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(Island Press, 2004)
Review by Thomas Fisher, Assoc. AIA
 The global
economy and global ecology seem at odds. The economy has driven
ever more people to use finite resources and generate more
greenhouse gases, even as ecologists rightly warn of the
catastrophic effects of this behavior on the environment. Timothy
Beatley’s book Native to Nowhere: Sustaining Home and
Community in a Global Age argues that the way out of
this apparent impasse involves our reconnecting to and caring for
real places.
He starts with a survey of the place literature—why place
matters, what qualities real places have, and how they benefit us
not just economically, but personally, socially, and politically as
well. He goes on to recount the ways in which we can recapture a
sense of place—through the preservation of historical places,
the resistance of communities against sprawl, the creation of green
space, the increase in pedestrian areas, the investment in public
art, the nurturing of local schools, the sharing of common
services, the integration of multiple generations, and the
distributed generation of renewable energy.
He ends with a call for a new kind of politics of place, one that
resists isolating people and polarizing positions among special
interest groups, and that, instead, encourages local communities to
take responsibility and have accountability for their care of a
place. Beatley’s book stands as an excellent summary of the
communitarian thinking that has grown substantially over the last
decade, even as it reminds us of how far we still have to go to
achieve the vision he lays out for us. We, unfortunately, occupy a
country awash in ideological divisions and political partisanship,
and so it may be that the only way we can affect any real change is
at the local level, each in our own place.
Thomas Fisher, Assoc. AIA, is dean of the School of Design at
the University of Minnesota. He is serving as an AIA Committee on
the Environment Advisory Group adjunct member and a key liaison
between AIA/COTE and ACSA.
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