Chaos in the City. Architecture, Modernism and Peak Oil Production - James Kunstler in Interview

Author: Robert Looby

 

Some people seem to take pleasure in boasting about how long it takes them to drive to work. Like the Yorkshire men in the Monty Python sketch, they get up half an hour before going to bed the night before in order to arrive at work on time in the morning. They live, for the most part, in the suburbs.

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere (1993), The City in Mind (2001) and the forthcoming The Long Emergency, argues that the low-density suburban sprawl of “in particular” North American cities is an unsustainable model of urban development built on the back of unrealistically cheap oil which has scarred the US urban landscape and destroyed urban communities. As anyone who has been arrested for taking a stroll (i.e. not driving) in a US suburb can testify, the US urban landscape is not “walkable”, not conducive to the warm human relationships which are so beloved of Americans that there have been attempts to recreate the atmosphere of Main Street USA in towns owned by large entertainment corporations. In the real world, Kunstler writes, buildings have become divorced from streets because people drive or are expected to drive everywhere (The City in Mind).

But Kunstler likes cities and buildings and even roads, if they are done properly, as, he maintains, is the case in Paris. He is not slavishly in favour of green spaces in cities, arguing that people often favour green space because of the depressing belief that we are no longer capable of designing a building that can compete with a patch of grass. Nor does he oppose gentrification, which he sees as a routine and essential process without which neighbourhoods and cities would never recover from down-cycles. “In America,” he tells me, “we have adapted a sentimental view that the well off should not displace the people living in run-down neighbourhoods. This is a philosophically indefensible position, since it presumes that well-off people are not welcome in the city per se, and have no business fixing up old property. It implies that the well-off should restrict themselves to life in the suburbs or the rural hinterlands. A city without better-off classes cannot endure”.

Worse by far than the general unpleasantness of US cities and the gutting of their centres is the looming global oil crisis. Peak oil production is about to be reached, Kunstler and many others maintain, and a period of unprecedented civil unrest will come in its wake. Kunstler’s forthcoming book, out in May from Atlantic Monthly Press, is entitled The Long Emergency but as far back as 1993 he wrote: “Some talented mob-master may arise among us, promising the American people that he can bring back the good days ‘if only we have the guts to invade some region with deep oil reserves’” (The Geography of Nowhere). Civil unrest caused by the peaking of oil production is upon us, and ‘unrest’ is putting it mildly.

Kunstler’s prose (he is also a novelist) ranges from energetic to downright pugilistic and his books on urban planning issues and the growth of the suburbs make lively reading. A row of facades, in The Geography of Nowhere, has “an aspect of slack-jawed cretinism”. In The City in Mind he writes that St Louis is “a virtual mummy’s tomb”; Baltimore “a fly-blown carcass”; Atlanta “one big-ass parking lot under a toxic pall”; Manhattan a “physically sordid agglomeration of endlessly repeated sub-mediocre typologies and over-blown engineering stunts”; Buffalo “looks as if it suffered a prolonged ariel bombardment”; and Appleton, Wisconsin has an “asteroid belt of highway strips and architectural garbage five miles outside of town”.

I caught up by e-mail with Kunstler just after his return from Europe and asked him if he had visited any grim European cities this time round. “Well, I was in two of the real good ones”, he wrote back. “I suppose there are plenty of industrial backwaters around Europe that aren’t all that groovy. But for the most part their cities are much more satisfying places than the towns and cities of America”. One of the reasons that American towns are less satisfying is their low-density sprawl, whose civic deficiencies Kunstler gives as: “the lack of decent public space, the extreme segregation of uses, the disadvantaging of children and old people who don’t drive. There are plenty of cities worldwide that have neighbourhoods composed of single-family houses on very small lots, the houses themselves sometimes being very grand. It is also not difficult to combine typologies, mixing single family houses with multifamily houses on small lots. The differences are often cultural. In Paris, for instance, apartment living is normative; to some extent the modern apartment building was pioneered in Paris. London, on the other hand, has long been allergic to apartment living. The result there was a series of neighbourhoods composed entirely of single-family rowhouses, a rather dreary and monotonous condition. Sprawl is the least natural and normative living arrangement. It was pioneered in the US, which began the 20th century with a handsome supply of its own oil. We now depend desperately for more than half the oil we use on nations who hate us. The age of sprawl as a credible alternative is nearing its end”.

I asked Kunstler if successful cities were planned or if they grew. “For the most part ‘successful’ cities grow ‘organically’ in a self-organizing process that might be characterized as the process called ‘emergence’. But parts of cities definitely are planned in an overt and conscious process. The neighbourhood squares of London and their accompanying row houses fall into that category, as do the great avenues of Paris dating from Louis-Napoleon’s time (1848-1870), or earlier pieces such as the Place de Vosges, which was a royal palace occupying an entire block with a square in the centre. The industrial era induced a kind of hyper-growth on cities that was sometimes planned and sometimes arbitrary. Of course, one has to make a distinction between grand schemes of urban design carried out as projects (e.g. Washington DC) as opposed to sets of standards and norms of excellence (e.g. the City Beautiful movement in the US (1890 - 1930)) which was more a matter of a consensus among architects about the best practices in design. The 20th century has been mostly unfortunate for all cities, insofar as virtually all growth has been hypertrophy, or pathological hyper-growth. The suburban tendency in America has been a fiasco, and somewhat less catastrophic in Europe, where the value of city life per se was retained”.

Kunstler describes architecture as a discredited profession in The City in Mind. (The Pompidou Centre is, he writes, a “mutilation” (39)). In interview he is just as uncompromising: “Most people, including intelligent, well-educated ones, think, in their heart of hearts, of contemporary buildings as things that have made their lives worse, not better. And certainly the accompanying disdain of the urban context among architects (‘star’ architects in particular) has made matters much worse. The ideology of architecture has been made hostage to the extreme entropy of our industrial culture. The immersive ugliness of American townscapes is, in fact, entropy made visible. And by ‘entropy’ I mean the tendency of things to lead to deadness and death. The ideas issuing from the highest circles of architectural education today are patent absurdities, such as the idea that novelty ought to trump the public interest, or the idea that ‘creativity’ (so-called) is a superior method than the emulation of forms that have already proven successful (meaning problems already solved). Personally, I view some of the leading architects of our time as being among the wickedest people in the world”.

Corbusier is an especial bete-noir for Kunstler. “Corbu’s main contribution to the destruction of the human habitat was his virulent hatred for cities and the enactments of urban life in particular. His writings are full of disdain for the life of the street and the people in them. It is no surprise therefore that he excelled at finding ways to destroy these indispensable units of urban design. Corbu was the father of the ‘tower in the park’ idea, which soon mutated in the US into the failed experiment of the housing projects. His contemporaries were equally destructive. Walter Gropius fled Germany and was immediately given authority as head of Harvard’s graduate program. In doing so, he began the process whereby despotic Modernism became the only permissible mode of design in the industrial world. Its most serious offence, besides his promotion of gigantism in scale, was what writer Wendy Steiner has shrewdly labelled ‘the exile of Venus’, meaning they wrung everything feminine out of architecture: no more ornament, no sensuality, no curves, no emulation of forms found in nature. Instead we got the worship of the Machine, an ethos promoted by the last of the Three Canonical Amigos, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, who landed at the Illinois Institute of Technology". Here Kunstler is particularly scathing, likening this ethos to, for example, sadomasochism. "These characters and their disciples managed to squeeze all the humanity out of architecture, at least public and monumental architecture, and left us with a legacy of robot buildings made for human ciphers”.

When I remarked that Gropius’s gigantism reminds me of Socialist Realist architecture he replied, “Gigantism was not by any means Walter Gropius’s special thing. Gigantism was a hallmark of industrial civilization and all the architects that served it. It required buildings for activities organized at the giant scale, everything from sixty story corporate office buildings to giant slabs of university dormitories to massive government bureaucracy headquarters. Gigantism went hand-in-hand with the worship of the machine and machine form, in place of forms drawn from nature, and was also something embraced by almost all the iconic Modernists. A more interesting take on Gropius’s aesthetic of machine purism is E. Michael Jones’s notion that Gropius was attempting to compensate for his messy sex life”.

Kunstler himself has no formal training architecture or related design fields. I asked him if he encountered much snobbery from trade professionals. “I’ve encountered some snobbery in the architecture schools where I am invited to lecture, but the architecture professors are snobby toward everyone. I don’t feel singled out. They are engaged mainly in the project of defending an indefensible ideology, Modernism (capital M), which has been hugely destructive to the human race. Their vocation is discredited. The public loathes their cold and inhumane buildings. They’re paranoid. Many of those who teach are precisely the ones who couldn’t make a living at architecture if they tried, so they take comfort in the shelter of theory and ideology. It confers a comfortable sense of superiority on people who haven’t accomplished anything. The record of their ideology in the cities and towns of America is there for anyone to see: abandonment, ruin, and the dishonour of the public realm”. Most of the resistance Kunstler runs up against comes from people with vested interests in urban sprawl, he tells me. “I’ve been all over the country several times over and most ‘normal’ people out there are very distressed about what has happened to their towns and cities. They’re also ashamed, and baffled. They are very grateful to hear that it doesn’t have to be like that, that there are different choices that they (and their public officials) can make”.

A part of the problem with urban development in the US is the sanctity of private property. In The City in Mind Kunstler writes that US property law was linked to individualism: you could fine a landlord for not having running water but you could not enter his property and install it. Nor could his tenants sue if he did not comply with regulations (35). I asked him about the differences in planning law between America and Europe: “European nations have very different land tenure traditions and laws than those in America. They tend to produce a kind of ownership that has many more obligations and requirements built-in. To some extent, land ownership in Europe is understood as just a more elaborate form of long-term tenancy. In a kingdom, particularly, there is a tacit understanding that the ultimate owner of all land is the crown, whatever the current disposition of things may be. The authorities have much more power to tell European land-owners what they can and can’t do with their land”.

I asked how to go about designing a city in which it is easy to orient yourself, an issue which comes up in The City in Mind. “There is charm in something like the medieval city. Most large Euro cities today retain at least gothic ‘quarters’. Orientation is achieved by means other than a legible, rational street-and-block plan. For instance, by landmarks. Church towers are one method for establishing where you are in a city. You can see them from a distance. So are the interruptions in urban fabric known as squares and plazas of various sizes. Another method is the ‘terminating vista’, which is a way of siting important buildings at the end of streets. One effect of this is to break up a longer journey across the city into smaller increments; you establish a visible destination (a courthouse or a palace), reach it, and then move toward the next visible destination (a square, a cathedral) and so you make your way around the city by steps. It’s not as simple as the numbered, orthogonal block system of Manhattan, but it works fairly well and it has a lot more charm. For the visitor, it even has the charm of a puzzle that is not so difficult to solve”.

Concern has been voiced recently in Europe at the impact of suburban retail giants, readily accessible only by car, on the fabric of local communities and cities. In Dublin there has been some controversy over mooted plans to change the law in order to allow a multinational furniture chain to build a massive shop in the northern suburbs [Editor’s note: The law has subsequently been changed, removing the previous 6000m² cap on retail outlet premises]. Kunstler, though, is not too worried about the influence of these mega-chains: “I believe that the format of giant chain stores is a temporary phenomenon, a product of certain anomalous economic conditions that will not continue in the decades to come. Defence against these corporate ‘swarm organisms’ has been difficult to impossible. But they are about to wither and disappear. Fighting against the Ikeas and Wal-Marts of the world, at this point, is a waste of time. They’ll be gone surprisingly soon. The national chain store model of trade will not survive the permanent global energy predicament and the conditions emanating out of it, in particular the end of cheap long-distance transport and 12,000 mile-long manufacturing supply chains. Their narrow profit margins will be destroyed in a non-cheap-energy future. Life is going to become extremely local in the years ahead. And the scale of all activities will have to be reduced”.

We turn to oil and the Hubbert peak. M. King Hubbert predicted that global oil production would peak in the late 1990s, after which the cost of extracting oil would steadily become higher and higher as we reached for less easily extractible oil at a time when the growing world economy would require ever more oil. In 1956 Hubbert correctly predicted the year that oil production would peak in the US; his forecast for global peak oil production has been knocked off course by only a few years because of the 1970s oil crisis.

“The consensus among those who study the oil peak phenomenon, chiefly Colin Campbell, Kenneth Deffeyes and their colleagues, many of them former oil company chief geologists, is that 2005 will be the actual year of peak. After that, suburban development will be tragic, if any of it happens at all. Our cities will have to shrink. The food supply will be in big trouble. The implication of that is that the hinterlands of our towns and cities will have to be devoted to much more local food production. Good luck”. I countered with OECD predictions that oil will still only cost 35 dollars a barrel in 2030 Kunstler’s reply was brusque: “The OECD is fucked in the head”. He does not hold out much hope for alternative energy sources or modes of transport just yet either. “No combination of alternative fuels or systems currently known will allow us to run American society as it has been, or even a substantial fraction of it. The ’hydrogen economy’ is a dangerous fantasy. If we want to keep the lights on after 2020, we’ll probably have to build more nuke plants. That’s not a personal desire necessarily on my part. Just stating a fact”.

“The Segway is an admirable invention, but it will logically end up being an expensive prosthetic aid for economically well-off old people and cripples, not a means of mass transport, as promoted by its inventor, Dean Kamen. The reasons for this are manifold. 1.) We are going to be a far less affluent society in the post-cheap energy world and the Segway is precisely the kind of expensive toy that fewer people will be able to afford. 2.) The electric grid is going to be severely stressed by the coming natural gas crisis. Electricity is going to get a lot more expensive and we are likely to go through a period (at least) of chronic brownouts and blackouts. 3.) For normal healthy people, walking is a far more efficient, natural, pleasant, and economical way to get around. Like a lot of techno-boondoggles (e.g. Amory Lovins's ‘hyper-car’) the notion of mass Segway use is a distraction from humanity’s more important task of returning to the design of walkable communities”.

This bleak future seems to make persuading people to use public transport redundant: I asked Kunstler if people could be weaned off the private car. “People will be ‘weaned’ off the private car - he replied - only as circumstances compel them to be. They will not be ‘persuaded’ to live differently by political policy. In any case, the physical arrangement of life in America so overwhelmingly mandates car dependency that the living arrangement itself will be in jeopardy, not just motoring. One problem seldom considered is that driving will become increasingly privileged, less democratic than it has been. The middle class will be economically devastated by the global energy crisis. They will be incrementally less and less able to afford car ownership, estimated at an average of $6,000 a year. What happens when 14 percent of the public can no longer participate in the mandatory motoring system? Or 23 percent? Or 37 percent? Big political trouble. In any case, cars will be a diminished presence in our lives a decade or two from now”.

Finally I asked Kunstler if all this talk of urban and suburban planning is not academic in the face of the exhaustion of oil reserves. This is the subject of his forthcoming book. “Yes, a lot of this talk about urban planning and related issues is somewhat academic at this point, in the face of the socio-political tidal wave of the global peak oil crisis coming at us. These days, I often tell audiences that in the decades ahead, the New Urbanism [compact, pedestrian-friendly mixed-use neighbourhoods] will be the Only Urbanism. Suburban development will come to a shockingly abrupt end. The trouble is, we will be a much poorer society and we will not make an easy transition back to traditional living arrangements. The failure of suburbia will have turbulent political ramifications. There will be a fire-sale of distressed properties out there as the value of suburban real estate plummets. There will be a political fight over the table scraps of the 20th century. A lot of people will lose jobs. Vocational niches will disappear. A new social class of economic losers will emerge: the formerly middle class. They will be pissed off about the loss of their ‘entitlement’ to ‘the American Dream’. They will create a lot of political mischief. They may vote for maniacs who promise to make all this trouble magically go away. There will be a tremendous need to produce more food locally, and a lot of trouble making that happen, from the reallocation of land to the technical problems of food production with much-reduced fossil fuel inputs. A lot of people may starve and certain parts of the US may become violent. Some places, such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, will literally dry up and blow away over the next one hundred years. The survivors elsewhere will be living in much more traditional environments, though they will be surrounded by many ruins and relics of a former age”.

Sources and Related Links

Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community and the American Dream, (Princeton Architectural Press) 1993 (New Urbanism)
Kenneth Deffeyes, Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage, (Princetown University Press) 2001
Andreas Duany, E. Plater-Zyberk & Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, NY) 2000
Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, (Doubleday, NY) 1991
E. Michael Jones, Living Machines: Bauhaus Architecture as Sexual Ideology, (Ignatius Press) 1995
James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-MadeLandscape, (Simon & Schuster, NY) 1993
James Howard Kunstler, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, (Free Press) 2001
James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency, (Atlantic Monthly Press, forthcoming)
The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream, (documentary film) director: Gregory Greene