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

by James Howard Kunstler

The original title had derived from one of my favorite epigrams in the manuscript: “We built a nation of scary places and became a nation of scary people.” It was the soundest line of political analysis I ever came up with, and is more true today than ever.

Far from being a mere matter of aesthetics, suburbia represents a compound economic catastrophe, ecological debacle, political nightmare, and spiritual crisis — for a nation of people conditioned to spend their lives in places not worth caring about.

To me, it is a landscape of scary places, the geography of nowhere,

America reinvented that paradise, described so briefly and vaguely in the book of Genesis, called it Suburbia, and put it up for sale.

The suburban “developments” of today and the shopping smarm that clutters up so much of the landscape in between them, arose from the idea, rather peculiar to America, that neither the city nor the country was really a suitable place to live.

Llewellyn Park became a prototype for many of the American suburbs that

In today’s subdivisions the streets have no other official function except to funnel the cars to and fro.

modern suburban street is a bleak, inhospitable, and hazardous environment for the pedestrian.

Riverside were connected to downtown Chicago,

City Beautiful movement in America,

The place where the dream house stood—a subdivision of many other identical dream houses—was neither the country nor the city. It was noplace. If anything, it combined the worst social elements of the city and country and none of the best elements.

Americans have been living car-centered lives for so long that the collective memory of what used to make a landscape or a townscape or even a suburb humanly rewarding has nearly been erased. The culture of good place-making, like the culture of farming, or agriculture, is a body of knowledge and acquired skills. It is not bred in the bone, and if it is not transmitted from one generation to the next, it is lost.

Children are certainly the biggest losers—though the suburbs have been touted endlessly as wonderful places for them to grow up.

The least understood cost—although probably the most keenly felt—has been the sacrifice of a sense of place: the idea that people and things exist in some sort of continuity, that we belong to the world physically and chronologically, and that we know where we are.

Yet some shoppers will spend as much time as their dignity affords haunting the supermarket aisles because it is practically the only place where they can be in the public realm and engage in some purposeful activity around other live human beings.

At Harvard, J. B. Jackson was credited with founding the field of landscape studies, as distinct from, say, geography or cultural anthropology or other ways of interpreting man’s use of land.

The landscape it runs through is littered with cartoon buildings and commercial messages. We whiz by them at fifty-five miles an hour and forget them, because one convenience store looks like the next. They do not celebrate anything beyond their mechanistic ability to sell merchandise. We don’t want to remember them. We did not savor the approach and we were not rewarded upon reaching the destination, and it will be the same next time, and every time. There is little sense of having arrived anywhere, because everyplace looks like noplace in particular.

Empty parking lots are the most common little dead noplaces of the postwar streetscape. Great big noplaces are made up of many little noplaces. It’s a bad

The procession of porches along the street created a lovely mediating zone between the private world of the home and the public world of the street, further connected

The crisis of place in America is illustrated most vividly by the condition of our cities.

The crisis of place in America has led to the creation of a gigantic industry dedicated to the temporary escape from the crisis.

As well as being free of cars, of course, Disney World is also free of the bad relationships imposed upon things and people by cars. Since there are so few places of any size with this characteristic in America, the experience is understandably exhilarating.

The boat ride is also a psychological device. Making you enter the place by stages, the Disney “imagineers” emphasize the illusion of one’s taking a journey to a strange land—as

the ferryboat from the ticket gate deposits you on Main Street U.S.A., a recreation, grossly simplified, of a provincial midwestern small town circa 1910—say,

There is nothing terribly mysterious about the appeal of his Main Street U.S.A. It is a well-proportioned street full of good relationships between its components, and blessedly free of cars. The two- and three- story buildings are architecturally unified, but individually various—

The buildings along the street are designed to a five-eighths scale, the toylike appearance supposedly adding to their charm.

Through the postwar decades Americans happily allowed their towns to be destroyed. They’d flock to Disneyland at Anaheim, or later to Disney World in Florida, and walk down Main Street, and think, gee, it feels good here. Then they’d go back home and tear down half the old buildings downtown and pave them over for parking lots, throw a parade to celebrate a new K Mart opening—even when it put ten local merchants out of business—turn Elm Street into a six-lane crosstown expressway, pass zoning laws that forbade corner grocery stores in residential neighborhoods and setback rules that required every new business to locate on a one-acre lot until things became so spread out you had to drive everywhere. They’d build the new central school four miles out of town on a busy highway so that kids couldn’t walk there. They’d do every fool thing possible to destroy good existing relationships between things in their towns, and put their local economies at the mercy of distant corporations whose officers didn’t give a damn whether these towns lived or died. And then, when vacation time rolled around, they’d flock back to Disney World to feel good about America.

Woodstock was more like home ought to be than their own homes were. As a legitimate yearning for a more humane living arrangement, this went beyond nostalgia—but it tended to express itself in sentimental terms.

also the appeal of southwold.

But they all had this in common: not one included an image of a car. I asked the gallery owners what this signified and got a set of explanations ranging from “Beats me,” to “Paintings with cars don’t sell.” Yet the village of Woodstock was jam-packed with cars,

confusion that Americans feel about the entire issue of place and the abstract quality of their thinking about it. Hence the sentimentality. Everywhere in America, cars had destroyed the physical relationships between things and thereby destroyed the places themselves, and yet Americans could not conceive of life without cars.

When I asked people on the street what they liked about the place, they replied overwhelmingly, in one way or another, that they liked the town’s “old-fashioned feeling.” Urged to cite specifics, they quickly got mired in circular reasoning: They liked the buildings because they were old-fashioned, and they liked old-fashioned things because they were old and antiquey, and … It was like Greenfield Village, where nobody seemed to notice that there were no cars around. These were educated people for the most part, but they were members of a culture that had long ceased to value place except as a sales gimmick, and they had no vocabulary with which to think about it. Whatever they took from the experience of walking around Woodstock on a fine fall day was not apt to make their hometowns better places.

q - do you reader have the vocab?

Lately I am impressed by the number of educated people I meet who don’t think about these issues and their implications. They may feel that there is something vaguely wrong with their homes, their neighborhoods, their cities, the whole physical arrangement of their lives. They may quietly yearn, like homesick children, to belong somewhere, to be members of real communities. But their feelings aren’t moored to specific positive ideas about what it takes to make a good place. When I mention the things I have been writing about to my friends—middle- aged people advanced in serious careers—they say, “Huh . . . ?” as though I were describing life on another planet.

We know not where we come from, still less where we are going, and to keep from going crazy while we are here, we want to feel that we truly belong to a specific part of the world.