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James Howard Kunstler is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine and is the author of eight novels. He now lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.

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Home from Nowhere

Free Press

From Prologue: The Victory Disease

One dangerously sunny morning in April 1994, six guys were sitting around the attic porch of a house in the Florida panhandle swapping theories as to why the everyday world in America had become such an abysmal mess. All of them were architects except me. It was the day after the annual Seaside Prize had been awarded and some of us were still a little woozy from the festivities. The prize recipient, Christopher Alexander, author of A Pattern Language and other influential books, was there. So was Andres Duany, one of the designers of Seaside, the town we were in; Witold Rybczynski, the writer of graceful books about cities and buildings; Peter Calthorpe, the California architect and planner; and Paul Murrain, a young British landscape architect. The house was one designed by Leon Krier, the architectural theorist and, it is probably accurate to say, godfather of the movement to repair the damage done to our world by Modernism. Krier was present only in the spirit of the house, but his was a palpable presence.

Calthorpe had the floor. Lean and urbane, Calthorpe, forty-five, was in a humorously expansive mood. He proposed two theories. The first was The Stroke Theory. World War Two, he said, was so traumatic that it had caused the same kind of damage to western civilization that a cerebral hemorrhage can wreak on a human mind. It had made the advanced nations of the world lose some of their most important abilities, to forget their own history and culture, as a stroke victim loses his powers of speech, his memories, the particulars of his education. All the ghastly office buildings, banal dwellings, crappy commercial structures, and other common architectural garbage of our everyday world, Calthorpe proposed, were like the inchoate squawkings and bleatings of a stroke victim who had lost the ability to express himself. This theory met with such general approbation that Calthrope went on to propose a second.

This was The Stupor Theory. World War Two, he said, was the high tide of our fathers' generation. All these American men in the full bloom of youth had marched off to a terrible war against manifest evil and won a decisive victory for democracy and decency. In the process, many of them had the adventures of a lifetime -- moments of heroism, romances with grateful foreign girls, days and nights enjoying the spoils of liberated castles, profound friendships with army buddies, and, finally, the worshipful reception of the folks back home, with a sweet package of emoluments upon return to civilian life, including free college tuition and low-interest home mortgage loans.

These young men, Calthorpe went on, were immediately absorbed into postwar corporate life, fitting well into large hierarchical organizations. Corporate life was familiarly regimented like the army, where so many of them had lately enjoyed their heroic exploits. They knew how to give and follow orders, and patiently await promotion.

The downside was that their greatest adventures were over, that life on the commuter platform with hundreds of other guys in gray flannel suits was in some elemental way an awful comedown. What was there to look forward to? Selling ten million units a month of Oaties breakfast cereal for decades to come? How did this compare to drinking seventy-year-old cognac in an Alsatian castle with a pistol strapped to your leg and a seventeen-year-old French curie in your lap, having spent the day slaughtering Nazis? Of course, there would be the compensations of family life, a nice house in those new suburbs, a shiny new car, the fabulous panoply of washers, driers, Mixmasters, TVs, hifi's, and power mowers, autumn days teaching Skippy to throw a football, winter nights at the school auditorium watching Princess dance in her toe shoes, summer evenings presiding over the backyard barbecue, and ... wait ... was that all? Is that where it ended? Flipping hamburgers and wieners in a joke-bedizened apron and a clownish chef's hat?

Well, yes, for a lot of them. This was what life had to offer after the stupendous adventure of World War Two. A whole generation of heroes slipped into a permanent semicoma, soothing their boredom and anomie with heavy doses of hard liquor -- their beloved martinis -- and living out the rest of their days in an alcoholic fog. This, Calthrope said, explained why the world they built for us -- the suburban sprawl universe -- was so incoherent, brutal, ugly, and depressing: they didn't care about what they were building. They were drunk most of the time, in a stupor. (This also, he added with wicked parenthetical glee, explained feminism: a whole generation of daughters raised by emotionally remote, perpetually plastered fathers.)

These theories admittedly veer into burlesque, but there is still much to admire in them. The Stupor Theory especially comports with the phenomenon known among historians as The Victory Disease, the condition in which a nation's military triumph carries within it the demoralizing seeds of its own later destruction. In The Geography of Nowhere I argued that the building of suburbia as a replacement for towns and cities in the United States was just such a self-destructive act. I attempted to describe the tragic process. I argued that the living arrangement Americans now think of as normal is bankrupting us economically, socially, ecologically, and spiritually. I identified the physical setting itself -- the cartoon landscape of car-clogged highways, strip malls, tract houses, franchise fry pits, parking lots, junked cities, and ravaged countryside -- as not merely the symptom of a troubled culture but in many ways a primary cause of our troubles. I stated that all reasonable indications suggest we will not be able to continue this pattern of living, whether we like suburbia or not, and I sketched some of the remedies that were then just beginning to present themselves.

I wrote The Geography of Nowhere as a layman attempting to make sense of a national condition that seems at best complicated and at worst incomprehensible. My approach was that of a citizen-observer, not of a design professional. It seemed to me that the country was full of normal people, including plenty of intelligent ones, who were distressed by their surroundings but unable to articulate their feelings. My intention was to give shape to those feelings, to turn inchoate emotion into coherent thought. Since then I've come to understand one of the chief impediments preventing us from comprehending the tragedy of our everyday environment: American culture is very abstract. Suburbia fails us in large part because it is so abstract. It's an idea of a place rather than a place. The way you can tell is because so many places in this country seem like no place in particular, and a lack of particularity is the earmark of abstraction.

Our knowledge of cities is increasingly abstract, too. Fewer and fewer Americans have any experience living in good ones, or in any city at all -- good, bad, or mediocre. Historically, American cities at their best have left much to be desired, an issue of great significance which I will discuss further. In any case, few American cities today even function in any normal sense and many are virtually empty shells. What Americans know about city life these days often turns out to be secondhand or worse. We read in the newspapers and magazines about urban war zones...