The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-made Landscape

Written by James Howard Kunstler

Narrated by Al Kessel

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."



The Geography of Nowhere has become a touchstone work in the two decades since its initial publication, its incisive commentary giving language to the feeling of millions of Americans that our nation's suburban environments were ceasing to be credible human habitats. Since that time, the work has inspired city planners, architects, legislators, designers and citizens everywhere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Oct 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781515942825

James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler is a renowned cultural critic and author of many acclaimed books, including the bestselling works of nonfiction The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere and his series of fictional depictions of the post-oil American future, World Made by Hand and its three sequels. He has been a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine and Op-Ed page, where he wrote on environmental and economic issues, and his work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Metropolis, Rolling Stone, and Playboy, among other publications. He lives in Washington County, upstate New York. His work may be found at Kunstler.com.

Reviews for The Geography of Nowhere

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

America's evolution—or devolution—from distinct communities to a place where everywhere is similar to nowhere in particular. An original examination of place sociology during the latter half of the 20th century.

[lauriebrown54 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This very interesting book looks at city planning and architecture, and how they have both failed to produce cities that people actually want to live in, and that are sustainable over the long run. He hates suburbs and shopping malls and big box stores; most of all, he hates privately owned automobiles. He likes small towns. He likes mixed use areas. He likes public transit.

I agree with him on almost all these things. Kids in suburbs are kind of trapped with no place to go unless mom drives them. There is no corner store or movie theater a few blocks away they can walk to. If you need a carton of milk when you live in one of those developments, you have to get in the car and drive to the nearest shopping center, which sits in a sea of parking spots. Because stuff is so spread out, public transportation won’t pay for itself, and no real community is built between people.

Modern zoning doesn’t allow mixed use- there are no apartments over little stores so people can live close to a job. There are no small factories in between eating places and stores. When faced with undeveloped or farm land, planners think to preserve the rural feeling by making building plots of 5 or 10 acre minimum, but this doesn’t work. It’s really hard for a farmer to keep using that 5 or 10 acres when it’s fenced off from other plots, and is bisected by a driveway, and has a house in the middle with a lawn and garden. We face that where I live; owners want their 5 acre lots hayed but farmers find the odd shaped plots that are left after people build too difficult to maneuver cutting and baling equipment in. It’s green space, but it’s not feeding anyone anymore. And it’s not green space that the public can use, either.

Written more than 20 years ago, Kunstler’s observations are still valid. Nothing has changed other than that we’re even closer to running out of fossil fuels and urban slums are getting bigger. Municipal buildings and shopping areas are still ugly. More suburban developments have been built. More big box stores have run small business out. The problem with the book are two things: one, the author presents few solutions although he does show a few; and, two, he’s a bloody snob. He puts down the majority of the population as not having any taste or class; he makes statements about the poor that make me, a poor person all my life, wish I could have a few harsh words with him. But despite these things, I feel his book should be required reading for anyone going into architecture, city planning, or being a small town/county politician. What he points out should be obvious, but people just don’t see it because they are so used to it. There *are* options to the way we live today.

[randcraw-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Terrific read. Kunstler writes very well and pulls no punches. This was the best book I've read in years and an excellent invitation to delving into the tradeoffs in both architecture and the public spaces where it lives.

[harrymacdonald · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This Author gets very high marks for his politics and vision on this important subject, but loses points for his tendency to belabour the obvious. This is a work which, paradoxically, I would like all my friends to read -- and then put aside forever in favout of further, more sophisticated studies.

[sallysvenson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An old (1993) but still important book decrying our suburban mall culture and the consequent loss of community, and advocating for new thinking about zoning and land-use laws.

[devil_llama · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The author presents a picture of the urban landscape as a homogenous, unchanging blur, with cities running into each other and virtually unrecognizable. I think this is a bit of a stretch, though he does make a good case that there has been a standardization of the landscape occurring over the past half century. Mostly, he just takes his thesis too far.

[carrieprice78 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I do believe that James Howard Kunstler may be a bit of an alarmist, but one cannot deny that he brings up very thoughtful points in this book. It made me observe my world a little differently, from the buildings I see every day to the infrastructure on which I rely, to my complete inability (and everyone else's as well) to do without an automobile in this crazy, silly little world we call ours.

Of course, there are many people to blame for this mess we've created, most of them long dead, and therefore excused from punishment. On the other hand, the mess just tumbles along in the name of profit and growth.

I was assigned chapters from this book for a college course on Cities and Suburbs. I've always meant to read it in entirety and I'm glad I did. I remember reading an article of Kunstler's (an excerpt from a book, actually) from The Long Emergency, which is no less uplifting.

If only we could reverse time's hand by about 200 years, perhaps we'd have an entirely different place to observe. Then again, maybe not.

"Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of a cancer cell." - Edward Abbey

[jckurth · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book changed my opinion of cities. A must-read

[mrminjares · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A surprisingly dense book that reviews the history of American architecture and town planning in an attempt to explain how our cities were transformed from people-centric to car-centric places. Kuntsler is a very smooth and articulate writer with a witty style I like. He shows amazing predictive ability in this book, written in 1993. He calls out the importance of global warming, the death of Detroit and GM, and the invasion of countries to secure our supply of petroleum. I learned a lot of new and interesting facts in this bookr. For example, Henry Ford built a small village near Detroit and populated it with the old homes of famous inventors like the Wright Brothers and Thomas Edison in an attempt to re-create the small town experience that his automobiles were in the process of destroying. Walt Disney did the same with Disneyland. I also learned about the Bauhaus movement, which was an attempt to simplify architecture, but instead served to strip the life and style out of American buildings. There is lots to chew on in this book, and I will certainly be reminded of Kuntsler's perspective every time I see a parking lot.

[grovesteen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The author belabors his point a little but this was a worthwhile read overall. It opened my mind to some things I had never thought about before, namely, how the car has completely changed the landscape of our country and ruined our sense of community because of the fact that towns are not designed for people, but for cars. This book should be referred to if ever I need to make a decision about moving to another city.

[nolongeratease_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

First of all, it's important to note that Kunstler's book is best characterized as a polemic and should be read as such. It's angry, sarcastic, and spiteful but in a way that manages to retain a sense of humor and a sense of the tragic.

The reason it's important to view the Geography of Nowhere as a polemic is this: many of Kunstler's points are not particularly well argued for. That's not to say there isn't interesting and insightful commentary within the book, but rather that most of the broader claims of the book presuppose a shared aesthetic and economic sensibility between author and reader. If you're not already inclined towards sheer disgust at the sight of a housing development, Kunstler is not going to convince you that you ought to be. If you are so adamant about property rights that you are willing to sacrifice every vestige of community in order to allow the building of anything anywhere, you'll be similarly unconvinced.

However, for those who are already a bit sickened and perplexed by the Sprawlscape affecting our nation Kunstler offers an explanation and a diagnosis. His first question is "How did we end up here?"

He begins with the Massachusetts Bay Colony in order to answer this question, and from there gives us a brief survey of the building and architectural trends that have developed since. What emerges is this: although the suburbs we are now familiar with first began to develop alongside railway and trolley lines, it was not until government, business, and the planning industry combined forces after WW2 that things really took a turn for the worst.

This is a familiar narrative and using it Kunstler goes on the describe the process by which we came to create a society and an economy scaled for cars rather than humans. I don't think there is anything particularity objectionable about the broad narrative, even if its become hackneyed.

What I found most interesting were some of his specific cases in which zoning laws literally forced asinine construction. This is something I was mildly aware of, but the examples Kunstler cites really helped to bring the point home. By creating nearly uniform sets of zoning regulations for communities big and small, urban and rural we've chosen convenience and perceived safety over any sort of contact with reality.

I do worry a bit about the some of Kunstler's broad conclusions. For example, it's just not obvious to me that living in one dimensional office park to mall to tract home communities is necessarily BADfor us. It's a lifestyle I find terribly unappealing, but I wonder whether or not it's really as psychologically damaging as Kunstler would have us believe. Are all the dramatics about "spiritual suffocation" and lives of "quiet desperation" any more true of today's gated communities than the similar but probably false claims made about the residents of Winesburg, Ohio? For my part, I'm loathe to paint my cultural and aesthetic adversaries as folks that subconsciously desire to trade in their lives for mine.

I also wonder how Kunstler might justify the claims he makes about disengagement from civic activities as a direct result of suburbanization. What he says fits all my preconceptions, but he doesn't bring any hard data to the table when he makes such claims.

Finally, all criticism aside, for a book written in the early 90s The Geography of Nowhere is remarkably prescient. Kunstler is flat out correct that we cannot keep building communities focused around cars, because it won't be long before we literally cannot power the cars in an effective or affordable manner. Tying up our property and our economy at large with a fleeting car culture is perhaps the biggest mistake in recent American history. In order to get ourselves out of this mess we're going to have to fundamentally revise our lifestyles and large parts of our economy. I can't help but think that the coming metamorphosis will be a painful process.

[jaygheiser · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating book. Got the lead to it from the Crunchy Cons book. Essential concept is that people form no bonds to their community when its houses and layout are unloveable. Zoning laws are counterproductive. We are perversely creating living spaces that do not support the community we crave. People form loyalty to their job, and move with it, because their community is unlovable, providing no significant reason to stay.

[yapete · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If you have been wondering why every major intersection in every American - suburb looks the same and why there always more strip-malls - just when you think there were already enough, this is the book for you. A history of how the American (sub-)urban landscape has become as bad as it is. Highly recommended.

[rakerman_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an informative and entertaining book about the disaster that has been modernism and urban planning, driving the construction of unlivable urban spaces, driving the citizens out to the suburbs, where their lives are all about... driving.

As is often typical of American books, it looks primarily within the US, with a section on how good urban planning was "rediscovered" in dusty tomes. It would seem to me that surely they could have looked (and surely they must have?) at living European models, but this aspect receives little attention. In fairness a lot of the action on the Eurocity rejuvenation front has been post-2000, and this book is from 1993. Nevertheless, Europeans have been building and living in functional cities for thousands of years, while Americans have been constructing large cities for a fraction of that time, generously a hundred and fifty years. Surely a region with 20 times the city-building experience deserves a fair bit of attention?

I also think Kunstler was a bit too credulous about the promise of "new urbanism", but again in fairness it was one of the few hopeful models he had to look to.

Throughout the book he talks about the importance of place, and how our relationship to our built environment shapes our entire civilisation.

Overall a prescient and compelling book about how the US ended up massively allocating funds to build cheap, ugly buildings and highways as part of a suburban society that depends on everyone driving everywhere in cars fueled by cheap gas... and the doom that is coming due to peak oil making this lifestyle totally unsustainable.

[derekstaff · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very well written critique of the current conventional settlement patterns (ie, suburbanization and sprawl). Kunstler makes a argument about the social problems sprawl spawns. Kunstler's writing is a bit harsh, and relies a little too much on anecdotal data (such as his use of Disneyland's Main Street U.S.A. as evidence), but the overall picture is rather compelling. He also points out potential alternatives to suburbanization and modern alternatives already in practice (such as the town of Seaside Florida).

[montano_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of my favorite books. Mr.Kunstler reminds me of the cranky, old guy on your block who yells at kids to get off his lawn but that doesn't mean he's wrong about how crappy modern architecture is. His observation of "parking lagoons" haunts me to this day. A very accessible book on urbanism, architecture and its effects on us.

[creativreaders · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've read some of his other books; in addition to being a prescient writer, he succinctly captured thoughts and feelings I'd been ruminating on for years but somehow couldn't express. Looking forward to reading his latest, and would love to see him in lecture.

[thetwods · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Driving around our country, a feeling of malaise comes over me when I pass through towns, villages and small cities. The boarded up business distracts, the dilapidated houses, they lend an air of sadness to these settings. Kunstler hits it right on the head when he blames the entire concept of suburbia and defines it to include not only the suburban tract housing and McMansions, but the "easy motoring" highways clogged with their strip malls and fast food joints. Everywhere in America now looks like everywhere else in America. After reading this, I've been convinced that our living arrangement needs to change, not just for sanity and aesthetics, but to survive a post-oil economy.

[eduscapes · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is both serious and hilarious while tracing the evolution of the American city and suburb.