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

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Manufacturer: Touchstone Press

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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, pleasant places in which to work and live -- still has a strong hold on our imaginations, but also offers innovative, eminently practical ways to make that dream a reality. Citing examples from around the country, he calls for the restoration of traditional architecture, the introduction of enduring design principles in urban planning, and the development of public spaces that acknowledge our need to interact comfortable with one another.

PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS:

Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 307.12
EAN: 9780684837376
ISBN: 0684837374
Label: Touchstone Press
Manufacturer: Touchstone Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: 1998-03-26
Publisher: Touchstone Press
Studio: Touchstone Press


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
• The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
• Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series)
• World Made by Hand: A Novel


CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Waste of $15 -
This is one of those self-righteous books written by an "intellectual" who sums up everything in vast generalizations. What a waste of $15.

It gives your anxiety a label, and a language for expressing it. -
You drive past an ugly strip-mall and think, "Man, *another* one of these things?"

You see the old farmland being stripped away and carted off, landscaped and dissected into half-acre plots for homes you can't afford and wonder, "Who thinks this is a good idea?"

You can't remember the last time you went shopping without your car, even for a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread. Or let your kids play in the neighborhood without arranging a minor migration with the minivan. Or walked to the park and met your friends for lunch.

Your anxiety is real. There's an explanation for it, and the book "Home From Nowhere" brings it to fore, warts and all, and dares you to reflect upon it. Mr. Kunstler might not be politically correct or use gender-neutral examples -- which shouldn't matter to you and sorry if it does -- but he's right. He's opening eyes to what's going on, explaining why your anxiety exists and what exactly is going on in America. And once you know, you can never go back. You either find yourself compelled to help fix the problem, staunch its flow, or preserve your local solutions; or you live with a new anxiety, one born of knowing the problem is real and refusing to deal with it.

It would be difficult to overestimate the value in organizing the topics and discussion so eloquently, as Mr. Kunstler does here. The strip malls, the poor planning, the misuse of the finite land resources we have, the lack of humanity in our design and construction, all conspire to disassociate us from what could be a positive experience: living among your neighbors, all of your neighbors, in an uplifting and positive community. It just isn't possible with suburban pods and the reliance of cars to get anywhere, see or do anything. The arguments all hang together, and the solutions are accessible and adaptable.

You might not be inspired to join your local zoning board, but you may be inspired to act locally in another way. I hope you do. Because, knowing what I know now, I'd hate to lose the small town I currently have. And I'd like for everyone to get a fair chance at it as well.

-C

Rant against sprawl, complete with cussing -
Home From Nowhere describes sprawl and car culture as evil and proposes an alternative to these. The discussion of sprawl and the irrationality of cars rings true and will tend to resonate with many US residents (unless the racial stereotyping and put downs of women get to you). The discussion of alternatives contains good jumping off points, however the alternative that Kunstler wants is a return to a 50's city with a cute two story downtown and some apartments over stores.

A big flaw is the excessive profanity, especially given that this is a nonfiction book that is trying to be serious. There is probably a cuss word about every 3 pages. Just use amazon's "look inside" feature to explore various cuss words. When he isn't cussing, Kunstler refers to people he disagrees with as "boneheads" or other derogatory terms. This makes the book read a bit like talk radio, where people call in and they and the host just call one another names. Facts come up, but when they fail, name calling and profanity are the tools used to illustrate the point.

The subject of this book is a good one, and I agree with Kunstler's conclusions on sprawl. However, the author's terrible personality and use of profanity to defend his points seriously undercut what he is trying to say.

Great insight - but style a bit over the top -
I just finished reading "Home from Nowhere" for the first time -- I'm commenting here just before reading it again. Wow - my head is spinning from insights like:

1. Neighborhoods made up of houses massed at the sidewalk like are much more attractive to walk around than set-back houses -- and in general, the more set-back, the less attractive the neighborhood is to walk around.
[I see this in my native city of Providence, Rhode Island, where the area around Benefit Street is clearly the most pleasant area to walk around in in the entire city -- and virtually all the houses front on the sidewalk.]

2. Americans have two ideals in mind when they think of houses: the 'little cabin in the woods' and 'the manor house in the park'. I didn't even realize I had those ideals, but, by God, I do (and I'm not happy that I now realize that I do).

3. The standard American approach to property taxes is not to tax land values, but rather to tax the value of the buildings on the land. [so the owner of a parking lot can afford to wait for the windfall of a large land acquisition to build a skyscraper while anyone who simply improves his building gets penalized by an increased tax -- who would have thought that Henry George was right?]

Kunstler is a bit intemperate in his language (I liked that) and a bit diffuse in his arguments, but these are very minor quibbles about a mind-expanding and eye-opening book.

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 pervasive in the US: It is possibly for the very same reason why American cities were mixed until 1954.

In Germany, schools are segmented by merit. After mandatory elementary school (Grade 1-4), each child in Germany is assessed on its academic potential at age 9 and then send to either "Main School" (to become a craftsman), "Real School" (to become most likely a very skilled worker) or to "Gymnasium" which is in essence a public (!) prep school with grade 5-13 whose graduates at age 19 then go to University.

In conservative states (Bavaria, Baden-Wuerttemberg), 40-50% go to Main School, 20-25% to Real School and 20-30% to Gymnasium (before 1963 it was 5%).

In left-wing states (notoriously Bremen and Berlin), 60% go to Gymnasium which has, of course, caused a collapse in quality. (German parents take great care to live outside the city-state of Bremen to take residence in either near-by Lower Saxony or Schleswig-Holstein - a rare example of suburbia behavior similar to the US).

If you mix people in habitats, you need to separate students in schools based on their potential. Without that willingness, any attempt to resurrect urban life in the US will not take-off as an option endorsed wholeheartedly by Americans. German "Gymnasiums" are in essence "Advanced Placement Schools" where every subject is taught for every student for nine years on AP level. The beer kegging red-neck segment is relegated to the "Main School" (I know that in the US many children with affluent parents are beer-kegging as well - just another sign of the social deterioration so prevalent in suburbia). As a matter of fact, merit segmentation often reflects social segmentation and much has been written in Germany to rectify this.

In German gymnasiums, the emphasis on academics and much less emphasis on school team sports is resulting in free space for geeks and nerds. "Jocks" do not exist. As a result, every boy and girl that likes school flourishes already in school without having to wait for the Promised Land of College.

As the history of America shows: If you mix public schools - after 1954 - adults refuse to mix any longer and settle in socially homogeneous habitats. At school, their children will then encounter neanderthals and primates, but how fortunate that their parents are in the same income percentile!

It is this move to social homogeneousness that gives Suburbia its fake ace: it is so easy to erect all those segregated zoning cages - the rich - the affluent - the true middle class - the delusional middle class - the upper trailer trash (who also are made believe they are middle class) - the zoning area you never entered. Teachers do not segment by academic potential: not a problem - then the parents do their job (but parents usually fail miserably at mixing their children socially - but again, this is what cities and towns are for).

Cities and towns, in turn, are very bad at segregating people (and after all: why should they do it ?) Yes, there are neighborhoods that tilt one way or the other, but usually they are too small to support a whole school: Therefore, students from different social backgrounds mix and therefore, teachers must do the separating by assessment based on merit.

If you allow public schools strictly segmented by merit, adults are ready to stay and accept and invite different people around them. Parents must be reassured that social mixing - in cities - does not lead to indiscriminate student mixing of bright and dumb students in the same public buildings. In Germany that means not mixing white dumb students with bright students of Turkish descent.

As the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said: "Differentiation means progress".

US public high schools do not differentiate by merit (enough). As a result, parents differentiate by income. Welcome to suburbia.

Yes, I am aware that in Germany the terms "selection" or segmentation are contaminated for a very valid reason. In your country, the term "segregation" is. Still, I offer this line of thought to you here, since I think it really matters and it helps both bright and not so bright students better to reach their potential when taught separately.

I remember how stunned I was during the first two years here (1998-2000). I could not believe the miles and miles of singe-family houses with no boardwalks, no cinema, no theater, no concert hall, no auditorium, no restaurant, no retail. Quiet confinements with adults sitting in front of flickering tv screens or computer screens (with or without children). Does this sound like a fulfilled life to you ?

It can be done better - in Germany, but also in this country which has a very rich tradition of mid-size and small-size towns that have resolved the task of building a humanly scaled habitat very well.

Back to the author of the book to review: James Kunstler offers his ideas and ideas from active architects of how compelling new ideas - and resurrecting old ones - can be implemented in a very detailed way. Make zoning your ally. Read: "Geography of Nowhere" as well. - The ICE (formerly INS) should give this book as a free hand-out to any immigrant arriving in the US and considering moving to Suburbia.

I have also read "The Long Emergency" in which Kunstler spells out the predicted events when cheap oil will cease to exist. The first casualty will be US Suburbia - and rightfully so in his view. "The Long Emergency" is laudable for its uncompromising bluntness (see such subtitles as "sunset for the sunbelt"). "Home from Nowhere" is valuable for its constructive advise how humans in the US can live instead.

There is a Society beyond the mere Ownership Society. We all can do better.

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