18 August 2009

I’ve finished reading James Howard Kunstler’s book The Geography of Nowhere. It’s a fantastic and depressing tale of how the American landscape has come to be. In his own words:

Born in 1948, I have lived my entire life in America’s high imperial moment. During this epoch of stupendous wealth and power, we have managed to ruin our greatest cities, throw away our small towns, and impose over the countryside a joyless junk habitat which we can no longer afford to support. Undulging in a fetish of commercialized individualism, we did away with the public realm, and with nothing left but private life in our private homes and private cars, we wonder what happened to the spirit of community. We created a landscape of scary places and became a nation of scary people.

This should be required reading for all Americans. If you care at all about design, the environments natural and built, agriculture, architecture, economy, beauty, history or the future, you should read this book.

More: suburbia dissected (amusing, enlightening TED Conference presentation); website; podcast.