It was tough but I compiled my top ten quotes from The Geography of Nowhere.  With the addition of a special guest’s favorite at the end, they are…

“…Modernism, which dedicated itself to the worship of machines, to sweeping away all architectural history, all romantic impulses, and to jamming all human aspiration into a plain box.”

“Kenneth Jackson makes the shrewd observation that ‘although the motorcar was the quintessentially private instrument, its owners had to operate it over public spaces.’ “

“I’ll pass over the questions of styling and merchandising that adumbrate the American-Love-Affair-with-the-Car myth, except to suggest that if Americans loved their cars, perhaps it was because the machines allowed them to escape from reality – which raises the more interesting question: Why didAmerica build a reality of terrible places from which people longed to escape?”

“The two elements of the suburban pattern that cause the greatest problems are the extreme separation of uses and the vast distances between things.”

“The public realm suffered in another way with the rise of the automobile. Because the highways were gold-plated with our national wealth, all other forms of public building were impoverished. This is the reason why every town hall built after 1950 is a concrete-block shed full of cheap paneling and plastic furniture, why public schools look like overgrown gas stations, why courthouses, firehouses, halls of records, libraries, museums, post offices, and other civic monuments are indistinguishable from bottling plants and cold-storage warehouses.”

“The unwillingness to think about the public realm of the street in any other term beside traffic shows how little value Americans confer on the pubic realm in general.”

“The average citizen – who went to school in a building modeled on a shoe factory, who works in a suburban office park, who lives in a raised ranch house, who vacations inLas Vegas– would not recognize a building of quality if a tornado dropped it in his yard. But the professional architects, who ought to know better, have lost almost as much ability to discern the good from the bad, the human from the antihuman. The consequence of losing our planning skills is the monotony and soullessness of single-use zoning, which banished the variety that was the essence of our best communities. Most important, we have lost our knowledge of how physically to connect things in our everyday world, except by car and telephone.”

“…to give up mass automobile use. By this, I do not mean an end to all cars but rather, that every individual adult need not make a car trip for every function of living: to go to work, to buy clothes, to have a drink, that every adult need not be compelled to bear the absurd expense of car ownership and maintenance as a requisite of citizenship.”

“This is a good place to consider in some detail why the automobile suburb is such a terrible pattern from human ecology. In almost all communities designed since 1950, it is a practical impossibility to go about the ordinary business of living without a car. …This produces two separate classes of citizens: those who can fully use their everyday environments and those who cannot.” 

“The identification of this extreme individualism of property ownership with all that is sacred in American life has been the source of many of the problems I shall describe in the pages that follow. Above all, it tends to degrade the idea of the public realm, and hence of the landscape tissue that ties together the thousands of pieces of private property that make up a town, a suburb, a state. It also degrades the notion that the private individual has a responsibility to this public realm – or, to put it another way, that the public realm is the physical manifestation of the common good.”

I asked James Howard Kunstler if he would share his favorite comment or quote from the book also:

“We created a land full of scary places and became a nation of scary people.”

Author: Tory