IN LAST FRIDAY’S Misc. World Midsummer Reading List, I mentioned James H. Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere and its sequel Home From Nowhere.
The two books claim to offer a thorough diagnosis of what’s wrong with the American suburban-sprawl nightmare and what might be done about it. Unfortunately, Kunstler himself sprawls all over the landscape of thought. He reveals himself as a self-described “angry old hippie” who doesn’t just have beefs against cookie-cutter subdivisions, soulless strip malls, and scenery-scarring freeways. He appears to hate the entire 20th century industrial society.
Kunstler rants and rants against mass-produced building materials, standardized home design, Craftsman-era magazines that published ready-to-build house blueprints, single-crop agriculture, etc. etc. etc.
And, of course, like all conformist nonconformists of the angry-old-hippie school, he reserves his deepest animosity for television, the angry-old-hippie’s all-purpose scapegoat for everything that goes wrong with everything.
I guess we should be grateful that Kunstler, unlike a certain other angry old hippie who hated industrial society, offers some positive solutions. Most of them come from the “New Urbanism” movement, a scattered bunch of architects, developers, planners and thinkers who wish to undo 55 years of North American civic planning.
For now, the New Urbanists’ schemes have led to a few planned communities, mostly in the Sunbelt. But if carried a little further, their schemes might eventually lead to “suburban renewal,” humanizing the existing sprawl (taking advantage of the possible depletion of oil reserves and the even more possible decline of existing malls and big-box chains as Net retailing gains more of a foothold).
Dig, if you will, the picture: Decaying old discount stores and supermarkets rebuilt as, or replaced by, public marketplaces and walkable meeting places. Hectares of surface parking lots replaced by curbside storefronts. Older and more decayed subdivisions refitted to be (or razed and done anew as) real neighborhoods with narrower streets, real sidewalks, smaller houses built closer together, and the population density that could make public transit more feasible.
One thing the New Urbanists sometimes don’t like to mention (though Kunstler does) is how today’s sprawlscape is the child, or at least the bastard grandchild, of yesterday’s humanitarian schemers, who thought they could destroy the twin scourges of urban chaos and rural poverty by imposing a rational, efficient, modern, convenient, and clean-looking built environment. Harvard Design Magazine writer Michael Benedik discusses this in a piece on “Architecture’s Value(s) in the Marketplace”: “The condition of the modern world is due at least partially to what the ‘best’ and most prominent architects have done, have allowed, and have come earnestly to believe over the past fifty years.”
Kunstler insists government regulation will have to be part of the answer. But he also admits government regulation has been part of the problem. Streetcars were private enterprises that merely used city rights-of-way. Freeways were and are built and maintained by governments, via gas and vehicle taxes encouraged by “the highway lobby.” Subdivisions and strip malls are the product of building codes devised to allow almost no other types of residential construction.
The Libertarian Party might use these facts to claim developers not only could but certainly would build more imaginative, affordable, dense, and eco-friendly tracts if only freed from those pesky ol’ governments telling ’em what to do. I don’t completely buy that line of reasoning (the private sector’s done plenty-O-damage to the landscape over the decades, with and without gov’t encouragement), but it does have something going for it.
As the influx of cyber-wealth into Seattle has shown, people want to live in real cities and towns. It’s just that Sprawlsvilles are the only new residential areas being built.
But before we buy up the old beige-rambler houses and replace them with something with more “character,” let’s remember what the subdivisions have wrought, the human-scale lives lived in inhuman-scale surroundings. As a current photo exhibit in NYC shows, humans have and will continue to express their individuality amid even the least-likely settings.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be octagonal.
MONDAY: A think-tank boss wants us to stop worrying about overpopulation.
ELSEWHERE: “Want to know what to expect before you see a movie? Want to read a mockery of some movie you hated? Have a few minutes to kill?” Then see parody movie scripts at The Editing Room (“We Clean Up After Hollywood”). An example, opening up Eyes Wide Shut:
INT. TOM AND NICOLE’S APARTMENT
NICOLE is wearing a sign that says “I’m in the movie, too.”
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE SPOOKY SATANIC MANSION
TOM:This is really weird. I must leave before I have sex and allow the audience to see me naked.
HIGH PRIEST: But, I thought the movie centered on you being naked.
AUDIENCE: So did we.
TOM: Ha ha ha.
