A Reflection on Cities of the Future (James Kunstler)

[Tace]

James Howard Kunstler -- Kunstler.com

Back in the early 20th Century, when the cheap oil fiesta was just getting underway, and some major new technological innovation made its debut every month -– cars, radio, movies, airplanes –- there was no practical limit to what men of vision could imagine about the future city, though often their imaginings were ridiculous. The representative case is Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret; 1887–1965), the leading architectural hoodoo-meister of Early High Modernism, whose 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris proposed to knock down the entire Marais district on the Right Bank and replace it with rows of identical towers set between freeways.
Luckily for Paris, the city officials laughed at him every time he came back with the scheme over the next forty years -– and Corb was nothing if not a relentless self-promoter. Ironically and tragically, though, the Plan Voisin model was later adopted gleefully by post World War Two American planners, and resulted in such urban monstrosities as the infamous Cabrini Green housing projects of Chicago and scores of things like it around the country.

Other visions of that early period involved Tom Swiftian scenes of Everest-size skyscrapers with Zeppelin moorings on top, linked to zooming air trams, while various types of personal helicopters swooped between things. Virtually all these schemes had one thing in common: the city of the future they depicted was vibrant. We know now, here in the USA anyway, that this was the one thing they got most wrong. By 1970, many American cities were stone dead at their centers, especially the industrial giants of the Midwest. Ten years later, the American city of the future was the nightmare vision of Blade Runner, an acid rain-dripping ruin fit only for androids.

These days, a new generation of mojo architect savants such as Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas are retailing an urban futurism that is basically warmed-over Corbu with an expressionist horror movie spin, featuring torqued and tortured skyscrapers, made possible by computer-aided design, clad in Darth Vadar glass or other sheer surfaces, with grim public spaces exquisitely engineered to induce agoraphobia. There’s more than a tinge of sadism in all this, though Koolhaas is much more explicit in his many writings than the less-voluble Libeskind about consciously surrendering to a zeitgeist of cruel alienation. But these are also very rarified exercises among a tiny group of mutually-referential fashionista narcissists, while the general public itself –- at least the fraction that thinks about anything -– only grudgingly goes along with it as a sort of drear obeisance to the religion of art.

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http://www.worldnewstrust.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=686

[GreenPartyVoter]

1. Which is why I prefer to live in the country and

build a sweet little eco-friendly home with active and passive solar + a wind turbine. Add in enough land to have a little garden patch and a small greenhouse to help grow supplemental veggies for the winter and a good sized pantry so I can buy things in bulk and cut down on trips to the store in the Prius I wish I had.

[Tace]

5. That Sounds Good

I'm living in the city now, and living in a rural town is sounding more and more appealing.

[DRoseDARs]

2. Interesting how this guy can easily knock on the idea of building upwards, but conveniently forgets

...that our population is over 6 billion, is growing, and shows no sign of stopping. It'd be nice if we could all live in little Mayberry hamlets... BUT WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO BUILD THEM ALL?! If we were to do as Kunstler implies, then we'd quickly cover the land area of the Earth with New Urbanist utopias just to house the billions and billions of people. Kinda defeats the whole idea of New Urbanism and related concepts. I love the ideas of New Urbanism and have used them in college projects, but I'm also not naive. There are simply too many people in this world and unless (assuming successful mass colonization of other planets is a looong way off...) you're emphatically suggesting that either A) the world should be completely covered with millions of little hamlets, B) we should exterminate a few billion people to bring our population down to a more manageable number, or C) we should have both hamlets and brutish towered cities that will necessitate two classes of people: The rich living in the hamlets, the poor living in the "urban monstrosities," then to dismiss so eagerly the fact that the future belongs to skyscrapers is just asinine.

He has quite the dim view of the coming century, so unless he's suggesting we're facing a mass die-off of billions of people, built-up cities are the only places these people can go. Skyscrapers and mega-buildings, not darling little tea houses and tree-lined bike paths, are the only things that can house the teeming masses as our world population continues to grow. If Mr. Kunstler wants to avoid the "nightmare vision of Blade Runner" then he should help urban planners design smarter instead of bitching about "torqued and tortured skyscrapers." Dude, get a new hobby. No one likes to hear a grown man whine and for God's sake, lose the bow tie.

[unother]

3. He's Realy Just an Anti-Suburbanite

So true.

For that matter, I would view Kunstler as a "fellow-traveller" in all the "Peak Dollar", "Peak Oil", "Peak Weather", domains.

The man just hates the suburbs.

Anything that wrecks the suburbs is fine by him.

[ixion]

4. a very realistic assessment

IMHO.

Kicked and recommended.