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The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape QUOTES

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape QUOTES

1 " The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever corresponds beyond its four walls.At the same time, the television if the families chief connection to the world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather it seals them from it.The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning. "

― James Howard Kunstler , The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

2 " the immersive ugliness of the built environment in the USA is entropy made visible. It indicates not simple carelessness but a vivid drive toward destruction, decay and death: the stage-set of a literal “death trip,” of a society determined to commit suicide. Far from being a mere matter of aesthetics, suburbia represents a compound economic catastrophe, ecological debacle, political nightmare, and spiritual crisis — for a nation of people conditioned to spend their lives in places not worth caring about. "

― James Howard Kunstler , The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

3 " The car, is the other connection to the outside world, but to be precise it connects the inhabitants to the inside of the car, not to the outside world per se. The outside world is only an element for moving through, as submarines move through water. "

― James Howard Kunstler , The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

4 " When they come to chronicle the decline of this civilization,” he said, “they’re going to wonder why we were debating flag burning, abortion, and broccoli eating instead of the fundamental issues of how we live and use the environment. "

― James Howard Kunstler , The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

5 " Community is not something you have, like pizza. Now is it something you can buy. It's a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green. "

― James Howard Kunstler , The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

6 " There was nothing like it before in history: a machine that promised liberation from the daily bondage of place. And in a free country like the United States, with the unrestricted right to travel, a vast geographical territory to spread out into, and a national tradition of picking up and moving whenever life became intolerable, the automobile came as a blessing. "

― James Howard Kunstler , The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

7 " Tradition evolves with time and place while holding strongly to certain formal, cultural, and personal principles. Nostalgia seeks the security of past forms without the inherent principles. "

― James Howard Kunstler , The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

8 " Community is not something you have, like pizza. Nor is it something you can buy. It's a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green. "

― James Howard Kunstler , The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

9 " On my way out of [Atlantic City] at quarter after seven in the morning, a young pump jockey at the gas station [...] mentioned that another man had lost $20,000 at Trop World a few hours earlier and had to be dragged out of the casino kicking and screaming. I asked if this happened a lot. "Man," he said, "there's a whole world of losers out there, and sooner or later they all end up here. Only they don't think they're losers. When they find out, it's like the surprise of their life. "

― James Howard Kunstler , The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

10 " The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever corresponds beyond its four walls.At the same time, the television is the families chief connection to the world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather it seals them from it.The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning. "

― James Howard Kunstler , The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

11 " Why should this matter? Why not accept the little fake church as a playful, harmless, adorable architectural oddity, as the lovers of kitsch do? Because it's a bad building, cheaply cute, out-of-scale, symbolically false, and stuck in the middle of a parking lot, a little noplace that contributes to the greater noplace. Because if the town had not been degraded by other bad buildings and bad design relationships, there would be no need for its mendacious symbolism, which cheapens the town a little more. "

― James Howard Kunstler , The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

12 " is a direct connection between suburban sprawl and the spiraling cost of government, and most Americans don’t see it yet, including many in government. Likewise, "

― James Howard Kunstler , The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

13 " The sentimental view of anything is apt to be ridiculous, "

― James Howard Kunstler , The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

14 " There is no shortage of apologists for the ubiquitous highway crud. "

― James Howard Kunstler , The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape