Book Review

Although he published eight novels and once worked as an editor at Rolling Stone, James Howard Kunstler had, until very recently, attracted precious little literary attention. Then in 1993, he burst onto the national scene with The Geography of Nowhere, a splendidly conceived non-fiction account of the "trashy and preposterous human habitat" that America had built since World War Two. In prose that recalled Tom Wolfe and Lewis Mumford, Kunstler described how terribly the nation had 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, Kunstler has returned to the subject and produced another gem. The author structured his sequel around two themes. First, he offers a convincing argument that ties the wreckage of communities to the erosion of American behavior. And second, Kunstler reports on a promising architectural and community design movement that offers a solution.

Such topics are not normally destined to gain a wide popular audience. Yet what distinguishes Kunstler's work, and what attracts his growing readership, 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 Kunstler's words, American cities and towns have grown "dismal," and "isolated," depleted by "junk architecture," and swollen by "suburban smarn." They are places where over 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 leaves much to be desired, Kunstler then tenders a compelling theory about American behavior. He convincingly argues that subdivisions that have no center, schools that look like "fertilizer factories," town halls that resemble a "wholesale beverage warehouse," and libraries that "look like shipping containers" have produced a national "dis-ease." When nothing in the public realm "honor or embellish it," he says, the result is "crippled civic life," and a loss of civility. It's no accident, he says, that America's wrecked towns and hollowed out cities produced guns in schools, eroded standards, and a dis-trustful, even surly national mood.

The solution: redirect public investment. Dust off traditional principles of community planning. Revive the architectural designs for homes, parks, and public buildings that once produced wonderful American towns and neighborhoods. Kunstler reports that across the country such work is now being taken up by a group of architects who call their movement the New Urbanism.

In vivid profiles, Kunstler describes how New Urbanists are building communities that focus on compact walkable neighborhoods, where bicycles and mass transit are regarded as essential means of transportation. New Urbanist neighborhoods have alleys where detached garages are located. Some of the garages have rental apartments on the second floor. Homes are closer to the street and are built on much smaller lots. Streets are narrower and they connect to each other unlike the dead end cul de sacs that proliferate in contemporary developments. New Urbanist neighborhoods also have schools, churches, parks, offices, small businesses, and apartments above the stores.

In effect, New Urbanist neighborhoods are complete communities, like the older neighborhoods 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 same sort of thriving places that were once the norm in the United States.

"This movement, in my view, is one of the most hopeful developments on the national scene," 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."

One measure of the greatness of a writer is an ability to give voice to the sweeping ideas that the nation has not yet found the words to describe. A century ago, Frederick Jackson Turner moved the nation with a famous essay in the Atlantic Monthly that described the closing of the American frontier, and the effect that idea was having on the national character. Turner succeeded in putting into words something the public already knew but until then had been unable to articulate. The result of the article, published in September 1896, was a paradigm shift in how America thought about itself.

Last month, exactly 100 years later, James Kunstler debuted the central ideas of Home From Nowhere in a cover essay in the same magazine. The article has already prompted new interest in civic design in the business community, in Congress, in local government, and in countless other groups. The reason is that 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.

Return to the Index of Synapse 37, Fall 1996