General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Americans are the loneliest, most isolated people [View all]ErikJ
(6,335 posts)Corporations forever sending employees families scattering over the biggest free market country on earth,........... to live alone in single-family houses,........................ in very low-density suburbs with no sidewalks even............... with no central community focus or main street................... and everybody goes from their car directly to their house.
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The "Geography of Nowhere" traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where every place is like no place in particular, where the cities are dead zones and the countryside is a wasteland of cartoon architecture and parking lots.
In elegant and often hilarious prose, Kunstler depicts our nation's evolution from the Pilgrim settlements to the modern auto suburb in all its ghastliness.
The Geography of Nowhere tallies up the huge economic, social, and spiritual costs that America is paying for its car-crazed lifestyle. It is also a wake-up call for citizens to reinvent the places where we live and work, to build communities that are once again worthy of our affection. Kunstler proposes that by reviving civic art and civic life, we will rediscover public virtue and a new vision of the common good. "The future will require us to build better places," Kunstler says, "or the future will belong to other people in other societies."