Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century

by James Howard Kunstler

Book Overview

In his landmark book The Geography of Nowhere James Howard Kunstler visited the "tragic sprawlscape of cartoon architecture, junked cities, and ravaged countryside" America had become and declared that the deteriorating environment was not merely a symptom of a troubled culture, but one of the primary causes of our discontent.
In Home from Nowhere Kunstler not only shows that the original American Dream -- the desire for peaceful,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684837374
• ISBN13: 9780684837376
• Release Date: March 1998
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Progressing back to a scale of living that will benefit humans in the future as well

If Ownership Society (G.W. Bush) instead of Great Society (L.B Johnson) sounds good to you, then US Suburbia is right for you. "Home from Nowhere" by James Kunstler, however, predicts the demise of suburbia in the near future and lays out principles and detailed suggestions how future cities, towns, and settlements by humans living in today's borders of the USA should be outlined. The book is rich in details and enables both US citizens and immigrants such as me (from Germany) to understand what went so wrong with suburbia and its emphasis of providing a life in solitude. The ideas of "New Urbanism" are covered extensively and quite illustratively. "Home from Nowhere" describes how cities and towns can be built or rebuilt that enable its residents to live in a social density traditionally associated with urban life (and in my country, Germany, the term "urban" had and has a positive connotation, socially mixed, culturally mixed, accessible, walking distance, public transportation). James Kunstler has offered his own view on why Suburbia is such a wrong way of life - and I recommend highly his previous book "Geography of Nowhere". "Nowhere" means "Suburbia". The title of this book "Home from Nowhere" hence means "Home from Suburbia", meaning home back in the urban life within a city - returning from the wrong life in the outer rings and returning to the city - once the US cities are walkable, enjoyable, livable again. How to make the cities livable again ? This is the topic of the book. Here are my own thoughts about US Suburbia as a German immigrant(who arrived here in 1998): In the US, social interaction in Suburbia is mostly limited to church and schools (in case of parish schools, the two are practically identical). Church and school alone, however, do not substitute for "Community". In Germany, I was raised in a single-family house with a sizable lawn and access to a public bus (10min to downtwon) in a 250,000 city (Moenchengladbach, west of Cologne, 15 miles from the Dutch border). As a child, I effortlessly visited my friends, the school, the church, the theater, the cinema, etc. by bike, by bus and also by walking. Retail and affordable housing was mixed, residential villa areas (such as the one of my parents) were interspersed with rent complexes etc. Buses were used by teachers, academics, students, workers - and still are. Not just by the "help" (latina nannies and cleaners as in the US) To understand better, why a focus on urban life is so important and why suburbia - home to half of Americans - is such a wasteful life (socially, resources-related, etc.) it is important to understand why so many Americans have chosen to live in barren, cloned, residential confinements: the unwillingness of US Public High Schools to differentiate by academic merit and merit alone. This is, however, in my view the one crucial difference to the US which might explain why the mixing is still there in Germany and why suburbia is so per

A Joy to Read, A Book to Treasure

This is a splendid sequel to "Geography of Nowhere". Kuntler's usual searing wit and no-nonsense style is evident throughout. It seemed to cover just about everything that ails urban & suburban planning since WW2. My only misgivings are that is does not adequately address a few issues that lie at the heart of the cancerous growth of America's hideous sprawlscape and the flight of the middle class from traditional city & town life: 1. Relentless population growth driven primarily by record levels of legal & illegal immigration, 2. The manipulation of US energy & transportation policy by parasitical corporate interests & their lobbyists, and, 3. The short term, 'throw away' mindset of the building materials industries and the residential McHome developers. The incentive to move to the suburbs is greatly enhanced by the artificially low cost of new homes due to idiotic short-sighted building codes, atrocious bldg materials with little durability, suppressed labor costs due to illegal immigrant labor, and subsidized infrastructure for single use auto use (road networks, vast prkg lots & artificially cheap gasoline). Overall however, this is an excellent book!

Remodeling Hell

The author of this book is a novelist by trade, with eight completed works already under his belt. However, having had no formal architectural training, his understanding of the subject in general, and what we have done to the physical fabric of our country in specific, is profound, enlightening and deeply important. For despite what we might imagine, "buildings foster certain kinds of behavior in humans." And our rush to pave over the nation with strip malls, urban sprawl, industrial parks, and seven-lane freeways ("anti-places") all tend to suppress and distort our better natures. Reading this book is both humorous and disheartening at the one and same time. It is humorous and easy to read, because the author's writing style is mature, articulate, and witty - clearly one of the quirks of his being a novelist. Disheartening, because it plainly documents how American cities have devolved into bleak, relentless, noisy, squalid, smoky, smelly, explosively expanding, socially unstable, dehumanizing sinkholes of industrial foulness congested with ragtag hordes of racing automobiles. In response to the tragedy of our cities, we seek escape. After the war, most Americans jumped into the wagon and fled for the suburbs. However, even there we find no guarantee of spiritual or physical ease. Cut off from grocery stores, city-centers, cafes, and work, we end up spending half our life (not to mention half our income) "sitting inside a tin can on the freeway." We have become "a drive-in civilization," scuttling between non-descript office malls, "schools that look fertilizer factories," warehouse-like grocery stores, paved-over mega malls, and the congested cities we left behind in the first place - all because none of these places are within walking or biking distance after having fled to the suburbs. In fact, life in the suburbs is so unsatisfactory that we seek alternate escape routes, having no other place to flee. The majority of our free time is spent glued in front of the TV screen or at the theatre, where we catch glimpses of a better world. When we are not in either of those places, we "escape to nature" via a weekend camping trip (because nature knows how to design esthetically-pleasing places) or head to Disneyland. Ah, Disneyland.... "The public realm in America became so atrocious in the postwar decades that the Disney Corporation was able to create an artificial substitute for it and successfully sell it as a commodity." Americans love Disney world, as the author points out, because it is only social terrain left that has not been colonized by the car. Although we may not realize it on a conscious level, "The design quality of Disney World ... is about 1.5 notches better than the average American suburban shopping mall or housing subdivision - so Americans love it." Yet this fantasy land is "ultimately less satisfying than reality, and only deepens our hunger for the authentic."In essence, the book is one long screed against sh

Mind Reader

"What's wrong with me? My home is neat and tidy (and big) and the neighborhood is tranquil, so why am I so BORED? How come my kids seem so aloof (comatose)? I'd go out, but even if there were no rush hour traffic I probably won't find a good parking spot." How many Americans have thought this? Jim Kunstler reads our minds and then deftly and humorously spells out why a "robust" economy hasn't done a thing to strengthen our lives and families. Folks, we don't know one another anymore because we're too doped up on all the "necessities" of life (Car, big-screen, cell-phone). Is traditional town planning the elixir we need to save us? Probably not. However, it becomes painfully clear after reading this indispensible book that suburban sprawl has done a lot more to us than contribute countless sterile neighborhoods to the landscape. This book, in many ways, has changed my life. GET IT...READ IT.

The nail hit on the head, dozens of times.

This is a superbly written book, probably the result of theauthor's having toiled for years in the salt mines of fictionwriting. Leafing through it for the first time, I found every passage I chanced upon to be a delight, such as this one on p.37: "Americans essay to cure their homesickness with costly visits to Disneyworld. The crude, ineffective palliatives they get there in the form of brass bands and choochoo train rides leave them more homesick and more baffled as to the nature of their disease than when they arrived--like selling chocolate bars to someone suffering from scurvy..."Our homesickness, which is Kunstler's theme, stems from having destroyed our home, or a large part of it anyway. The homesickness is the spiritual devastation that follows the trashing of a beautiful country, the grand hotel razed to make way for an eyesore of a shopping center, the neighborhood raped by a freeway, the suburban children that know nothing of the city and nothing of the country--nothing at all in fact, except how to make a purchase at a fast food franchise. That is the "Nowhere" of the title. "Home From" refers to Kunstler's and the New Urbanists' proposed remedy. I've seen this topic touched on before, but never so elegantly nor so bluntly. Strip malls and tract housing are dismissed as "dreck" and "blight" and "piece(s) of junk"... The landscape in which all is subjugated to the car is described variously as "wasteland", "crudscape", "rubbish"...The people inhabiting this nowhere are no longer citizens, but consumers. Trips through this nowhere are to be endured rather than enjoyed.From a succinct history of how we got into the mess, to a quick outline of the New Urbanist philosophy, to dozens of real scenarios around the country illustrating what he means, Kunstler's volume packs a punch. Before this, I had found only unsatisfying and glancing treatments of this topic in such works as "Crabgrass Frontier" and Trow's "In the Context of No Context".This is not to say I agree with all of the proposed solutions. Main Street, "outdoor room", ma and pa shops? No thanks. Main Streets give me a Mayberry RFD feeling that makes me want to emigrate. And Ma and Pa were always understocked and overpriced. It's not their fault: supplying an industrial society is too big a job for an old married couple. That's why the big box store is here to stay (at least for a few years).But the big box does not have to be ugly, and it doesn't have to be segregated from the society it serves. I think Kunstler is right on the money with his indictment of single use zoning. He and the New Urbanists propose building apartments over commercial buildings. He'd probably laugh me to scorn at the very mention, but I think it would be great to put apartments and condominiums over big boxes.The average Home Depot could have 20 units superimposed on it. A central courtyard on this second story with a restaurant or two and an internet café would create a hotel-like atmosphere. The Depot