A Return to Somewhere

For the last five or so days, between a couple of showings and a few communications with clients and my dear assistant Jen, I've been sleeping a lot, trying to kick a monstrous upper respiratory infection and reading a book, morosely titled, "The Geography of Nowhere," written by James Howard Kunstler. So you know where he's coming from, he's a novelist, former newspaper editor and editor for "Rolling Stone". He's a frequent contributor to the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and he lives in upstate New York.

That is a salient fact, I think. The only other experience I have with a person who's from upstate New York is my friend Lisa's husband Max. Max is fiercely plainspoken and smart as a whip but dour as all get out and sees things through the caul of the failed businesses and technologies of the past 250 years that makes up the region of upstate New York. So I think Max and James Kunstler could have a really good conversation. The thing about Max, and also James Kunstler, is that he is so often right about things. It's kind of depressing.

"The Geography of Nowhere" is a polemic against suburban sprawl and the failed policies of the business and government partnership that made the needs of business, especially automobiles and automobile manufacturers, paramount to the demands of human scale, public transportation and sustainable economies in our unique history of housing and development in America. It's a really good book, and entertaining in a horrifying kind of way, as it catalogs the decline and fall of communities as they used to be. It's also a treasure trove of information about historic building styles and theories of what makes for an ideal community, from the Pilgrims all the way through postmodernism. It has interesting asides on the unreal communities that are Las Vegas and Disney World, the horror of Detroit and Los Angeles and what makes for a sense of place and home.

"The great suburban build-out is over," Kunstler declares. We can no longer afford to live in the far-flung houses, offices, and discount marts connected by freeways (note the need for Obama's huge infrastructure component in the economic recovery legislation as support). It may be part of what has contributed to the perfect storm of financial failure, oversupply of housing and high energy costs which we attempt to weather now. In the end, what Kunstler calls for is nothing short of a redesign of our everyday world. Towns, rather than suburbs, with mixed use properties close to public transportation and higher population densities have been called for by urban planners for decades, but have been resisted by all sorts of people for all kinds of reasons, some of them even well-intentioned. What has been lost in the bureaucracy of town planning and zoning ordinances and building codes and minimum lot sizes and setbacks is the reason behind it all...we want to live in relationship to one another, with a sense of permanence, an appreciation for beauty and nature and a sense of belonging. This is I think the challenge of building our physical landscape in the future, to provide a sustainable environment where these very important human needs are met. You should really read the book. I don't know if I liked it, but I can't stop thinking about it.

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