Kunstler calls for "New Urbanism"
The tabloids in our super market checkout lanes tell us that we are fascinated with UFOs. To James Kunstler, those UFOs consist of Jiffy Lubes and the like lining our highways. The post-World War II "suburban replacement" for our cities and towns, he claimed in addressing the Twelfth National STS Meeting in Worcester, MA, on 8 March 1997, is now bankrupting us. These UFOs are not only symptoms of our culture but also the cause of it.
Drawing from two of his books -- The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere -- Kunstler observed that in our world the "public realm" mainly takes the form of streets (there are few squares and plazas). In suburban sprawl they exist in what he termed "spiritually impoverished" form, housing a slum of automobiles. By making the degradation of the public realm a normal condition in our lives, he argued that we have discouraged attempts to focus on what is good for our communities.
The cabin in the woods or the manor in the park were the response to the industrial city, initially in the form of the romantic railroad suburb, he pointed out. The automobile suburb has been an even more grotesque model, he went on, yet it is the only acceptable living pattern for many. Multiples of cabins in the woods are now called a housing development, not a neighborhood or community. It is isolated, as all the individual cabins are, because we want it that way, not to live in relation to others, but rather to imagine ourselves as pioneers.
But civic life is not about being alone, he claimed; rather, it is about being with other people. A civilization cannot be constructed solely from country houses. Cities and towns are indispensable. Kunstler maintained that we need to reinvent civic life to feel welcome in the city again.
Both political parties are opposed to city life in their own way, he continued. Democrats oppose gentrification because it displaces poor people and raises rents in adjoining neighborhoods. The extension of this attitude is that cities should be for impoverished minorities only, and not for progressive citizens. Unless environmentalists become concerned with where humans live, Kunstler felt that their efforts to preserve wilderness will go for naught.
Republicans proclaiming family values and arguing for replication of suburban sprawl are also opposed to civilization, Kunstler went on. Their children's public realm is "Beavis and Butthead" and MTV. He felt that conservatives confuse communities with communes.
Anyone who thinks we'll be using cars 25 years from now the same way we are today will be sorely disappointed, Kunstler predicted. That era is coming to an end. Not only have cars polluted our air; they have also deprived our children from learning how to get around -- e.g., to the library. Electric and low-polluting cars (as espoused by Amory Lovins at the Tenth National STS Meeting and reported in our Spring 1995 issue) are too expensive to be the answer, Kunstler felt. Nor, in his opinion, is the Intelligent Vehicle Highway System (operated by the coordination of computers on highways and in cars) the answer, in spite of the millions of dollars of government funding. Why not establish a reliable mass transit system, he countered, in which our brains are the on-board computers? Kunstler lamented that today's attitude is that public transit is for losers.
But our transportation system needs to connect places worth caring about, Kunstler added. Most of our cities are not worth caring about, so we feel the need to get in our cars to escape them.
Finally, Kunstler argued, we need to reintegrate poor people into our cities. They can and should be provided good housing, and they can contribute through their own work and diligence. Kunstler's "New Urbanism" declares that the quality of where we live and our public realm matter. The knowledge to achieve it already exists in the 50 centuries prior to World War II. Kunstler urged us to go back to rescue much of what we have thrown out. Achieving the "New Urbanism," he maintained, will lead automatically to restoration of institutions that have declined -- the family and the community.
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