Home from Nowhere – James Howard Kunstler 1998

  • Community, as it once existed in the form of places worth caring about, supported by local economies, and has been extirpated by an insidious corporate colonialism that doesn’t care about the places from which it extracts its profits or the people subject to its operations.
  • Without the underpinning of genuine community and its institutions, family life has predictably disintegrated, because the family alone cannot bear all the burdens and perform all the functions of itself and the community.
  • Suburban housing subdivisions are so sickening in their endless, banal replication. They deny and confute the tragic nature of life because they are places not worth caring about.
  • Within each nation or city-state, Europeans enjoyed a level of cultural agreement lacking in America.
  • Europeans have known for centuries how to treat a riverfront so that it equitably serves both commerce and public enjoyment. In America, urban riverfronts almost never included any provision for public amenity and still don’t. The river bank is commonly the site of a freeway, leaving our cities cut off from their rivers.
  • The constant counterpoint in American History to the reasonable hatred of industrial cities has been the notion of its antidote: the individual dwelling place in the natural landscape.

2 distinct models for the homestead in the natural landscape.

1-Lone settlement in the wilderness, the pioneer and his family living in a stump filled clearing. “Little cabin in the woods”

2-English manor house in the park

  • The southern plantation house is the English manour in a park. Raising a manor out of stark wilderness.
  • The chief characteristic of the American suburb was not of an organically real town but a place of fantasy and escape.
  • Enabling those who lived there they could conduct their industrial activities without suffering any of the unpleasant consequences these activities typically entailed. This notion of freedom from the consequences of one’s social behaviour has also persisted in the mental life of Americans.

The extraordinary post-war economy that boomed and allowed Americans to build the hugely expensive drive in fantasy world that is the mature auto suburb. That economy is now fading into history. Perversely, as soon as its demise became manifest, Americans began to insist that they were entitled to it and all its goodies forever, because ‘were number one’. Now finding a strong undercurrent of political grievance among those who once were termed middle class and who suddenly realize that the American Dream in the form of suburban house with 2 cars has been denied to them. This sense of grievance is apt to build and grow uglier as suburbia and its trappings become increasingly unaffordable to an ever-broader class of Americans.

Questions

To what extent is the pattern of suburbiadescribed by Kunstler different or similar to

that in the UK?

How far do you agree that the AmericanDream of a house and two cars is shredby

people in the UK?

Do you agree that this form of living isfundamentally unsustainable?