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The Geography of Nowhere
The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
Category: Regulars, Subcategory: Terry Lowe
Contributed by Terry Lowe on May 25, 2006
By James Howard Kunstler; Simon & Schuster, 1993
This book is about freeways, suburban sprawl, monoculture subdivisions, and the hideous commercial strips that line the roads between the shopping malls. Kunstler explains how all this came to pass, how quickly it spread (and why), and the effect this has had on the daily life of people who live there.
The author knows whereof he speaks. Born in 1948, he lived as a child in one of the first suburbs on Long Island; also in Manhattan; and in several classic small towns in upstate New York. At the time of writing, he lived in Saratoga Springs, and in one of his chapters takes a perverse delight in documenting its decline since 1970.
In the author's opinion, how suburbs came to pass is only a little short of criminal. He documents how great American cities were gutted by commercial interests — primarily car manufacturers — and their populations dispersed to bland far-flung hinterlands.
The combination of the Great Depression followed by the second world war effectively put an end to the occupation of city planner for a couple of decades. They were eventually replaced by bureaucrats and engineers, but not until Modernism had replaced common sense in architecture.
You know what a Modernist building is like: it's a monolithic slab with a flat roof and windows that don't open (if it has windows at all). Such buildings are usually office towers, shopping malls, big box retail stores, or housing project apartment buildings. When found in suburbs, they will always be surrounded by parking lots.
The rise of the private automobile in the 1920s displaced the existing network of city tramlines, with the assistance of General Motors and Firestone, who saw profits to be made by replacing public transportation with private transportation. Tram cars were just in the way, so they had to go. In 1925, GM and Firestone began to buy and dismantle tram routes in cities across the country. This process was completed by about 1950, despite the occasional conviction for criminal conspiracy, and the trams were forgotten.
When the Depression hit, the US government poured money into building roads as a way to provide employment for people. A lot of this money was channeled through a guy in New York named Robert Moses.
Moses oversaw road construction in New York for about 40 years (1920 - 1960). He created a quasi-official Bridge and Tunnel Authority, wrote its charter, and maneuvered the state into appointing him as head of it. Once installed, it was impossible to remove him; he was unelected, untouchable, and answered to no one. His Bridge and Tunnel Authority had the power to raise money by issuing bonds, and then bank the revenue generated by the tolls on the finished projects.
Moses hated buses and trains, and took special pains to exclude them from ‘his’ highways and from their rights-of-way, believing them to be money-losers. Eventually, New York city engineers were begging him to include mass transit rights-of-way with the freeways, but he always found a way around them. In many cases, he designed overpasses to be so low that they prevented buses from using the freeway beneath.
During the period from 1945 to 1960, agencies controlled by Moses spent $4.5 billion, none of it on mass transit. During the 1950s, Moses had more money to spend on public works than the entire city of New York, and nobody could tell him how to spend it. ... It is estimated that during his career Moses caused a quarter of a million people to be evicted from their homes to make way for his highways. When he began his career, Long Island was rural. When he retired in 1968, it was a parking lot. By the end of his reign, community residents (Jane Jacobs among them) rose against him and physically prevented expressways from demolishing their neighbourhoods, but by then the damage was done.
One lane of freeway can accommodate 2,500 cars per hour under optimal conditions. One line of light rail (which takes up the same amount of space) can carry 40,000 passengers per hour.
Government-subsidized highways made suburbs inevitable. Suburbs made freeways inevitable, and anyone who has sat unmoving in freeway ‘traffic’ knows the results.
The final nail in the coffin of livable city communities came in the form of guaranteed ‘no money down’ mortgages for servicemen returning from the war in the late 1940s. These mortgages were available only if the house was in a suburb. Why? Several reasons. By then the downtown housing stock was dilapidated and in need of replacing; by then all the economic activity — promoted by powerful real estate developers — was far away from the inner city; and because by then most of the downtown housing was occupied by black people (or Negroes, as they were then known), and no one wanted to live next door to them.
Levittown on Long Island, where the builders could slap up 150 houses per day, was the first such suburb built, with the full approval of Robert Moses. Levittown eventually grew to 17,000 identical houses, and real estate developers across the continent copied it. This may well have been the first industrial implementation of Copy and Paste.
Aprés Moses came the Interstates, and the shopping malls with their huge parking lots, and the final division of human life into widely dispersed pods: the identical residential pods where people live; the office or industrial pods where they work; the shopping mall pods where they go to buy stuff; and the school pods where their children are taken by bus each day.
Anyone who commutes an hour daily in each direction spends 2 weeks a year sitting in their car doing so. This includes children commuting back and forth to school. There are now two generations of people who have been born and lived in suburban landscapes all their lives, and who know nothing else.
As such, they have lost all sense of community. If all places are identical, they are also meaningless, and thus not worthy of any committment, nor of any respect. What, after all, is there to respect in a landscape of strip malls and parking lots?
The least understood cost [of the automobile-centric suburban life] — although probably the most keenly felt — has been the sacrifice of a sense of place: the idea that people and things exist in some sort of continuity, that we belong to the world physically and chronologically, and that we know where we are.
This has left us with a public realm that is composed mainly of roads. And the only way to be in that public realm is to be in a car, often alone. Kunstler continues with the sobering thought that to build communities that people would actually want to live in is now prohibited by zoning laws in most places. For example: typical suburban homes must be isolated on large lots; on wide curving streets free of sidewalks and trees; service lanes behind the houses are prohibited, so garages are a large part of the frontage; and it is forbidden to build a second floor of apartments above stores, assuming you can find a store. Obviously these laws are defined by lawyers and traffic engineers who design subdivisions that best serve cars rather than the people who live there.
This book is an informative and usually entertaining read. The author is clearly biased — he hates suburban sprawl — but strong opinions make for better books, I think. There is a useful bibliography included, and from that, the first book I'll be looking for is Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses.
Seattle webcam photo courtesy of the Washington State Department of Transportation.
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