I feel at home in strip malls, in the looping streets of subdivisions, in the bland suburban landscapes people love to hate.

If you listen to the experts, much of the place I’m from is not a place at all. Suburban Michigan is full of winding roads dotted with identical houses, strip malls stuffed with chain restaurants and big-box stores, and thoroughfares designed for cars, with pedestrian walkways as an afterthought. The anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term non-places to describe interchangeable, impersonal spaces lacking in history and culture that people pass through quickly and anonymously. Non-places—such as shopping centers, gas stations, and highways—can be found everywhere but seem to particularly proliferate in the suburbs like the one I grew up in. The writer James Howard Kunstler memorably called this sort of landscape “the geography of nowhere.”

In his book of the same title, Kunstler traces the history of the suburbs from the Puritans’ 17th-century conception of private property up to the early 1990s, when The Geography of Nowhere was published. He argues that, enamored with both automobiles and the sheer amount of space in this country, the U.S. built a sprawling empire of suburbs because, as he puts it, “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” But this arrangement has proved to be “deeply demoralizing and psychologically punishing,” he told me in an email—not only because the design of suburbia is unsightly but because it is at odds with human connection and flourishing. He doesn’t mince words about what he sees as the consequences of this way of life, writing in his book that “the immersive ugliness of the built environment in the USA is entropy made visible,” and suggesting that America has become “a nation of people conditioned to spend their lives in places not worth caring about.”

This sort of dismissal is a common posture, though few have put it quite so colorfully. Perhaps because of the sometimes bland and homogenous built environment, many people assume the suburbs have a conformist culture too. These places have long been associated with boredom, with a vague, free-floating malaise. (Or, as one writer bluntly put it, “You know it sucks, but it’s hard to say exactly why.”) There is a Subreddit with 60,000 members called “Suburban Hell.” All of this adds up to a popular conception of suburbs as indistinct and interchangeable—they are “no-man’s-land,” the “middle of nowhere.” And this idea doesn’t come only from city slickers sneering at “flyover country.” Jason Diamond, the author of the book The Sprawl, said in an interview with Bloomberg that he’s noticed a “self-hatred” among people who come from suburbia.

From the September 1996 issue: Home from nowhere

Yet the majority of Americans live in this “nowhere.” Being precise about the proportion of the U.S. that is suburbia is difficult—the federal government, in much of its data, doesn’t distinguish “suburban” as a category distinct from “rural” and “urban” (perhaps implying that it, too, considers these places not worth caring........

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