacks a human scale and neglects the human spirit.
Kunstler could be accused of cynicism in his critique of the suburban world in which most of us grew up were it not for his obvious passion to create something better, a village life with a strong local economy, a mixed-use commercial/residential center that encourages interaction between and diversity among its inhabitants.
“Everything we love and care about in this world,” he writes, “is subject to the tragedy of eventually being lost to us, including our very selves. The easy response to this terrible condition is to create a world full of things that are not worth caring about. That is precisely what we have done in the United States.”
Rather, in our short time upon this planet, we ought to have been creating places of beauty that celebrate skill and craft and things of the spirit that ennoble “in the face of life’s tragic nature” and lift us “close to the domain of angels.”
Our own history, celebrated in the mythos of Main Street America, offers concrete examples of more workable and people-friendly places to conduct business and socialize, says Kunstler, places that lift rather than stifle the human spirit.Yet, because in America our cities and communities gradually developed to serve the interests of industry rather than human needs, we cut ourselves off from the possibility of a more sane and sustainable lifestyle.
Kunstler, while at his best when criticizing the American Dream, points to a number of solutions and developments such as the New Urbanism, a planning movement that seeks to create vibrant, viable mixed-use communities, where it’s possible to live, shop and work within walking distance. (See the film The End of Suburbia for an exploration of these ideas; the film also features the work of Mr. Kunstler and other critics of our highly subsidized suburbia, as well as oil depletion.) He argues that we can repair the landscape with more habitable architecture and spaces, and offers examples how such spaces might be built, and of what they would consist.
Passionate in his contempt for all things bland and soulless, Kunstler could be written off as another negatron with nothing to add to the discussion of how to make a better community. His bitterness regarding the triumph of ugliness over beauty tends to overshadow the really truly valuable critique he presents.
I enjoy Kunstler immensely. He’s readable, passionate, rough and articulate.
Stacey Warde is a regular contributor to HopeDance. He can be reached at swarde805@charter.net.
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