Rating: 
Summary: Remodeling Hell
Review: The author of this book is a novelist by trade, with eight completed works already under his belt. However, having had no formal architectural training, his understanding of the subject in general, and what we have done to the physical fabric of our country in specific, is profound, enlightening and deeply important. For despite what we might imagine, "buildings foster certain kinds of behavior in humans." And our rush to pave over the nation with strip malls, urban sprawl, industrial parks, and seven-lane freeways ("anti-places") all tend to suppress and distort our better natures. Reading this book is both humorous and disheartening at the one and same time. It is humorous and easy to read, because the author's writing style is mature, articulate, and witty - clearly one of the quirks of his being a novelist. Disheartening, because it plainly documents how American cities have devolved into bleak, relentless, noisy, squalid, smoky, smelly, explosively expanding, socially unstable, dehumanizing sinkholes of industrial foulness congested with ragtag hordes of racing automobiles. In response to the tragedy of our cities, we seek escape. After the war, most Americans jumped into the wagon and fled for the suburbs. However, even there we find no guarantee of spiritual or physical ease. Cut off from grocery stores, city-centers, cafes, and work, we end up spending half our life (not to mention half our income) "sitting inside a tin can on the freeway." We have become "a drive-in civilization," scuttling between non-descript office malls, "schools that look fertilizer factories," warehouse-like grocery stores, paved-over mega malls, and the congested cities we left behind in the first place - all because none of these places are within walking or biking distance after having fled to the suburbs. In fact, life in the suburbs is so unsatisfactory that we seek alternate escape routes, having no other place to flee. The majority of our free time is spent glued in front of the TV screen or at the theatre, where we catch glimpses of a better world. When we are not in either of those places, we "escape to nature" via a weekend camping trip (because nature knows how to design esthetically-pleasing places) or head to Disneyland. Ah, Disneyland.... "The public realm in America became so atrocious in the postwar decades that the Disney Corporation was able to create an artificial substitute for it and successfully sell it as a commodity." Americans love Disney world, as the author points out, because it is only social terrain left that has not been colonized by the car. Although we may not realize it on a conscious level, "The design quality of Disney World ... is about 1.5 notches better than the average American suburban shopping mall or housing subdivision - so Americans love it." Yet this fantasy land is "ultimately less satisfying than reality, and only deepens our hunger for the authentic." In essence, the book is one long screed against shoddy civic design, car-centered development, single-use zoning laws (a subject that enrages the author to the point of profanity), and loss of excellence and beauty in architectural design. In place of these, the author wishes to reinvigorate community connectivity, enliven the public sphere, enthrone commonsense zoning laws, and start designing beautiful, lasting structures - just like we used to. As the author reminds us, "In such a setting, we feel more completely human. This is not trival." The alternative? Continuing on the "garbage barge steaming off to Nowhere."
Rating: 
Summary: passionate but uneven
Review: This book started out on a strong note, with Kunstler's typically searing rhetoric and a well-written overview of what's wrong with American city and town planning. However, it soon deteriorated into undisciplined discussions about farming and the political saga of Saratoga Springs. Eventually, the book peters out almost completely, as Kunstler waxes nostalgic about his boyhood in New York and ends with a bizarre, egocentric soliloquy that has something to do with painting a McDonald's and biking to the YMCA. I was disappointed with the unevenness of this book, especially after such a powerful, interesting beginning. Also, Kunstler's personality and opinions on certain issues are likely to turn some readers off; he frequently seems almost crotchety and bitter as he frowns on things like "teenage rebellion," rock & roll, and "black Nationalism." Although Kunstler's commitment to sound planning principles is admirable, his views on more complex sociopolitical issues are so simplistic as to just make him seem stupid (for example, he essentially denies the significance of systematic racial discrimination). Unfortunately, Kunstler makes it seem like he wants to go back to the ultimate '50s version of small-town life, complete with corner five-and-dime stores, ballgames in the Ramble, and cheery milk deliverymen. He does *not* seem to favor exciting urban development like the kind happening in Europe, since it might contain people "dressed in high top sneakers and a sideways hat." I would recommend Kunstler's "The Geography of Nowhere" to this sequel. Or if you must read this book, maybe you could follow it up with something like William Upski Wimsatt's "Bomb the Suburbs," which at least shows an appreciation for the vibrancy of *modern* city life.
Rating:
Summary: A Joy to Read, A Book to Treasure
Review: This is a splendid sequel to "Geography of Nowhere". Kuntler's usual searing wit and no-nonsense style is evident throughout. It seemed to cover just about everything that ails urban & suburban planning since WW2. My only misgivings are that is does not adequately address a few issues that lie at the heart of the cancerous growth of America's hideous sprawlscape and the flight of the middle class from traditional city & town life: 1. Relentless population growth driven primarily by record levels of legal & illegal immigration, 2. The manipulation of US energy & transportation policy by parasitical corporate interests & their lobbyists, and, 3. The short term, 'throw away' mindset of the building materials industries and the residential McHome developers. The incentive to move to the suburbs is greatly enhanced by the artificially low cost of new homes due to idiotic short-sighted building codes, atrocious bldg materials with little durability, suppressed labor costs due to illegal immigrant labor, and subsidized infrastructure for single use auto use (road networks, vast prkg lots & artificially cheap gasoline).
Overall however, this is an excellent book!
Rating:
Summary: The nail hit on the head, dozens of times.
Review: This is a superbly written book, probably the result of theauthor's having toiled for years in the salt mines of fictionwriting. Leafing through it for the first time, I found every passage I chanced upon to be a delight, such as this one on p.37: "Americans essay to cure their homesickness with costly visits to Disneyworld. The crude, ineffective palliatives they get there in the form of brass bands and choochoo train rides leave them more homesick and more baffled as to the nature of their disease than when they arrived--like selling chocolate bars to someone suffering from scurvy..." Our homesickness, which is Kunstler's theme, stems from having destroyed our home, or a large part of it anyway. The homesickness is the spiritual devastation that follows the trashing of a beautiful country, the grand hotel razed to make way for an eyesore of a shopping center, the neighborhood raped by a freeway, the suburban children that know nothing of the city and nothing of the country--nothing at all in fact, except how to make a purchase at a fast food franchise. That is the "Nowhere" of the title. "Home From" refers to Kunstler's and the New Urbanists' proposed remedy. I've seen this topic touched on before, but never so elegantly nor so bluntly. Strip malls and tract housing are dismissed as "dreck" and "blight" and "piece(s) of junk"... The landscape in which all is subjugated to the car is described variously as "wasteland", "crudscape", "rubbish"...The people inhabiting this nowhere are no longer citizens, but consumers. Trips through this nowhere are to be endured rather than enjoyed. From a succinct history of how we got into the mess, to a quick outline of the New Urbanist philosophy, to dozens of real scenarios around the country illustrating what he means, Kunstler's volume packs a punch. Before this, I had found only unsatisfying and glancing treatments of this topic in such works as "Crabgrass Frontier" and Trow's "In the Context of No Context". This is not to say I agree with all of the proposed solutions. Main Street, "outdoor room", ma and pa shops? No thanks. Main Streets give me a Mayberry RFD feeling that makes me want to emigrate. And Ma and Pa were always understocked and overpriced. It's not their fault: supplying an industrial society is too big a job for an old married couple. That's why the big box store is here to stay (at least for a few years). But the big box does not have to be ugly, and it doesn't have to be segregated from the society it serves. I think Kunstler is right on the money with his indictment of single use zoning. He and the New Urbanists propose building apartments over commercial buildings. He'd probably laugh me to scorn at the very mention, but I think it would be great to put apartments and condominiums over big boxes. The average Home Depot could have 20 units superimposed on it. A central courtyard on this second story with a restaurant or two and an internet café would create a hotel-like atmosphere. The Depot would reserve a couple units as demonstration models, and the rest would be rented to those people who, for one reason or another, don't wish to buy a single family house: college students, Depot employees, gay divorcees, foreigners--the perfect recipe for a yeasty cosmopolitan enclave, the presence of which almost always drives up property values. Complete the picture with a rooftop garden of the sort so eloquently described in the writings of Dixie Lee Ray, and you have a new paradigm of development...or perhaps a return to an ancient and trusty paradigm: the market town.
Rating: 
Summary: The alternative to suburban sprawl and dead inner cities
Review: This might well become the bible of New Urbanism - the notion that planners should imitate turn-of-the-century townscapes, with their high densities, mixed uses, and streets designed with the pedestrian in mind. Lengthy case studies describe success stories of New Urbanism: Seaside (Fla.), Boca Raton (Fla.), Memphis, Columbus, Providence, Corning, and Kentlands (Md.). There are also stories of where it failed due to local opposition: Lagana West (Cal.), Mashpee (Mass.), Chatham (NY), Homestead (Fla.), and Brooklyn. Oddly, there are almost no illustrations of these projects - a glaring flaw in an otherwise brilliant book. Page after page describes innovative planning initiatives in enormous detail, where the material cries out for a photo or diagram. Kunstler has a tendency to wander: There's a chapter about an organic farmer, a chapter about African-American history culminating in the author's recommendation that many black kids should be put in orphanages (huh?), and two chapters that are essentially autobiographical. Also, the occasional use of words like "crudscape" adds spark to his writing, but Kunstler sometimes gets carried away by his own emotions. The author's description of a zoning dispute in his hometown of Saratoga Springs is so venomous and vulgar that he hurts only his own credibility. Kunstler should keep in mind that not everyone who opposes the New Urbanism is "evil" (his overused adjective), but rather are responding to the fact that people do like malls, large house lots, and travelling short distances by car, however harmful these preferences might be to the larger fabric of our metropolitan areas.
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