Books › The Geography of nowhere
The Geography of nowhere
First published 1993 · 304 pages
A biting, hilarious, and deeply felt critique of the American suburban landscape and the spiritual toll of the parking lot.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like taking a cross-country road trip with a brilliantly cranky architectural critic riding shotgun. Kunstler's prose is brisk, acerbic, and relentlessly observant, transforming the mundane ugliness of strip malls and subdivisions into a profound tragedy of lost community. The mood is a potent mix of simmering indignation and nostalgic yearning for the walkable, coherent towns of the past. It is not a dry academic text; rather, it is a passionate, often hilarious polemic that moves with propulsive energy. Urbanists, history buffs, and anyone who has ever felt a creeping sense of alienation in a big-box store parking lot will devour this sharp, urgent plea for a return to civic beauty and human-scaled living.
- Mood
- indignant
- nostalgic
- provocative
- alienated
- Tone
- acerbic
- wry
- polemical
- passionate
- urgent
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- the spiritual cost of sprawl · loss of community · car-centric culture · civic decay · the built environment
- The writing
- Sharp, elegant, and frequently hilarious, driven by a biting wit and a deep aesthetic conviction.
- The arc
- Moves from a nostalgic appreciation of early American settlements through a simmering outrage at modern suburban sprawl, landing on an urgent call for civic renewal.
- Who it's for
- Urbanists, armchair sociologists, and anyone who has ever felt a vague sense of despair while sitting in traffic at a strip mall.
About the book
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."
Includes bibliographical references (p. [281]-284) and index.
Description from Open Library.
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