This interview is courtesy of David over at CityComforts Blog. The person interviewed is James Howard Kunstler, who is the author The Geography of Nowhere, and Home From Nowhere and The City in Mind. These texts are critiques of modern urban and suburban design in that argue that cities "relinquished their authority in the 60s and gave it to the developers, and highway engineers, who then made decisions about things they didn't understand. And they made a mess of things."
I do not know any of the texts or even the author. But I love what he has to sdy on his website :---"the 20th century is over! We don't have to be Modern anymore!" Oh I wish that we had this kind of writing in Australia about liberal modernity and the mass exodus from our urban centers since the 1950s that has left our cities gutted and strangled. It would open up a dialogue on the development and effects of modern urban construction that now enframes and disciplines our everyday lives.
That is what being modern meant in Australia: being suburban: bargain shopping, fast food and auto slums. I drive through the southern part of Adelaide each weekend to go to Victor Harbor, and it is depressing. The whole surburban part of the city of the linear Adelaide is sleepwalking on cheap oil. And the public places in the inner city are not worth being in because of the cars. So we have a mutilated urbanism.
I just love this:
"Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work. A land full of places that are not worth caring about will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending."
The civic revival has been driven by the New Urbanism, which is described thus:
"They re-discovered all this stuff. Information about typology. Why different types of buildings are appropriate in specific kinds of places. Why it's not a good idea to put a bank building, which looks like a southern plantation, in the most important part of your downtown. It's a rural building, and putting it into an urban setting doesn't behave right.The New Urbanists are applying this knowledge in a hybrid way, understanding that they're working within a market with certain expectations. Bankers have to be retrained to make loans for real estate ventures that don't fit into templates that they understand - strip malls and subdivisions. Home builders have to be retrained to put out a product different from packing crates with vinyl siding. Planning officials have to be retrained to recognize that the suburban development pattern is tremendously destructive, and that there's a better way of doing things. We don't know how to do it. "