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read in June, 2008
Charley said:
"I've been stumped for a category for this book ... it's not journalism, not architectural criticism, only partially travelogue and fitfully humor ... but closer to sermon, a really entertaining sermon, with flashes of yearning, learning, and flat-out...more
I've been stumped for a category for this book ... it's not journalism, not architectural criticism, only partially travelogue and fitfully humor ... but closer to sermon, a really entertaining sermon, with flashes of yearning, learning, and flat-out rant. I've settled on prophecy.
As a prophet, Kunstler makes sense. Not just on a superficial level, though when he writes about how the skyrocketing oil prices (of the '70s, mind you; this book is 15 years old) are about to cause the implosion of suburbia, he's writing no more than what you read on the front page of today's New York Times. He saw it and got it right. Also his visceral reaction to ugly buildings, to pompous architects of our unuseful and unlovely cityscape, to highway scars and stupid civic planning. It's a "Howl" that still works, because much of our built landscape is still hideous, and will remain so for many lifetimes. I live in a city and state where the horrors he describes are starting to retreat, but "Geography of Nowhere" could do us a great service by making sure the retreat continues, and still faster. I don't hold it against him that he never heard of the "new urbanism" and never saw transit hubs, multi-use dwellings, successful downtown core revitalizations, carpool lanes, green buildings, urban infill, and (most significantly) the Internet come to pass. Jeremiah never saw Zion, either.
Two things in this book are harder to take. One, a reflexive anti-suburb, anti-middle-class snobbery that keeps Kunstler from seeing the vast majority of his fellow citizens as having desires and values every bit as meaningful as his own -- and of having needs different from, but not inferior to, his. Suburbs grew because people hated crime, overcrowding, filth, lightless dwellings and stunted horizons in the established cities (and what made those cities sacred? Should everyone feel guilty because Detroit died, or did Detroit lose its reason for existing?). Wanting more room in a healthier environment is not only universal but commendable. It's fatuous, it's adolescent, to whine about "the suburbs" -- they are, after all, cities themselves, just newer and in many cases more justifiable cities than the ones from which they sprang. If the automobile created most of them, many exist for their own sakes now. They have both the jobs and the homes -- the economic raison d'etre that Kunstler identifies as crucial to the life of a community. Take away one's prejudice for certain traditional patterns of urban life, and you realize that anti-suburb bias is, like the endlessly unspooling freeway of mid-century, an outdated idea.
The other problem is a lack of ideas. Again, if Kunstler is a prophet, these aren't serious sins. It's a prophet's job to goad and to warn, not to rewrite the building code. But in a crucial way he can't see the city for the buildings. It's too easy to mock flaking vinyl siding in a dead Northeastern mill town, to shake a fist at the lit-all-night convenience store that ruined the harmony of a moribund Main Street. That vinyl siding didn't kill the town -- economic obsolescence did. Mourn the village if you want, but dreaming of long-gone grand hotels and bandstands and furniture workshops won't bring it back to life, or bring its lifeblood back from India, China, or wherever it's flowed. A prophet really committed to his message would need to say that yea, and verily, that genteel way of life is gone and not to be retrieved by a few deep porches or walkable sidewalks. I like Frank Capra, too. But this isn't 1946.
And occasionally a sneer gets in the way of fact. Kunstler is miffed that Woodstock, Vermont, though picture-perfect, is a "fake" burg because it lives off tourism. Someone should point out to him that tourism is a real economy, too, just like the water-driven industries and barge transshipping, manufacture (not exactly clean in those halcyon 1920s, but never mind), mining and milling (oh yes, quite traditional occupations of the vanished small town, and also quite destructive), and small farming (often inefficient and a very poor living)of the places he remembers. It's an exchange of goods and services for money, i.e., an economy. In fact, tourism can be a very good economy because of its power to preserve scenery and buildings, clean air, and public peace. But Kunstler is too busy frowning at the stereotypical, pale "middle class" souvenir shoppers, in their shiny new Jeeps (today he'd say Hummers), to notice that Woodstock, Vermont, has pretty much got it made.
The author plays reporter by parachuting into Disney World and Atlantic City, but the less said about these feints the better. These are second-rate Rolling Stone articles. Could have been closer to first-rate if he'd explored more of what Disney wanted to do with EPCOT and did to in Celebration, Fla., and might have found something of genuine interest to readers of this book. He doesn't get past Main Street USA, other than noting that it seems to be Disney visitors' favorite spot. He gets a cynical riff out of this. He harpoons a few more white, unsophisticated suburbanites. Kunstler instead could have seen in Main Street USA the germ of the residential-over-retail developments clustering around transit nodes in today's big cities. Maybe Walt was a bit more practical about the past than Kunstler understands. If you're going to take on Disney, you should at least get back the price of admission.
I miss streetcars and civic identity, too. I wish every home were a craftsman bungalow or a trim midrise, that all the street trees met in the middle, and that my job was a brisk stroll down the lane. (I also love googie roadside architecture, which Kunstler loathes, presumably out of dislike for civic whimsy.) But it's not that way, and in most of the country never was -- and even where it was, it was highly unlikely to last. Mill towns, and barge-canal towns, and cities where the factories lost their reason to survive decades ago, will need more than porches and friendly shop windows to bring themselves back to life. I don't think Kunstler lifted himself far enough out his nostalgia, his sorrow and his prophecy to lead the way forward out of the geography of nowhere.
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