Bring It On Home
by Mark Givens -- Mung Being
James Howard Kunstler has written four books on Urban Design and Suburbia including the ground-breaking "Geography of Nowhere" in 1993. He has also written nine novels, the newest of which is entitled "Maggie Darling" and it's a doozy. He is a passionate author, a painter, an insightful social critic, and a sharp-witted observer. His latest book is called "The Long Emergency" and it talks about life after "peak oil" -- or, as he describes it in this interview, "the cheap oil fiesta of the late 20th century."
His "Clusterfuck Nation" is loaded with his commentary on our social condition and his "Eyesore of the Month" serves to remind us, with wit and sincerity, of the horrible things we're doing to our surroundings. But most of all, James Howard Kunstler gives voice to the uneasy feelings that bubble up within us, from the discomfort and confusion regarding our current urban environment to the uncertainty regarding our future post-cheap oil.
MungBeing: Your background is not in urban planning or architecture. Where does your passion for urban design come from?
James Howard Kunstler: Well, I've had to live in the shitty environments of daily life here in America for half a century, and I have strong feelings about it. The books I wrote represented to a large extent a personal struggle to understand why we could do such damage to our civilization.
MB: What attracted you to New Urbanism?
JHK: When I was writing "The Geography of Nowhere," I went up a lot of blind alleys. I talked to a lot of people who were, in fact, part of the problem -- for example, "star" architects like Bob Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, who thought all the suburban crap was wonderful, playful, marvelous. When I finally encountered Andres Duany, I realized I had finally come to the right source. That very year, 1993, Andres along with his wife Lizz Plater-Zyberk, Doug Kelbaugh of the U of Washington, Peter Calthorpe, Stefanos Polyzoides, and a bunch of other dissatisfied architect / urbanists were organizing the official group that came to be called the Congress for the New Urbanism -- the name was supplied by it's founding director, Peter Katz. These guys knew the score. I had found my way home.
MB: In practice, pure Democracy has not actually existed, true Communism has not existed and I believe that actual implementations of New Urbanist neighborhoods have not been fully realized. I think that New Urbanist plans have been made but not executed fully because of planning commissions, regulators, various "standard bearers," etc getting in there and mucking it all up. Am I wrong about that? Have any actual New Urbanist plans ever been fully realized and implemented?
JHK: There's no question that the officialdom of planning, and the horrendous body of code-and-regulation has posed a HUGE obstacle to reforming the way we live in this country. The inertia was overwhelming. Many New urbanist projects did get fatally compromised. A few came out pretty well. However, I have always viewed the New Urbanist "New Towns" work as a transitional phenomena. That is, they are kind of a bridge between the cheap oil fiesta of the late 20th century and the new era of oil scarcity we are now entering. I don't think the founding New Urbanists were consciously aware of this -- certainly not back in the mid-1990s. These days, some of the New Urbanist leaders have become keenly aware of the peak oil predicament and what it implies -- namely that the future will not present a "choice" between suburbia and traditional living arrangements. Rather suburbia is simply coming off the menu. Andres knows this. After a decade-plus of practice, though, another insidious problem has occurred with the New Urbanists. They became so successful that they were sort of co-opted and made hostage to the production home building industry. This is a problem because that whole scale of operation cannot continue, nor can the further development of greenfield sites, because we will be desperate to reassign all remaining good farmland back to food production, as industrial agriculture fails us. It is quite a problem.
MB: Are there any examples of New Urbanism out there in the world today?
JHK: Well, there are scores of New Urbanist projects that were completed all over the United States and Canada. In Europe, there were projects done by New Urbanists, but it's virtually impossible to make a distinction between, say, an infill project designed by DPZ (Duany / Plater-Zyberk) in Berlin and the usual practice done by others in Berlin -- since both represent essentially the same traditional urbanism.
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