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He’s A Resi Neiiiiere Han,
iivins Ia HU Keuhere &sAd
■p wonder why most of us work in
Hi V \Z I one part of town, eat and shop in
another, and live nowheie near either? Do you
find yourself working extra hours to pay for a
car—so that you can get to your job? Is the
preva ,o nce of chemically treated lawns and oily
asphalt parking lots enough to keep you
indoors—or do you live in a city where it's
actually unsafe to breathe the air?
As James Howard Kunstler will tell you, it
wasn't always this way. In Tne Geography of
Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-
Made Landscape (1994) and Home From
Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the
Twenty-First Century (1998), he explains what
A'ent wrong:
"Eighty percent of everything ever
built in America has been built in the
last fifty years, and most of it is
depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and
spiritually degrading—the jive-plastic
commuter tract home wastelands, the
Potemkin village shopping plazas with
their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-
block hotel com
plexes, the
'gourmet
mansardic' junk-
food joints, the
Orwellian office
'parks' featuring
buildings sheathed
in the same reflec
tive glass as the
sunglasses worn by
chaingang guards,
the particle-beard
garden apartments
rising up in every
meadow and corn
field, the freeway
loops around every
big and little city
with their clusters
of discount mer
chandise marts,
tne whole destruc
tive, wasteful,
toxic, agoraphobia-
inducing spectacle that politicians
proudly call 'growth.'
Kunstler posits that the post-World War II
economic boom allowed the new middle class to
flee the grimy industrial hlight that had made
life in many cities miserable. Plus, with the
advent of the automobile, it was no longer nec
essary to live within walking distance of, well,
anything.
Bolstered by Madison Avenue's assurance
tnat we could indeed have it all, Americans
fanned out, Kunstler says, to our "little cabins
in the woods," on cookie-cutter tracts with
manicured lawns lining cul de sacs sans side
walks. (Walking was for poor people, after all.)
With a few exceptions, our cities and towns
became little more than barren parking lots.
The result of what Kunstler calls our "indus
trial experiment" is a narcissistic, nihilistic
pseudo-society that has, to put it mildly, lost
its way.
Thanks to zoning laws that segregate
industry and commercial activities from
housing, Kunstler says, Americans no longer
have any concept of civic life. Consequently, we
have ceased to care about what buildings look
like or how they function in relation to the
people who encounter them. A big box retail
outlet atop a scorching asphalt slab may
assault our sensibilities, but we're so obsessed
with accumulating SUV-loads of cheap plastic
map that we barely take time to notice.
Somehow over the last half-century, Kunstler
points out, we traded in citizenship for con
sumerism. "Live to shop" has become more
than a cutesy slogan on a key chain; it may as
well be our national motto.
This paradigm is painfully evident in the
suburban housing development, and Kunstler
says it's killing our kids.
"Americans think suburbia is great for
lads. The truth is, kids older than seven
need more from their environment than a
safe place to ride their bikes. They need
at least the same things adults need.
Dignified places to
hanq out. Shops.
Eating establish
ments. Libraries,
museums, and the
aters. They need a
public realm worthy
of respect. All of
which they need
access to on theii
own, without our
assistance—which
only keeps them in
an infantile state of
dependency. In
suburbia, as things
presently stand,
children only have
access to television.
That's their public
realm. It's really a
wonder that more
American children
are not completely
psychotic."
Our self-destructive car culture is perpetu
ated, Kunstler says, by an incestuous govern
ment subsidized highway construction industry
and its ties to businesses, developers and politi
cians with a financial interest in keeping us
neck deep in our fossil-fueled ruts.
But all is not lost. Kunstler finds hope in
the towns that still work. Many of them are in
Europe, but some are right here in the US. Even
a few state governments are beginning to
realize that their departments of transportation
can—and should—be responsible for moving
people, not just cars. Besides, he says, the sheer
cost of sprawl will soon force us to reconsider
our clownish ways, whether we like it or not.
A former staff writer for Rolling Stone,
Kunstler is a frequent contributor to The New
York Times Magazine. He's also a wildly popular
lecturer and will present his latest monologue,
"Beyond The National Car Slum," as a prelude
to BikeAthens' inaugural Tour de Sprawl (see
accompanying article on facing page).
"The United States is the wealthiest
nation in the history of the world, yet its
inhabitants are strikingly unhappy.
Accordingly, we present to the rest of
mankind, on a planet rife with suffering
and tragedy, the spectacle of a down civ
ilization. Sustained on a down diet rich
in sugar and fat, we have developed a
clown physiognomy. We dress like
clowns. We move about a landscape filled
with cartoon buildings in clownmobiles,
absorbed in clownish activities."
Brad Aaron
WHO: James Howard Kunstler,
"Beyond The National Car Slum"
WHERE: UGA Chapel, North Campus
a
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