Reddit Reddit reviews The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

We found 16 Reddit comments about The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
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16 Reddit comments about The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape:

u/soapdealer · 55 pointsr/SimCity

I totally love the Christopher Alexander books. Definitely check out his The Timeless Way of Building which is a great companion piece to A Pattern Language. You should know that his works, while great in my opinion, are sort of considered idiosyncratic and not really in the mainstream of architecture/urban design.

Here's a short reading list you should look at:

The Smart Growth Manual and Suburban Nation by Andres Duany & Jeff Speck. Another set of sort-of-companion works, the Manual has a concrete set of recommendations inspired by the critique of modern town planning in Suburban Nation and might be more useful for your purposes.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs is probably the most famous and influential book on city planning ever and contains a lot of really original and thoughtful insights on cities. Despite being over half-a-century old it feels very contemporary and relevant.

The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler is similarly mostly a critique of modernist planning principles but is both short and very well written so I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

Makeshift Metropolis by Witold Rybczynski: I can't recommend this entire book, but it does contain (in my opinion) the best summary of the history of American urban planning. Really useful for a historical perspective on different schools of thought in city design over the years.

The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup is the book on parking policy. It's huge (700+ pages) and very thorough and academic, so it might be harder to get through than the other, more popular-audience-oriented titles on the list, but if you want to include parking as a gameplay element, I really can't recommend it highly enough. It's a problem that's thorny enough most city games just ignore it entirely: Simcity2013's developers say they abandoned it after realizing it would mean most of their players' cities would be covered in parking lots, ignoring that most actual American cities are indeed covered in parking lots.

Finally there's a bunch of great blogs/websites out there you should check out: Streetsblog is definitely a giant in transportation/design blogging and has a really capable team of journalists and a staggering amount of content. Chuck Marohn's Strong Towns blog and Podcast are a great source for thinking about these issues more in terms of smaller towns and municipalities (in contrast to Streetsblog's focus on major metropolitan areas). The Sightline Daily's blog does amazing planning/transpo coverage of the Pacific Northwest. Finally [The Atlantic Cities] (http://www.theatlanticcities.com/) blog has incredible coverage on city-issues around the world.

I hope this was helpful and not overwhelming. It's a pretty big (and in my opinion, interesting) topic, so there's a lot of ground to cover even in an introductory sense.

u/cirrus42 · 18 pointsr/urbanplanning

In this exact order:

  1. Start with Suburban Nation by Duany, Zyberk, and Speck. It's super easy to read, totally skimmable, and has a lot of great graphics and diagrams that help explain things. It's not the deepest book out there, but it's the best place to start.

  2. After that, try Geography of Nowhere by Kunstler. The author can be cranky and there are no diagrams, but he does a nice job of explaining how suburbia happened, why it made sense at the time, and why it's not so great anymore. Basically it's a primer on the key issue facing city planning today.

  3. After them, you'll be ready for The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jacobs. This is the bible of urbanism, the most important and influential book written about the form of cities since the invention of the car. But it's not as accessible as the first two, so I wouldn't start here.

  4. Walkable City by Speck. This is the newest of the bunch, and provides the data to back up the claims from the previous 3.

  5. Image of the City by Lynch. This one is a series of case studies that will teach you how to "read" how a city functions based on its form. The examples are all woefully obsolete, which is too bad, but still teaches you an important skill.
u/Leland_Stamper · 6 pointsr/lowcar

No Kunsler??? The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler is fantastic.

u/doebedoe · 5 pointsr/urbanplanning

Fixing existing developments and creating better ones in the future are very different beasts. One very influential group working on latter is the Congress for New Urbanism. A useful volume by a few of CNU's leading practioners is Suburban Nation. One pertinent critique of New Urbanism though is that is has been relatively ineffective about the retrofitting you describe. For that you might check out books like Retrofitting Suburbia.

If you want a good rant on how we got into the mess J.H. Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere is an angry read. On patterns that underlay places we like being in, there is the always present work of Christopher Alexander. For my money one of the most under-read great urbanists of our time is Richard Sennett, particularly his book The Uses of Disorder.

Finally, Jacob's has a lot of prescriptive stuff in Death and Life. I'll give you that it is not as rule-based as most contemporary approaches, but therein lies its greatness.

u/iamktothed · 4 pointsr/Design

Interaction Design

u/helgie · 3 pointsr/urbanplanning

The books mentioned so far are great ones to start with. The Geography of Nowhere is also a good primer for the amateur; Kunstler's style is provocative and interesting to read.

I've always found good planning histories to be pretty accessible as well (for those interested in the subjects). Here are some recommendations that aren't the "main offenders" people normally reference:

Bourgeois Utopias is an interesting history of "suburbia", and the various forms "suburban development" has taken throughout history.

Sprawl by Robert Bruegeman is a good "contrast" to a lot of books about planning. His essential premises are that sprawl isn't bad, that underlies our economic growth, and that people want it.

u/J_Drive · 3 pointsr/TrueReddit

I'm somewhat skeptical about the "sprawl was planned" argument suggested here. There are plenty of decentralized cities all around the world, most more economically robust than the U.S. style of grid-city every 30-50 miles you see throughout the midwest. Take a look at a map of Germany and you'll be hard-pressed to find a vacant 100 square km.

As a city grows it envelops other cities, and it's easy to support development that fills in the vacant land between urban centers. That's very different from an official "plan" to create robust suburban dispersal.

Ironic, now -- cities may be the only way to create a decent sustainable future for humanity. Suburbs take too much energy to sustain. Read any work by J.B. Jackson or Geography of Nowhere by Kunstler to get a better sense of suburban hell.

u/[deleted] · 3 pointsr/geography

The Geography of Nowhere

That's one of my favorites. Cultural geography is very broad so I don't know if there are any "essential" books, other than a textbook of course.

u/nwzimmer · 2 pointsr/pics

I'm surprised no one as mentioned this book yet; VERY good read on this subject...

"The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape"

http://www.amazon.com/The-Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Landscape/dp/0671888250/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333474570&sr=8-1

u/bnndforfatantagonism · 2 pointsr/nottheonion

"Pedestrian oriented neighbourhoods" are likely to have a lot of utility & are likely to undo a lot of the damage Automobiles have done to the urban environment as described in 'the Geography of Nowhere'. Particularly as they can afford automotive mobility to people who can't today drive on their own (elderly, children).

I don't think we'll get banning of manual vehicles, at least not quickly. There'll likely be a quickly rising standard of expected driving competence though. There's a 'pareto principle' in effect with car accidents, 20% of the drivers on the roads today cause about 80% of the accidents. When people have to drive to get to work, we let it go quite a bit. In the future, we're not gonna let that fly. Those people who still want to drive (& can drive) are still going to get there quicker than they did before, even with an expectation for them to give way to pedestrians, because most traffic is caused not by the limitations of the roads but by bad driving.

u/chrisjayyyy · 2 pointsr/AskReddit

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler

I've probably read this book half a dozen times. A great summary of the problems with our car-centric built environment and how they came to be. Urban Planing and Development is a dry subject, but JHK has a good sense of humor in his writing and the book is an easy read.


( http://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Man-Made-Landscape/dp/0671888250/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373057700&sr=1-1 - amazon link)

u/slow70 · 2 pointsr/CozyPlaces

You know, I don't really track such things on reddit so much, but the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) is sort of a hub for these things.

For years I didn't really have words or terms to go with my sentiment regarding our built environments, but reading first Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Death of the American Dream and then ["The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Environment] (https://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Man-Made-Landscape/dp/0671888250) were wonderfully informative and encompassing on the topic.

Check out James Howard Kunstler's TED talk, you'll probably laugh and feel sad in equal parts.

It's incredible how wide reaching the effects are of our built environment, and in the United States, it's mostly negative.

u/elbac14 · 1 pointr/urbanplanning

Just graduated with a master's in planning (in Canada). The first thing you should know is that you cannot go into this field for the money or for great job prospects. Getting a job right out of school is extremely difficult in both the US and Canada right now unless you have the right prior experience and skills (which school will not give you). Many people take unpaid internships (which is disgusting on the part of employers in my opinion) or have a long wait ahead of them for an entry-level job.
So if you do pursue planning for grad school make sure you are in no financial difficulties and that you have a backup plan or money to spare in case.

There is also a difference between what skills jobs want and what you'll learn in planning school. Planning school will focus heavily on "issues" in urban planning (social science, econ, history, etc). So you'll be writing term papers just like you are now in poli sci. You'll also learn a bit about planning law and the planning system but not nearly enough of what jobs want. And lastly, planners need to know some software, but this greatly depends on what type of job you have. Some typical programs include ArcGIS, AutoCAD and Adobe Illustrator/Indesign.

Learning about the urban issues part of planning is not too difficult in comparison and there are a lot of great books.
The best one's I've read so far are also the books that are best to introduce anyone to the major issues in planning:

u/brianjshepherd · 1 pointr/explainlikeimfive

I recommend reading The Geography of Nowhere. The book has its ups and downs and its points and non-points but I think it gets to the heart of what you are asking.

u/wooq · 1 pointr/PoliticalDiscussion

The political and marketing influence of the car industry played a huge part, but it's as much a cultural and urban planning thing as it is industry driven. Entire cities are built around catering to people in cars... there are vast swathes of strip malls and supercenters where there aren't even sidewalks but there are huge multi-story parking garages. Cities are zoned to have most of the population separated from areas where they participate in commerce... our entire life has become decentralized and auto-focused. Public railways serve a very small niche when both endpoints are, by design, far-removed from anything you'd want to explore. By contrast, in places in Europe and Asia, you get off the train and onto the bus or subway, and the bus stop or subway station is smack dab in the middle of shopping and business, and business is much more local.

A couple interesting books on this topic are Fighting Traffic (Peter Norton), Geography of Nowhere (James Kunstler) and Asphalt Nation (Jane Holtz Kay), worth a read if you're really interested in the topic.