The way forward: beyond urban planning
James Howard Kunstler’s classic work, The Geography of Nowhere: the Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, remains central to many urban planners and urban ecologists thoughts on U.S. cities. As this particular urban ecologist prepares to teach next semester at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, I’ve been meditating on Kunstler’s work. His central argument is indubitably correct: the rise of the automobile, combined with extensive government investment in road infrastructure and the persistent American ideal of agrarian purity, led to massive growth in suburbs, which were simply unpleasant places to live in many senses.
Kunstler commits one great sin during his presentation, a sin all authors must constantly flirt with to some extent: simplification. He shows only the negative aspects of dispersed-style development, and doesn’t adequately discuss the many negative aspect of live in an industrialized city. An economist would argue, correctly I think, that people would only have moved to the suburbs if they felt that on average it was a good move for them and their families. A full understanding of suburbanization requires an understanding of these drivers of migration.
Kunstler’s solution to the banality of current development in the U.S. rests on a firm faith in the power of urban planning to restore some sanity to American growth. I whole-heartedly agree that this is an important goal, and one that the brave practitioners of New Urbanism may hopefully bring into fruition. However, his solution also strikes me as symptomatic of a disease that urban planners and landscape architects are often afflicted with: the belief that bad urban planning, and the bad ideas behind it, is the root of bad development patterns in the U.S. The reality is that most new development occurs without any direct input from an urban planner or landscape architect, in patterns that result from a combination of economic drivers and relatively diffuse laws. Changing these diffuse laws, as Kunstler advocates, is surely important, but at least as much attention must be focused on making the economic drivers reflect the full cost of ecological and sociological externalities.
This brings me to the other think about the book that makes me uneasy: I have the sense that Kunstler envisions the end of the automobile era as a reversion to previous transportation technologies. We must acknowledge that there has been a consistent trend toward transportation systems that increase mobility and decrease the per-mile cost of transit. This trend will likely continue into the future, regardless of how the oil economy ends up crashing in the short to medium term. It is a simple fact that development patterns are shaped in fundamental ways by the dominant transportation system, and so new development will by necessity look different than in the past. There is no going back to the city of the 19th century, no matter how much New Urbanist planning we do. There are of course principles from older form of development that we should preserve, but we must not slip into nostalgia. The new developments of the 21st century can be more sustainable and humane than those of the 20th century, but they will above all be new, in style and form.
