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In 1993, James Howard Kunstler wrote The Geography of Nowhere, a splendidly conceived non-fiction account of the "trashy and preposterous human habitat" that America has built since World War Two. In prose that recalled Tom Wolfe and Lewis Mumford, Mr. Kunstler described how terribly the nation has suffered from mistakes of policy and investment that turned cities into war zones, and smeared the countryside with featureless subdivisions, ugly strip malls, and congested highways.
Now, in Home From Nowhere, Mr. Kunstler has produced another gem. The author structured his sequel around two themes: 1) a convincing argument that ties the wreckage of communities to the erosion of American behavior, and 2) a promising architectural and community design movement, known as "New Urbanism," that offers a solution.
Such topics are not normally destined to gain a wide popular audience. Yet what distinguishes Mr. Kunstler's work is an imaginative, blustery, energetic writing style. In essence, he's invented a language to articulate the dismay that millions of Americans feel about what has happened to the places they once fondly called home.
In Mr. Kunstler's words,American cities and towns have grown "dismal," and "isolated," depleted by "junk architecture," and swollen by "suburban smarm."They are places where in the past five decades "almost nothing of enduring value got built." For millions of Americans, in cities and suburbs alike, life has become "degraded, incoherent, ugly, and meaningless."
Having built the case that United States communities leave much to be desired, Mr. Kunstler then tenders a compelling theory about American behavior.He argues that subdivisions that have no center, schools that look like "fertilizer factories," town halls that resemble "wholesale beverage warehouses," and libraries that could be "shipping containers" have produced a national "dis-ease."
When nothing in the public realm "honors or embellishes it," he says, the result is "crippled civic life," and a loss of civility. And it's no accident, he notes, that America's wrecked towns and hollowed out cities have produced guns in schools, eroded standards, and a distrustful, even surly national mood.
The solution:Redirect public investment. Dust off traditional community planning principles. Revive the architectural designs for homes, parks, and public buildings that once produced wonderful American towns and neighborhoods.
In vivid profiles, Mr. Kunstler describes how New Urbanists are building compact walkable communities, where bicycles and mass transit are regarded as essential means of transportation. New Urbanist neighbor- hoods have homes built closer to the street, on much smaller lots. Streets are narrower and connect to each other, unlike the dead end cul-de-sacs that proliferate in contemporary developments.Affordable housing is provided by a mix of home sizes and styles, and by apartments above stores and garages. These neighbor- hoods also include schools, churches, parks, stores, offices, and small businesses.
In effect, New Urbanist neighborhoods are complete communities, like the older sections of Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Ann Arbor. They contain all the "civic equipment" necessary to make a place "worth caring about."They also are the sort of thriving places that once were the norm in the United States.
"This movement, in my view, is one of the most hopeful developments on the national scene," Mr. Kunstler writes. "I share the belief of its members that if we can repair the physical fabric of our everyday world, many of the damaged and abandoned institutions of our civic life may follow into restoration."
In September, James Kunstler debuted the central ideas of Home From Nowhere in a cover essay in Atlantic magazine.The article already has prompted new interest in civic design in the business community, Congress, local governments, and citizens' groups. The reason is that Mr. Kunstler gives form to the national yearning for "an honorable dwelling place." It also confirms that no one else is writing more clearly and ardently about America's soul-numbing human habitats, and the suffering from its dreadful consequences.u |
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