The geography of somewhere.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul
• Position: Citings - Cars and society - Brief Article

The crimes of the car are manifold, or so say academics and others who have blamed it for--among other sins--atmospheric pollution, environmental scarification, highway carnage, personal over-indebtedness, back-seatimmorality, and a sense of rootlessness often summed up by author James Kunstler's titular phrase, The Geography of Nowhere. (That is, you may no longer have much fealty to any place, but then there's hardly any places worth identifying with anyway.)

Yet lots of people continue to buy cars. Presumably, they're getting something in exchange for such horrors. One of the things they're getting, according to University of California at Berkeley sociologist Claude Fisher, is--well, a sense of "rootedness" in their communities. In his recent paper, "Ever-More Rooted Americans," published by the Russell Sage Foundation, Fisher argues that automotive mobility has allowed Americans to move to better jobs while remaining in the communities they like.

"When living a couple of miles from one's job was impractical," Fisher declares, "changing jobs...