What many people probably call suburban sprawl, James Howard Kunstler likes to call the “national automobile slum.” He also thinks it’s appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. Kunstler’s TED Talk titled “The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs” is worthy of watching.
Despite the sometimes flamboyant language used by Kunstler, he has done some deep thinking about what makes America worth preserving and defending. Kunstler starts by talking about what makes any place worth caring about. The major characteristic about them is a sense of place. He describes sense of place like this:
“[Y]our ability to create places that are meaningful and places of quality and character depends entirely on your ability to define space with buildings, and to employ the vocabularies, grammars, syntaxes, rhythms and patterns of architecture in order to inform us who we are.”
Importantly, this sense of place is highly connected to who we are as Americans, how our particular form of civilization is maintained and understood by its citizens in a common way. Quoting Kunstler again, as he describes this so well:
“The public realm in America has two roles: it is the dwelling place of our civilization and our civic life, and it is the physical manifestation of the common good. And when you degrade the public realm, you will automatically degrade the quality of your civic life and the character of all the enactments of your public life and communal life that take place there. The public realm comes mostly in the form of the street in America because we don’t have the 1,000-year-old cathedral plazas and market squares of older cultures. And your ability to define space and to create places that are worth caring about all comes from a body of culture that we call the culture of civic design.”
So what’s wrong? How did we end up here? After World War II, we collectively threw that body of historical knowledge about how the public realm worked into the garbage. We thought we knew better, or could create something better from whole cloth. It was the jet age! The space age! Cheap money (low-interest, subsidized loans) and massive highway expansion fueled sprawling new housing tracts and a blurring of the lines between city and country. And consequently, we can now see the result all around us.
All too soon we will also see how this post-war style of building and civic-hostile public spaces is not just bad for our psyche and our civic life, but economically untenable. We simply cannot afford this kind of built environment, and the loans from the past 70 years since World War II are going to come due.
Do we want to save our places from decay? I’ll let Kunstler have the last word:
“We have about, you know, 38,000 places that are not worth caring about in the United States today. When we have enough of them, we’re going to have a nation that’s not worth defending.”
