From James Kunstler’s Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century:
“The suburban housing subdivision is not what it pretends to be. It is emphatically not a community, certainly not a village or a town. What you feel most strikingly is the perverse absence of those qualities. The subdivision is an abstraction: a metaphor. It is an essemlage of little cabins in the woods or little manors in a park or some hybrid of the two. It is essential to this metaphor that each of these houses be understood as existing in isolation. The fact that there are, say, 350 of them distributed around a tract of 175 acres only elevates the unreality of the metaphor. We want them to behave as an ensemble, as a living pattern, but the houses refuse. To do so would contradict their splendid isolation.”
