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James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler

Assignment

Reading, below. And a four-page paper, described below.

Address three (3) separate critical issues that affect our world (in America) today, as presented by Kunstler in The Geography of Nowhere. Carefully select, read, and bring in to your discussion six (6) contemporary articles (two for each issue) that relate to your paper.

Draw from dailies (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.), weeklies (The Economist, etc.), periodic journals, including peer-reviewed publications.

Reading

Kunstler, James Howard.The Geography of Nowhere:The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. [View on Amazon]

Aditional reading and references by chapter.

Home From Nowhere: How to Make our Cities and Town Liveable was published in The Atlantic Monthly, September 1996. This article provides and overview of Kunstler's sequel to the Geography of Nowhere. In Home, Kunstler places an emphasis on New Urbanism. This article is not required reading for HRS150. But is is valuable as a means of:

  1. understanding how preservationist must partnership with other disciplines, and
  2. how the paradigm of preservation can apply directly to new constuction and community design, thus greatly expanding the purpose and relevancy of our discipline.

Kunstler at RWU

19 February 1997, Can We Survive Suburbia. School of Architecture's lecture series, Roger Williams University

07 December 2005, The Long Emergency and the End of Suburbia. School of Architecture, Art & Historic Preservation Fall Lecture Series, Roger Williams University.