The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #14: Talkin’ Peak Oil. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[intro music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to The KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency and World Made by Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: talkin’ about Peak Oil, the point at which our demand for oil will probably exceed the global supply. And just a note to our listeners, today’s program contains some sexually suggestive language.

Duncan Crary (in interview): Hey Jim!

James Howard Kunstler: Hey, Duncan!

Duncan Crary: How’s it going?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, aside from a few little arthritic complaints, I think I’m just dandy.

Duncan Crary: Well today’s topic is going to be about talking about Peak Oil. And you’ve been doing a lot of talking about Peak Oil on the media circuit lately.

James Howard Kunstler: Yes, running my mouth as they say.

Duncan Crary: You’re like the Where’s Waldo of American social criticism right now.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, like I pop up in Wisconsin and I pop up in Oregon…they call the police.

Duncan Crary: We have a listener comment, a listener caller asking for advice on how to talk about these issues. Let me play that for us right now.

Listener Caller: Hi Jim! My name is Kris and I have a Web show which is about Peak Oil awareness at KrisCan.com. I’ve read Handmade World (sic) and I’m currently reading The Long Emergency . Well, I’m finding that I’m saying “Yes, of course, absolutely!”

Personally, I believe that the more people that know the facts and have a glimpse what our near future holds there might be less chaos when we all hit the wall.

I can’t seem to persuade many of my friends and family, even with my Peak Oil video show, that this is happening and not invented by a couple of left-wing conspiracy theorists. How do you intelligently speak to people around you who don’t believe that this tidal wave of an oil crisis has anything to do with them, when it all seems so obvious and it’s happening all around us?

Duncan Crary: OK, Kris you read Handmade World but have you read World Made By Hand?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, that’s the real title. I think.

Duncan Crary: Yes. Thanks a lot for your call. So, Kris wants some advice on how to talk to people about Peak Oil who are not quite getting it, maybe a little something like this, Jim:

Stephen Colbert (audio clip from program): My guest tonight wrote a novel about a world without oil. Hear that? A novel, because it can never happen in real life. [audience laughing] Please welcome James Kunstler!

Duncan Crary: That was Stephen Colbert. Jim you were just on The Colbert Report a couple of weeks ago.

James Howard Kunstler: I was. It’s called “Publicity Through Mockery”. ‘Cause that’s how we treat serious ideas these days. They are basically held up to mockery and somebody says, “Next!” and the next person comes in.

Duncan Crary: But probably in speaking about Peak Oil that might be one of the most challenging people to talk to about it, someone acting like Stephen Colbert in real life?

James Howard Kunstler: I should say. The only thing that got me through that was about three cans of Red Bull.

Duncan Crary: OK, Jim, so Kris wants help about telling people about Peak Oil and she has a Web show which I have already checked out. So I think, before you give her advice, you should probably watch the show and listeners can listen along.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah?

Duncan Crary: So, I’m going to move Jim over to his computer right now. [movement] OK, so Jim we are going to KrisCan.com. That’s K-r-i-s-c-a-n.com.

James Howard Kunstler: Got her.

Duncan Crary: OK, now can you go to public service announcement number three. Do you see that on the screen? And let’s hit play.

[music]

Kris (voice over): Oil is a finite, non renewable resource. Currently, the world uses 85 million barrels of it per day. And that number continues to rise because the world economy is run on oil. And demand for oil globally is increasing.

The supply of oil is not going to match the demand. So production will peak, but demand for that oil will not.

Duncan Crary: So, Jim can you describe for our listeners what you are looking at right now?

Kris (voice over): …users are at, or close to, reaching Peak Oil production. Some say that oil has peaked already. Others say that it will not peak for 10 or more years.

James Howard Kunstler (watching video): Well, I see an attractive young woman with a tattoo writhing behind a couple of oil cans.

Duncan Crary: Naked, of course.

James Howard Kunstler (watching video): With a kind of a solarized video. Um…it’s kind of um…I’d like to see if she’s got a nice rack, but she’s hidden behind the gas cans… A nice face…

Kris (voice over): …petroleum has penetrated all aspects of our lives…

Duncan Crary: Are you being persuaded by this video?

James Howard Kunstler (watching video): What’s going on here is that she’s appealing to two different lobes of the brain. And I think that that in itself creates a lot of cognitive dissonance, which is exactly what we don’t need more of.

Kris (voice over): …what matters is not so much when oil will peak but how we are prepared for this change and that we continue to move away from our dependence on oil.

James Howard Kunstler (watching video): Guys are going to be watching this feeling very preoccupied with that other part of their brain.

Duncan Crary: OK, Jim so..

James Howard Kunstler: That was a little complex and I’m sorry if I…did I respond well enough?

Duncan Crary: Well, we’re going to keep talking about it. So those were your live reactions to the program. I know it’s easy to — she’s definitely get people watching.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, they’ll be watching her but they may not hear anything she’s saying. But maybe she’ll reach them on a subliminal level, maybe it’s something that’s actually very cleverly designed to get the message through without us being aware of.

Duncan Crary: Yes, actually a lot of Kris’ — now listeners you can go to K-r-i-s-C-a-n.com to watch some of Kris’ programming. They’re not all — that’s just one public service announcement gag she did with the nudity behind the oil cans.

The rest of her programs have songs and sometimes they have interviews with other people. They begin with her putting on T-shirts.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, sort of the Gillette cavalcade of camisoles.

Duncan Crary: It does make me laugh though, using sex to sell things. Does it really work? I mean using sex to sell something — it gets people to look at…

James Howard Kunstler: Well we use sex to sell everything else, so..

Duncan Crary: Yeah, but does it actually sell stuff or does it just get you looking at the… breasts?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, I wish I knew. I do think it sells things like soap and cosmetics and things like that… and cars. I don’t know if it sells lawnmowers and other things. It probably has its limitations.

Duncan Crary: OK, getting to the larger topic here. We’re done critiquing. Kris I think you’re doing a great job with your show. It’s probably only going to get better but the larger question is: how do you talk to people about Peak Oil who just don’t get it?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, I go in front of all kinds of groups of people including some who really don’t get it. I remember talking to the International Council of Shopping Center Developers last year.

They really didn’t get it. But they weren’t obnoxious about it. They politely listened to what I had to say. And I was able to actually sit in on their deliberations because my plane was leaving so many hours ahead. So when we finished talking to them, they just went right ahead and started chatting up all of their plans for building more parking structures, after we told them that car storage is probably not going to be the programming of the future — so they didn’t hear a darn thing.

To tell you the truth, I don’t really focus too much on whether people hear or not. And even the well-intentioned, predisposed people often either don’t get it or they have a lot of ideas in their head that are kind of crazy themselves. I talk to environmental groups all the time, and one of the big problems that I’m seeing all over the country is that the environmentally-sensitive, for some reason, are completely preoccupied with how they’re going to run their cars on something other than gasoline — it’s all they want to talk about. You end up with a supposedly well-educated, intelligent audience who are not thinking about these things on a level that’s any better than the NASCAR morons.

Duncan Crary: Jim, what’s your…they call it an “elevator pitch” — what’s a quick run-down of Peak Oil? When you’re asked on these TV shows — where you get 30 seconds to talk and it’s all in sound bytes — what do you give for your pitch?

James Howard Kunstler: Well I tell them that it’s not about running out of oil. It’s about how the various systems that we depend on for everyday life are going to get into trouble just as we go over the peak, and how the problems that they have are going to ramify each other. So that when we have problems with motor fuels and transport, we’re also going to have trouble with feeding ourselves and doing capital finance and doing retail trade, and medicine and all the other things that we have to do — education. That these things are all going to affect each other. So I tell them that.

I tell them that the coming permanent oil crisis is going to change everything about how we live. I tell them that we’re sleepwalking into the future, which they may consider to be a “diss”, and maybe they don’t want to hear that. I do talk a lot about the alternative fuel area because that happens to be the focus right now of so much of the wishful thinking that’s out there. And it’s important to get in there and wrangle with it, and wrangle it away from the center where people are investing all their hopes and wishes and fantasies, because it’s become a very unhealthy set of fantasies.

So I tell the audiences that no amount of alternative fuels will allow us to run the stuff that we’re running now. I guess I’m not overly-concerned with how well they get it or whether they get it. I’m just pretty much doing my thing and if they get it, fine, and if they don’t get it, then I just go onto the next bunch.

Duncan Crary: I heard something on WNYC’s Radio Lab. It’s a radio show and you can listen to it as a podcast. It’s a very interesting science/cultural show. And they were talking to a scientist about messing with the DNA of microbes to be able to basically excrete diesel fuel. So…they can do it in a Petri dish already. They can change the genetic coding of these microbes to… when they digest their food, they excrete basically diesel fuel.

James Howard Kunstler: That’s cool. You know what question it raises?

Duncan Crary: It raises a lot of questions.

James Howard Kunstler: What’s their food going to be?

Duncan Crary: I don’t know.

James Howard Kunstler: Soylent Green?

Duncan Crary: (laughs) I don’t know. But they’re talking about how we can release this into a lake, and we can have machines that skim off the diesel as it floats up. It’s horrifying man, but people are taking this stuff seriously.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah. You could also probably genetically-engineer a human baby to look like a baluchitherium, but why would you want to do it?

Duncan Crary: But if that’s our solution to the impending oil crisis?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, we’re nuts. We don’t get it. But I’m actually kind of amused with the degree of ‘not getting it’ that people show. And watching this whole spectacle unfold is like an amazing clown show. There are elements of it, to me, which are just purely entertaining, and elements which are scary, and elements which are tragic.

So it’s a multi-dimensional show out there — it’s not all tragic and it’s not all doom. As I’ve said more than once, Samuel Beckett once observed that nothing is funnier than unhappiness. So the unhappiness of this whole problem actually has a lot of comedy in it.

Duncan Crary: So I guess your advice to Kris – I mean it depends on how much she… does she want to just convince people of this, or does she want to produce an entertaining, witty program online?

James Howard Kunstler: Well she seems to be a bit of an exhibitionist, which is OK because she’s got a good thing to exhibit: her body. In fact, I’d do her, you know …if somebody gave me the opportunity…

Duncan Crary: Uh the first time I saw this –

James Howard Kunstler: …like Kris.

Duncan Crary: [laughs] Thanks a lot.

James Howard Kunstler: OK, bye.

Duncan Crary (as host): Well folks, our caller Kris today pointed out that some people just don’t get it. And to illustrate that point, here are hosts Daniel and Jana of That Podcast Show reviewing The KunstlerCast:

Jana: I felt like he was extremely educated, really knowledgeable about just a wide variety of things that come into society and how it’s made up. It was, to me, very thought-provoking.

Daniel: Yeah, but I go back to what is billed as: “the tragic comedy of suburbian (sic) sprawl.” I still do not know or have that really answered for me, and maybe it’s because the show’s really young. It only has, what, 11 episodes? So I think they’re trying to get it, but that’s just a lot to throw out there and it’s very confusing. They did not clarify enough for me what in the world that means.

Jana: Again, I hate to disagree with you, but I just feel like it was so obvious that, yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that makes it a tragedy. I’m looking forward to more episodes because I think it is such a broad topic. Maybe in each episode, he’s giving you a piece of the puzzle and he’s going to have to do 100 or 200 of these before you get the whole picture.

Daniel: Now that very well may be true. And if that’s the case, which I suspect you may be correct on that, it still has some more growing to do. But as of this time, I’m going to go with a two out of five for the show, for The KunstlerCast.

Jana: Wow. I am way on the other side. I’m giving it a solid 4. Solid 4.

Duncan Crary (as host): To hear that entire review, search for “That Podcast Show” on the Internet.

You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll free at 866-924-9499.

Send email to

You can download episodes of this program, read transcripts, learn about our theme music, and join our mailing list at KunstlerCast.com.

I’m your host, Duncan Crary, thanks for listening.

Direct Download (10 MB): KunstlerCast_14.mp3

Comment & Discuss at KunstlerCast Forum

The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #13: Personal Transit & Green Buildings. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[Intro music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to the KunsterCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and World Made by Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: personal transportation and sustainable green building.

Today’s program is in special partnership with Planetizen. Visit them online at Planetizen.com.

Duncan Crary (in interview): Hey, Jim.

James Howard Kunstler: Hey, Duncan.

Duncan Crary: The Planetizen folks are back again for another special cross-promotional podcast.

James Howard Kunstler: Do they get here in some kind of UFO from their planet? Is that a planet they’re on?

Duncan Crary: They arrive in MP3 format.

James Howard Kunstler: Is that Planet Zen? Are they all Zen Masters?

Duncan Crary: It took me awhile to figure out how to pronounce Planetizen.

James Howard Kunstler: Man, I didn’t know until, you know I–I’ve been writing for them for like four years. I still don’t know how to pronounce it. So, I’m glad you told me.

Duncan Crary: Yeah, Planetizen. OK, anyway…

James Howard Kunstler: I thought it was like Planet Citizen, or something like that. I was having some kind of a, you know, learning disability thing.

Nate Berg (recording): Hi, I’m Nate Berg, assistant editor at Planetizen, the leading news and information website for the urban planning, design and development community. You can keep track of the latest news, views and issues in urban planning and contribute to the conversation at Planetizen.com.

Here are some questions for James Howard Kunstler from the Planetizen editorial staff and also a few from Planetizen readers:

How do you feel about personal rapid transit, a pod-like automated transit systems that are being experimented with at London’s International Airport? Is this just another crazy idea or has its time come?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, I’ve gotten a lot of letters from the PRT guys and I’ve run into them at conferences. They seem to be a particular kind of crank. And, you know, I just don’t get it because it requires so much infrastructure and so–you know, you have to build these sort of trestle systems and…

It’s basically a monorail with your own personal monorail car pod in it. And… are they going to build trestles everywhere? I don’t really get the whole idea.

If we’re going to replace the car, why do it with something that’s not only like the car but not really as good as a car.

Duncan Crary: Yeah.

James Howard Kunstler: It just seems crazy. You know, the whole point ought to be that we need walkable cities, walkable towns, walkable neighborhoods. And to just invent another machine system for schlepping people around is nuts. And this one just requires so much built infrastructure, I just don’t see how it has a chance.

These guys have come up to me time and time again with their schemes and their booklets and their diagrams. And you know, I just think they’re crazy. It seems basically like a railroad that only carries one person per carriage. So where’s that at?

I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something.

Duncan Crary: I don’t know. It’s probably going to end up with the Segway, go the way of the Segway, right?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, the Segway was a very interesting kind of analog to that. You know, another personal transportation device that costs a huge amount of money, like $3,000 or something or more maybe. And was it better than a bicycle? It just seemed…

And also, the Segway was a good idea for people who are disabled, let’s say, for one reason or another; you know, too old. But the idea that normal people need a prosthetic extension for walking around, that was also kind of nuts.

Duncan Crary: I think Crocodile Dundee got it right when he was sort of looking at the escalator, like: people have this machine so you don’t have to walk upstairs and then they have to go work out on the Stairmaster? [laughs]

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, pretty nice.

Duncan Crary: Let’s take that next question.

Nate Berg (recording): With the increasing popularity of green thinking and development and the rising notoriety of environmental rating systems like LED and LED for Neighborhood Development, how do you think cities and consumers are going to react to the cost of creating “sustainable” places?

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, boy. Well, that’s a mouthful. Let’s start out with an English lesson. Notoriety means to be notorious, as to be known for doing bad things. It’s not a reference to things that are just, you know, well known. So, OK, English lesson over.

There’s so much yammer about greening this and being green and you know, I just came back from a green kind of conference in Colorado. And everybody wants to be green. And I think that we are blowing a lot of green smoke up our ass. I think there’s an awful lot of misunderstanding and confusion about what we’re actually doing.

I have a friend here in this town who–a very dear friend—who was a hippy carpenter who morphed into a developer. And he did a green development, so-called, full of buildings that were impeccably built without any kind of artificial off-gassing insulation. He did a great job with the model. It was very pristine. The trouble is that it’s built in a cul-de-sac subdivision which is going to require mandatory driving and is not connected to any other kind of civic activity or infrastructure.

To me, it seems a very self-defeating thing. And I think that there’s a lot of that going on.

There’s an idea that if you can build a quote “green” house–you know, a house that is made of good quality, pristine, safe, healthy materials that you really have solved the problem. But the problem is a problem of urbanism, not individual houses. It’s a problem of how the buildings relate to each other and their context and how the whole thing works together as an ensemble.

So, I’m not very impressed with the so-called green thinking that I see. A lot of it, by the way, is being applied to skyscrapers. And I don’t see anything green about the whole concept of a skyscraper. I think that everything about them implies enormous externalities of cost and the likelihood that they’re not going to work very well under any circumstances given our power situations.

Duncan Crary: The second part of the question was, “How do you think cities and consumers are going to react to the cost of creating quote ’sustainable’ places?”

James Howard Kunstler: Well, let me begin by revisiting my campaign to abolish the word “consumer” from our discussions about these things. It’s a very unuseful, demeaning, degrading term to call ourselves consumers, because consumers have no obligations or duties or responsibilities to anything other than their desire to eat Cheez Doodles and drink Pepsi Cola.

We need to call ourselves something else. You know, maybe– I don’t know–citizens or something other than consumers; very bad word. Because it also suggests that remaining a consumer society is a desirable end. And I think that that has caused a huge amount of mischief.

So, now what was the rest of that question?

Duncan Crary: Well, it’s just asking: how are citizens–using your term–going to react to the cost of creating “sustainable” places?

James Howard Kunstler: I’m not sure that we’re even going to have a lot of money to spend on new forms of public transit or retooling or retro-fitting things that currently exist. It’s mostly going to be a question of how do you get people out of their cars and walking? And how do you create an environment that is rewarding for walking in that isn’t absolutely horrible and invoking fear and making people uncomfortable.

You know I was having a talk with one of my best friends today about–there’s a shopping center that was retooled in the asteroid belt of Albany, New York. It was actually the first big shopping center of the ’60s. And then it went into decline and it had a really bad decade, and then they’ve gone and poured a whole lot of money into it again, and they’ve pedestrianized it a little bit–they’ve built some sidewalks around the perimeter and down the road that it’s on, et cetera et cetera.

But it’s still not really a very nice rewarding journey to go down that sidewalk. They built the sidewalk, but to be on that sidewalk next to an eight-laner–or whatever the hell it is–is really a frightful experience. So we’re trying to get there by fits and starts and we’ve got a long way to go to make this stuff work.

Duncan Crary: OK, and here’s one more:

Nate Berg (recording): Rising oil prices have seemed to serve as a good impetus for getting people out of their cars. Public transit has seen higher ridership in recent years and some areas are reporting record lows in gas consumption. Do you think this trend will continue as fuel efficiency increases and alternative energies allow driving without the guilt related to pollution? Or do you think people will revert to their car-happy habits when the costs fall back down and the emissions concerns fade away? And how do you see this transition affecting land use and development?

James Howard Kunstler: I’ve been to places where there are some impressive changes going on. For example: Dallas, Texas. They’ve built a light-rail line there about five or six years ago and they had very low expectations for it. But the ridership has really been quite high.

And to go along with it, there’s a long urban corridor in Dallas called the McKinney Avenue Corridor–I think it’s called–which has gotten a lot of apartments and condominiums along it along with retail on the ground floor and all of the ingredients necessary to create a walkable neighborhood.

They even have a pretty marvelous pedestrian and bike trail that runs on an old railroad right-of-way, that, if I remember correctly, there may even be an existing rail line on it, I’m not sure. But it runs quite a distance, kind of a parallel way of getting around on your bike or on foot or running. And the whole combination was pretty favorable. I got a pretty good impression of it. That was about two years ago.

Portland, Oregon is another place that made some really large investments in light-rail and I think those have proved to work out really wonderfully well.

Everywhere that we’ve seen it, really, the light-rail, I think, is paying off. Unfortunately there are still a lot of people who are stuck where they are in houses that they bought in the ’80s and ’90s and they’re not served by the rail and they don’t have a whole lot of choice.

We’re trying to kind of fix a development pattern that is a very unfavorable development pattern to begin with. I think some places are making a heroic effort, and in some places it’s working out better than others.

The Dallas thing is interesting. On the other hand, Dallas is in a very punishing climate. You can understand why people stay in their cars all the time, because it’s so hot there. Three of four months of the year it’s 90 degrees, 100 degrees every day. So it’s punishing to walk from point A to point B in a place like that. Unless it’s really compact-and I’m not sure they’re really getting there with as much compactness as they need–even though they’re building downtown buildings, multi-story buildings and condos, the blocks are probably too big and too long to traverse. The whole scale thing has really not been addressed.

Duncan Crary: OK, and the second part of this question is: Do you think people will revert to their car-happy habits when the costs fall back down?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, that is a question of whether the costs will fall back down and how far they’ll go and what the picture is with gasoline and oil. And I think it’s probably deceptive. The price of oil probably is going to ratchet around. It’ll go up a few steps, it’ll fall back a step, maybe fall back a few steps, and then notch up a few more steps. I do think that the overall trend line is going to continue to be upward. But, of course, price is not the only factor here.

Other people have made the case-and I think that it’s correct-that before too long, sooner rather than later, we’re going to have problems with spot shortages and regional shortages of refined product and diesel and gasoline. And that’s really going to be the thing that is going to get the attention of people. It’s not necessarily just going to be price.

Duncan Crary: OK, Jim, but there also is something about (the) psychology of Americans and driving. I showed you once an historical memoir of someone who was visiting Saratoga Springs in 1814 and was like, “American’s drive everywhere!” This was in the day of horse and carriages. But there’s something about hyper-individualism and just the American Way.

So, I think what they’re asking is: If we came up with some fuel that had lower emissions or some magic fuel, would American’s return to our happy motoring ways, even if, in the meantime, we’ve built better public transportation?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, that’s kind of a trick question, because I don’t really believe that there’s going to be a rescue remedy for happy motoring. I just don’t believe it. If there were, well, I have to say, I don’t think there’s any question that American’s would revert to their happy motoring habits. Why wouldn’t they? The system’s all set up for it.

I just consider it an idle wish. You can understand the wish. Once you’ve invested all of your nation’s wealth in a certain way of using your environment, there’s certainly going to be a huge desire to keep running it. And that’s exactly where we’re at.

But realistically I don’t think that any hypothetical “they” are going to quote “come up with,” a miracle rescue remedy for this thing.

Duncan Crary: Well, Jim, that was an ultra-fast Q & A round with you but I think you held your own, so thanks for doing it.

James Howard Kunstler: My head is still spinning.

Duncan Crary: [laughs] Those were some great questions…

James Howard Kunstler: It’s spinning like a planet of its own. Maybe I have my own Plan-Planetizanzin–how do you say that?

Duncan Crary: Planetizen.

James Howard Kunstler: Planetizen.

Duncan Crary: So, all you KunstlerCast listeners, if you haven’t been there, check out Planetizen.com. Thanks a lot, Jim.

James Howard Kunstler: See you, Duncan.

Duncan Crary: You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast, featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll free at 866-924-9499.

Send email to

You can download episodes of this program, read transcripts, learn about our theme music, and join our mailing list at KunstlerCast.com.

I’m your host, Duncan Crary. Thanks for listening.

Direct Download (10 MB): KunstlerCast_13.mp3

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The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #12: Gentrification. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[intro music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to The KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency and World Made by Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: gentrification.

Duncan Crary (as interviewer): Well, Jim, I’ve got a good topic for us today.

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, boy.

Duncan Crary: We have a listener comment, a listener email from Kara in Washington. It’s about gentrification, so may I?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah.

Duncan Crary (reading listener mail): Hi, Duncan and Jim.

James Howard Kunstler: Can you take an aristocratic tone with that, though?

Duncan Crary: I can’t even do it in a female voice.

James Howard Kunstler: Can you say something like, (with aristocratic voice) My good sir, we have a question here, my good man. Please answer this, if you would be so kind?

Duncan Crary: OK. My good sir… I’m sorry. I’m a total failure at that. You’re the one who went to school for theater, not me. But, here’s the question:

Duncan Crary (reading listener mail):

I listened to the latest podcast and I liked what you had to say about walkable cities. I just moved to Capitol Hill in Washington, DC and I love being able to walk to work, to the grocery store, and down town. My neighborhood has wonderful sidewalks and fully grown trees to shade us from that brutal DC July sun.

My question is about something that has been on a lot of our minds here in our nation’s capitol: gentrification. As middle-class people like me move into neighborhoods like Capitol Hill - that are wonderful in part because they were overlooked by developers - what happens to the poor people that are being pushed out? If they move out to the suburbs, where it’s become cheaper to live, they have the extra burden of needing a car because there is no mass transit out there.

Thanks for a great show! I’ve really been enjoying it!

— Kara, in Washington

Duncan Crary: OK, so Jim, what’s the deal with gentrification?

James Howard Kunstler: It’s a very complicated issue. I think we could start by making the point, maybe, that it was never the norm in city life for cities to be inhabited mostly by poor people.

That’s a distortion and a perversity that has only occurred because of what we did in America, because all of the people who were doing well had the option of living in a cartoon version of the country, which is what suburbia was. The cities were left by default to everybody else which were the people who weren’t doing well in one way or another.

So, we have to begin by observing that it’s an abnormality in the first place that our cities are inhabited by so many poor people at the center. If you go to other cities in other lands, what you discover is for the most part the cities at their centers are inhabited by the people who are doing OK and the poorer people live in the periphery.

Duncan Crary: Like in Paris, right?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, like in Paris. That’s been the norm. Now, it’s unfortunate that we have large populations that are poor and not doing well and seem to be stuck where they are. Those are social issues and social questions that may not be able to be addressed sheerly by physical form. Physical form can only do so much.

But, there are things you can do. One thing is that as neighborhoods are getting better in the cities you can typologically make provision for people of different income levels to inhabit the same blocks or the same neighborhoods. You can do that by activating the dwellings in the alleyways and allowing them in the first place, you know, allowing accessory apartments.

One of the problems we run into is that in many, many neighborhoods in America they have outlawed accessory apartments, meaning that families living in very large houses cannot assign part of the house to being the rental for someone who’s not in the market for a single family home or a single person or an older person. That’s the norm in other cities so we don’t do that. We kind of zone people out by — typologically.

But there is another kind of moral dimension to the gentrification issue that has a lot of people very worried and concerned. The problem is if you start creating rules and regulations against improving neighborhoods and against well-off people inhabiting the cities then you have to ask yourself: OK, then by default where do they go? And the answer is: They go to the suburbs; if it’s morally not cool for them to fix up the neighborhoods in the center of the city then they either have to go to the edge of the city or outside the city. It leaves us back in that predicament again.

The cities are not just for poor people, and the cities have to be the responsibility of people of all classes but particularly the well-off because if rich people can’t take care of their towns, who can? We really find ourselves in a bind, where to get back to the original form of an urban habitat — which is allowing people of all incomes to live in proximity to one another — we have to make it OK for them to do it.

Now, cities have gone through a lot of different transitions. Probably the most traumatic one was the one that let industry into the city when we entered the Industrial Age. That created a lot of difficulty that hadn’t been present before. Of course, there had been other problems before, like poor plumbing and poor sanitation and irregular delivery of decent water and stuff like that.

And you get into the Industrial Age and you start to get decent water and decent electricity, but then you also get the overwhelming scale of the industrial town and the noise and the obnoxious behavior of the factories and stuff that people want to get away from. By the early 20th Century, people were getting away from that in the United States when they could.

I guess the question really is: what are the scale and quality and shape and character of our cities going to be like from here on? And I would maintain that we have really gotten past the age of the industrial city as we knew it.

That is a story that is now coming to an end. I think the cities are going to be smaller, that they are going to contract, they are going to densify at their centers. That the people who are doing OK, if there are any in our society, will come to inhabit a lot of those places.

I don’t know where the poor people are going to go. I don’t know what the poor people are going to do. Right now, the poor people are not doing things that are necessarily that productive for themselves. That is a whole other social issue that is maybe beyond the cant of what you and I are talking about.

Duncan Crary: Well, Jim, it just doesn’t make sense to not have affordable housing within a city — even though that term is unnatural, and you’ve explained how ridiculous it is that we need to create this artificial commodity called “affordable housing”. But I remember as a reporter in Saratoga Springs, which is a very popular up and coming city, and a tourist destination in the summer time—

I remember reporting on the service industry, which is sort of the fuel of the Saratoga economy. And the people who are waiters and waitresses and other service industry professionals can’t even afford to live in Saratoga anymore. It’s really hard for them to find—

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, it’s gotten increasingly difficult, and you know it’s very much the same in other parts of the country, although I do think that that was another abnormality, another distortion that’s going to come to an end. We go through a lot of phases.

Right now, oddly enough, in Saratoga Springs, there’s a glut of apartments for rent, and the prices have been coming down, because the college built a new dorm apartment complex as they called it, because it really isn’t an ensemble. But one of the things that it did was it took away all of the college students out of the town, in one fell swoop, who were renting apartments.

And it left a lot of properties un-rented that are hard to rent because they had these three-bedroom and four-bedroom apartments that were pretty crummy, all divided up so that they could cram four students in there and collect $2,500 rent, which is a lot for an apartment.

But the students would pay it because they were only paying $500 or $700 a piece. And when the students left, these were apartments that nobody wanted to be in, because they were so crummy, even though they had a lot of space.

Duncan Crary: Jim, our letter writer is from Washington D.C., which has a substantial black population. Another city that we hear a lot of fear of gentrification is New Orleans, which is also a very black city. What are the underlying moral racial issues; do you feel that there are any going on with this fear of gentrification?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, well, yes. A lot of it has to do with the failure of the social justice movement in the late 20th Century, and our embarrassment over the fact that we still have these large populations of one racial group that seem to be chronically unsuccessful and can’t change their circumstances and get out of this predicament.

And it’s very hard to account for, and it embarrasses us and makes us tremendously uncomfortable. So we can’t talk about it in those terms. And when you really get down to it, people are people. And it’s a question of what are you, Mr. Individual Person, going to do to take care of your life?

If you find — if you’re poor, if your family’s poor, even if your family’s been poor for three generations, are you going to make a decision to maybe try to do everything possible to not be poor? Or are you just going to submit to where you are because somebody has convinced you that structural racism will prevent you from ever succeeding?

I’m not really sure where structural racism, so-called, leaves off and personal behavior issues begin. And I think it’s very important for us to have that discussion. I think it’s very reassuring that, Barack Obama, running for president is beginning to touch on the edges of that discussion. And I think his contribution to that could be very important.

So that we are once again thinking about ourselves as people and individuals and not as stereotypes. And the question will become: what will we do? What will, as individuals, what choices will we make? And are we just going to allow ourselves to be scripted by cultural scripts and cultural scripts for behavior that condemn us to repeating old stories?

Duncan Crary: So let me ask you this Jim, should we be concerned about gentrification, and why should we be concerned about it? Should we make it a moral issue about racial relations? Or should we strictly think on economic terms? It’s not good for a mono-class society.

James Howard Kunstler: Well the implication of your question, and I would certainly say that we have to think about it in all of its dimensions… But we particularly have to think about the importance of making it OK for people who are doing well in society to live in the city.

And we can’t just take the position philosophically that it’s not OK for people who are doing OK to live in the city. Because that, by default, leaves them only the suburbs or the countryside to live in.

Duncan Crary: Because there is this unhealthy evolution of language in our culture, where “urban” is like code-speak for black.

James Howard Kunstler: Absolutely, and it’s peculiar, you know? It’s bizarre.

Duncan Crary: Well it’s offensive to black people. It’s also offensive to everyone else.

James Howard Kunstler: Well it should be. But I think it’s become the acceptable euphemism for now. And at some point it won’t be, because it suggests that the center of the city is the only place that’s suitable for black people, and black people should be urban.

The whole thing is really crazy, especially when you consider the fact that many of the black people who ended up in the cities were former sharecroppers, basically country people who moved to these cities to get jobs in the 1950’s and 60’s.

The mechanical cotton picker was invented, I think, in something like 1948, and that really put a whole class of southern rural people out of business. And they had to go somewhere and do something else.

And a lot of them went to Detroit and Columbus, Ohio, and New York City, and Philadelphia for industrial jobs, etcetera.

Duncan Crary: Well Jim, I know we just danced very lightly upon a very controversial topic. But I think it’s important to have the conversation. We’ll probably be criticized in some ways for how we handled this.

But I think we’ve opened up a dialogue, and if our listeners want to contribute to this, correct us… I for one was saying “black” and not African American. But I would like to point out that not all black people in America are African Americans.

James Howard Kunstler: Well it’s true, and I think that you deserve a lot of credit for even raising this difficult subject which most white people in America are just too uncomfortable to talk about. Somehow we do have to talk about these things. And the best thing we can do is just try to remember to be kind to each other as much as possible.

Duncan Crary: Well thanks a lot Jim.

[music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll free at 866-924-9499.

Send email to

You can download episodes of this program, read transcripts, learn about our theme music, and join our mailing list at KunstlerCast.com.

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Direct Download (10 MB): KunstlerCast_12.mp3

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The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #11: Picturing Suburbia. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[Intro music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to The KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy in suburbia sprawl featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and World Made by Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: Picturing Suburbia.

Duncan Crary(in interview): Jim, I’ve heard from a lot of our listeners who imagine that we’re in a studio. We’re actually in your home office.

James Howard Kunstler: Yes, it’s sort of like a studio. It’s a professional place where good things happen.

Duncan Crary: If I can describe to some of the listeners, hanging on the wall are paintings of a burnt-out car, a somewhat dilapidated streetscape, and a car on a sort of a country highway…you know cars on the road—very beautiful paintings of cars on the road.

James Howard Kunstler: That’s not all that’s in here, but…

Duncan Crary: Well I’m selectively picking them out, but I think people might be surprised to know that you spend a lot of time painting the American landscape, which includes a lot of paintings of parking lots and McDonald’s and Mobile stations. When I first learned that you are a painter and I saw some of your paintings, I was really surprised at the subjects that you chose to paint.

James Howard Kunstler: Well maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise. I’ve really painted my whole life. I went to a special school in New York City called the High School of Music and Art where we received a fair amount of decent training. It wasn’t fabulous. It was OK. It’s something I’ve carried on in the background of my life forever and I take it seriously. I do get out a lot. I’m what’s called sort of a sur la motif painter. I go out to the motif with my French easel — it speaks French. It’s a box that unfolds into an easel and I’m out there with the subject matter in the field. I’m interested in the landscape of our time and the landscape of our time is mostly about the highway.

Van Gogh painted the peasants sleeping next to the haystacks because he was in a landscape that was populated with human beings. I’m in a landscape that’s populated mostly by automobile, so I paint them.

Edward Hopper did something similar. Although we look at Hopper’s paintings today –his paintings from the 1920s and the ’30s when he was doing a lot of his highway stuff -– and we recognize that as a landscape that is now bygone because the scale of it is smaller and it all seems kind of quaint. It’s not as overwhelming as what we’ve got. But I’m very interested in it.

Now, there’s some additional things about it that people who haven’t tried this might not know. It is very hard to see what you’re looking at out there on a commercial highway strip with all the contesting signage and all the sort of visual clutter. So it becomes a great challenge to be able to make it legible and that’s one of the things that I like about painting the highway strip.

I also got really interested, as I was going out there, in the contrast between the natural light and the artificial light, especially at sundown.

So I would go out and set my easel up, let’s say in the juniper shrub bed of the Burger King, painting the K-Mart a quarter of a mile away with the sun going down in a certain way. So that the lovely kind of violet and purple and pink and orange and salmon-colored clouds would be contrasted to the bright primary colors of the electric signage and stuff. I found that kind of interesting and sometimes, it’s beautiful although it shouldn’t be construed as a reason to promote suburban sprawl. It’s out there, it’s what we’re living in. It’s not going to be there the way it is now in 50 years. And people will look back on these paintings, if they survive, people will see a landscape that looks different from what they’re living in.

Duncan Crary: When I first heard that you’re a painter, I assumed your paintings were going to be sarcastic — I knew that you were painting about these topics — but they’re not.

James Howard Kunstler: No, they’re not ironic at all. I’m not trying to make a joke about it. I’m literally trying to be a straightforward reporter of the landscape of our time and its many moods.

I do like to paint in the evening. I like to paint at night. I found one particular strip mall nearby where the supermarket had a particular lighting scheme under the soffit. It allowed me to see the colors of my palette and the canvas very clearly while the rest of the stuff around was sort of dark. You could paint the McDonald’s in the dark and still see what you’re doing and that was a great boon to me.

I also found a lot of satisfaction in the industrial ruins that are all over this area of the Upper Hudson Valley. In fact, in the time that I’ve lived here over the last 30 years, a lot of the factories have been bulldozed so that I was able to actually witness the process of demolition.

Duncan Crary: I just bought a book called Hudson Valley Ruins and it’s an excellent book that goes up and down the Hudson Valley, sort of giving you the history of all of these ruins, many of them are industrial. But here’s the little nugget I like: The Hudson River School of Painters, sort of America’s first formal “school” of painting, these artists were lamenting in their day that they didn’t have any ruins to paint.

James Howard Kunstler: Absolutely, and the figures in that period–Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church and all those guys–would go through this initiation rite of traveling all the way to Italy and painting the ruins there as young men. They’d stay for a year or two or three and they’d make their bones by painting the ruins of Rome. Then they’d come back to America and what they finally settled on was the idea that — OK, we don’t have ruins here but we do have this wonderful romantic natural landscape. Let’s make that our subject matter.

So that became the subject matter of 19th century American landscape painting in the absence of having ruins and it became a kind of a fetish.

The situation is different today. We have a lot of ruins out there. And when I go out there, I feel very privileged like I feel like Thomas Cole might have felt on the Roman Campania, painting the disintegrating aqueducts of the Roman Empire. I go out to Clarks Mills by the Hudson River and I paint the ruins of the wallpaper factory that are there and it’s sort of thrilling. It’s also a thrilling place to be physically because it’s a place of nebulous ownership.

The Georgia-Pacific company actually owns the site but there’s nobody there guarding it anymore. They’ve given up guarding it. The fences have big holes in it now so you can get in there. It’s become a kind of a strange natural park that has no supervision. But there hasn’t been a whole lot misbehavior there yet because it’s really in sort of a country place.

So it’s thrilling to be out there alone with an easel by the river. It’s starting to get populated, too. There are people who are going through the fence and fishing along the river. So finally there’s some human figures out there.

Duncan Crary: Speaking of Thomas Cole, one of the paintings series you mentioned in The Geography of Nowhere is…

James Howard Kunstler: The Course of Empire.

Duncan Crary: Tell us a little bit about that painting series and how it influenced you.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, I don’t know that it did influence me. I certainly appreciated it, although I haven’t done anything remotely like it.

Well, Thomas Cole, the great American landscape painter, was interested in painting series of things. He did one called The Voyage of Life, which I think was a four-panel series in which a young baby starts out in a river in a basket like Moses, floating along a river. And then he becomes a young man fighting the gales and storms of life. And finally as an old man he’s delivered into some quiet eddy where he will be born to Heaven by the angels.

He has another called The Course of Empire which depicts in, I think, five panels, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, really, although it’s never stated — going from the pastoral phase to the big buildings being built up, and finally the climax of it is this huge pageant that’s going on and this gigantic kind of amphitheater on the water. It’s like a harbor but there seems to be some great spectacle of empire going on.

Somebody has just returned from a remote land with giraffes and elephants and being born on litters and all this stuff. And then we get a little further and there’s nobody there anymore and the buildings are disintegrating and there’s some kind of war that’s taken place. It’s left a lot of damage. And then finally, the utter desolation of the ruins hundreds of years later.

Duncan Crary: You can identify…there’s like a hill in the background in every painting so you can kind of tell…

James Howard Kunstler: All the canvases are done from a similar perspective. I don’t think they’re absolutely identical but very similar. And, yeah, there’s a landmark in the background and it’s quite a tour de force of paintings.

Duncan Crary: Well, the funny thing is that if I were to come up with a more recent example of the same thing, I would think of Robert Crumb’s A Short History of America. You know that cartoon series?

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, it’s a fabulous thing, showing the development of a little country road into a small town into the beginning of the automobile age and all of a sudden the small town starts to fall apart and finally it ends up in like the 1980s as a Pizza Hut or a convenience store, surrounded by all this crap of technology: the horrible broken signage and the telephone poles and the condensers and the electric installations and the trucks and just all the crap out there.

Duncan Crary: Yeah. But that’s not exactly what your paintings are like, though. Are you interested in exploring that area a little bit more?

James Howard Kunstler: Well like I said, I don’t really have an ironic attitude about it.

Duncan Crary: You think Crumb was being ironic?

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, absolutely. Well, in the sense that it seemed to be remarkably straightforward reportage of what was going on there. In fact, in that movie with Crumb, they show him drawing that kind of scene and he’s sitting there saying, “You can’t make this stuff up. You have to really pay attention to the details.”

Duncan Crary: As soon as he said that, and this is the documentary, I think it’s called Crumb.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah.

Duncan Crary: I think he mentions something about how once you start paying attention to transformers in the air and all the wires, it just ruins it. That’s all you can focus on. And that happened to me for months, that was all I could focus on. There’s so much of that crap up there that you just ignore.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, there is! And when I’m out there painting that stuff, I edit some of it out. But I leave a lot of it in. If you tried to put it all in, two things would happen: it would become as visually illegible as it actually is, and you would drive yourself crazy.

Duncan Crary: Yeah. So Jim, out there in the field, painting, you had some encounters. Right? Isn’t there some story of you painting a Burger King?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, I was doing one of my paintings at a Burger King and the manager guy came out, this young man with a 23-hair mustache came out and said, “That ain’t allowed here!” And I wanted to mess with him a little bit so I said, “What? What ain’t?” And he said, “That there!” I said, “What?” He said, “You know! What you’re doing there!” I said, “Painting’s not allowed, huh?”

So finally we went through this for a while and I thought the situation was so ridiculous that I really wanted to have fun with him so I finally said, “Look. It’s fine with me if you go call the sheriff and he can arrest me for painting at Burger King on their property. I’m sure that’ll be great public relations for your company. Because I’ll make sure that lots of people know about it. And it’ll be real cool.”

Duncan Crary: Do you know if that actually did happen, it’d probably make the Associated Press wire.

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, absolutely.

Duncan Crary: And you’d probably sell that painting for three hundred grand.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah. Dude. I should have encouraged him. I should have actually been more provocative because then I would have made more money on the painting.

Duncan Crary: Well Jim, thanks a lot for talking with us about your paintings.

James Howard Kunstler: Well thank you for being here.

Listener Caller: Hey guys. This is Ben Lowe from San Francisco. You guys mentioned in your last show that schools look a lot like prisons, I think, at one point. And it actually reminded me that my high school was designed by the same architectural firm that designed the prison in my hometown where I grew up. It was explained to me that the school architects were chosen because the idea was industrial-style throughput. That schools were pretty much student factories and to have students there and sort of crank them out just the same way that prisons process prisoners.

So it made sense to hire an architect who had experience dealing with the same type of crowd. So, as a result, my high school looked like a medium-security prison. So it’s really not a surprise when you end up with the same results when your goals are the same going in. Thanks for your great show, and I can’t wait to hear the next episode.

[music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll-free at 866-924-9499.

Send email to . You can download episodes of this program, read transcripts, learn about our theme music, and join our mailing list at KunstlerCast.com.

I’m your host, Duncan Crary. Thanks for listening.

[music]

Direct Download (10 MB): KunstlerCast_11.mp3

Comment & Discuss at KunstlerCast Forum

The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #10: Children of the Burbs. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[Intro Music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to the KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl, featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and World Made By Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: Children of the ‘Burbs.

James Howard Kunstler: Nice to see you, Duncan.

Duncan Crary: Nice to see you, Jim.

James Howard Kunstler: [joking] I’ve just consumed a quart of paint thinner to try to clear my mind.

Duncan Crary: So, Jim, I have a question for you. It may sound a little lame, but one of the things that people always say — the first thing they say when they choose the suburbs over living in an urban environment is, “Oh I have children. I’ve got to raise children.” But I want to ask you, is raising children in suburbia good for them?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, I think that it has a lot of drawbacks. When people say that, generally what it means is that they’re afraid to send their kids to schools in a city. And behind that are racial issues that are too toxic for us to have a public discussion about. But then there are the other aspects of living in suburbia for a child that go beyond school, that have to do with their “normal life,” supposed normal life. And they end up having a pretty abnormal life in the ‘burbs.

Apart from the school issues, kids over seven years old have a tough time in the suburbs. Under seven, they don’t really have to go anywhere. They’re happy in their little cul-de-sac, playing cops and robbers, or flies up. In fact that was my experience the three years that I lived in the suburbs between the age of five and eight. That was OK.

The trouble starts a little bit later when they have to start becoming socialized. And by that I don’t mean becoming socialists, I mean learning how to use their daily environment themselves and developing their own sense of sovereignty.

And that tends to not occur because it’s too hard for kids to get places. They can’t get to their soccer match by themselves. They can’t get to their clarinet lesson. So the family “chauffeur” ends up taking them to all of these places. And a kid doesn’t develop any sense of moving through space himself or herself under his or her own power.

And then there are other things. Now, I happen to live in a small town that is set up so that kids really can get to things on their own. They do come downtown, and they do go to the coffee shop. They go to the stores. They buy things. They learn how to do things that will eventually lead them into being fully functioning adults. The kids in the suburbs don’t learn how to do that. Mommy does everything for them.

When I was a kid, I moved from the suburbs of Long Island into Manhattan at the age of eight. Previously, my whole life was kind of centered around throwing baseballs around the cul-de-sac and riding my little bike. Then I got into Manhattan, and I didn’t even have a bike anymore when I moved to Manhattan. That was over with. My whole life, all of the sudden it was about learning how to get on a Madison Avenue bus, to go from point A to point B at the age of eight, learning how to take the crosstown bus from 86th Street to the planetarium at the Museum of Natural History.

That was kind of a scary thing for an eight year old to learn how to do, but I did. Then I got over it and I wasn’t scared anymore, then I did it over and over again. I was just a normal person using part of the city, the planetarium, going there when I was able to go.

Duncan Crary: Well, Jim, I grew up in the ‘burbs, too, and there was sort of this dead zone between the age of like 13 and 16, where you can’t drive.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, and your needs at that point are greater than they were when you were seven years old, and you need to be connected to stuff. And you’re frustrated continually by not being able to do it.

Duncan Crary: Well, there’s a lot of drug use in, like, Dad’s rumpus room in the basement. It’s really depressing.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, playing with Dad’s guns.

Duncan Crary: [laughs] It’s true, but also, we send our kids in the suburbs to these schools that look like penitentiaries. They’re really demoralizing, these suburban high schools.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, well I don’t understand why the schools just look so terrible and scary, why it’s necessary to do that. Obviously we didn’t do that in an earlier period. If you go up to Glens Falls, New York, there’s the old high school, which I think was converted into an office building. It’s a wonderful, dignified building. It fits in with the city. It sends a message that what goes on here is all about the eternal verities, the classical verities. The school building is a neoclassical building, so it sort of speaks in the language of the classical verities.

And then you go see the new junior high school on Route 9 in Saratoga, it looks like as Tom Wolfe described it: “an insecticide factory.”

Duncan Crary: Yeah, it’s scary. I went to a private school in Albany. I went to the Albany Academy, which a beautiful building designed by Marcus T. Reynolds. It’s a nice classical — it looks like an institution of higher learning.

James Howard Kunstler: And by the way, by saying this, I don’t think that either one of us is necessarily pimping for neoclassicism as the only way to decorate a building, or the only way to design something. It happens to be an architectural language that’s suited to our democratic society, our republic. It takes the idea from Greece of being a democracy, and the idea from Rome of being a republic and combines them.

And so we express that in a lot of our civic buildings, not just schools but libraries, museums, and all sorts of things, courthouses. But we’re not pimping for that. It’s not the only way you can — there are plenty of wonderful other styles. It’s not about style. It’s really about making a statement to the user of the building that this is a dignified place, and that it’s an honor to be here, and it’s a privileged activity that goes on in here. It’s not punishment.

But with our mentality of just creating “facilities” rather than actual typological buildings like schools, churches, etcetera. When everything is a facility, it’s really nothing. And a facility is also a prison. In fact, most of our prisons are now officially called facilities. That is actually their name. We have gotten into a lot of trouble by sort of technologisizing these things. And we manage to take all of the artistry and humanity out of them.

Duncan Crary: Jim, let me ask you something. When I was a kid in the ‘burbs one of the most common disputes, at least, among the boys when they got mad at each other, they would say, “Get off my property.” They would have these arguments over property lines. Eight, nine, ten-year-old kids. It’s absolutely insane. Did you experience any of that when you grew up?

James Howard Kunstler: It’s funny that you mentioned it. I seem to dimly remember exactly those kinds of things. I guess what it shows is that the exaggerated sense of hyper-individualism out in the suburbs is even communicated to eight-year-old kids.

Duncan Crary: You know, Jim, one of the things that kills me, there is a strip mall in a suburban town that I visited that has a sign saying, “No bicycle riding. No skateboarding. No horseplay.” And I just think “What the hell are these kids going to do?” These are their public spaces now, strip malls, and because they are privately owned the kids can’t interact with the centerpiece of their town at all. It’s really sad.

James Howard Kunstler: The whole key to understanding the suburbs, I think, has to do with the impoverishment of the public places and the glorification of the private realm. We have more bathrooms per inhabitant in our houses of any nation in the world, but we have extremely poor public places in most of suburban America, which is most of America.

Most of the public places for kids are the leftover scraps, you know, the berms, the parking lots, the places that nobody really cares about. We have very few places that really demand respectful behavior from the kids, and so you put them in a place like that they are going to tend to be as wild as possible.

You put them in a berm between the Wal-Mart and the K-Mart, and they are going to torture kitty cats and make homemade tattoos and smoke bongs and drink aftershave. That is how they behave in the public place of the berm in suburbia between the K-Mart and the Wal-Mart.

Duncan Crary: I had a pretty good childhood. I’m not trying to complain, but one of the lingering psychological effects is that I have anxiety whenever I find a nice open, undeveloped natural place, because growing up in suburbia the landscape got so gobbled up as I grew older. I don’t want to get attached to any patch of woods or field or anything. Do you experience any of that? I feel an anxiety about that.

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, yeah. I think it creates a lot of tension and anxiety. Tony Hiss wrote a wonderful book back in the late ’80s called The Experience of Place in which he said pretty much that nobody in America anymore feels that they are entitled to go back home and find it being the same thing that it was when they left a few years earlier.

The rate of change has been terrible. It’s not just the rate of change. It’s the quality of the changes that have taken place because almost everything we’ve built in the last 50 years has made people uncomfortable or made their lives worse.

In fact, that is what is really behind so much of the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) activity today when the demonstrators come out. First, the bulldozers show up. Guys in the yellow hard hats show up, and then the NIMBY protesters come out. They don’t want anything new built next to them because all these things have made their lives worse. The old expression is they don’t want a house just like their house next to their house.

Duncan Crary: Yeah, they originally moved into someone else’s backyard, too, before they started protesting. The whole situation has got me — it’s funny because the word “development” has been hijacked. I dread the word “development.” Development should be a positive word, shouldn’t it?

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, yeah. But to us basically, it just means a new parking lot will appear next to your house.

Duncan Crary: I don’t want to see any more “developments.” I’ve heard people actually say that raising children in suburbia is a form of child abuse. I get the feeling you wouldn’t actually agree with that statement, would you?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, you know, I don’t think it’s that far off the mark. But, obviously, this is really mostly not intentional. Most people move to these places because that’s what we’ve got in America. We don’t have a whole lot of choice, especially when it comes to the schools.

People are making these decisions because they feel like they are compelled to make them. It’s just unfortunate. The suburbs are not good places for kids. The cities are not really adequate the way most of them are in America.

You know, New York City has a lot of wonderful amenities and attractions and opportunities, but it’s really an overwhelming place. I don’t think that kids necessarily feel comfortable in it. The scale of the streets and the buildings is huge. The traffic is overwhelming and frightening. There are very few places in Manhattan or Brooklyn that are really scaled very well for kids, and that’s one of the better environments in the U.S.

You go outside of New York, and you start talking about Akron, Ohio, and Kansas City. It’s really hard. For me, the default solution would be small town America, but a lot of people don’t have the ability to get there, and there isn’t that much of small town America left that’s still OK, you know. A lot of it is really struggling.

Around here where we are, the town of Saratoga Springs is doing fairly OK. It’s healthy, but most of the other towns around here are in a kind of a post-Soviet backwater haze of desolation and dereliction. Their school systems are suffering. Physically, the places are deteriorating. It’s a really tough one.

Where are you going to live in America? You can count on your hands the places that are really wonderful, and there are very few places that are even adequate beyond that.

Duncan Crary: Well, Jim, it’s always a pleasure talking to you. Thanks a lot.

James Howard Kunstler: It’s always a pleasure to be here, Duncan.

Duncan Crary: See you next week.

James Howard Kunstler: OK.

Duncan Crary (as host): You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll free at 866.924.9499.

Send email to .

You can download episodes of this program, read transcripts, learn about our theme music and join our mailing list at KunstlerCast.com.

I’m your host, Duncan Crary. Thanks for listening.

Direct Download (10 MB): KunstlerCast_10.mp3

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The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #9: Urban Planning. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[Intro music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to the KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl, featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency and World Made by Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: Urban Planning.

Duncan Crary (in interview): Jim, it’s nice to see you.

James Howard Kunstler: Nice to be here Duncan.

Duncan Crary: I have a cold this week so listeners forgive me. But luckily Jim will be doing most of the talking today. The folks at Planetizen have collected questions from professional planners that they would like to have answered by James Howard Kunstler.

James Howard Kunstler: Uh, oh.

Duncan Crary: Planetizen is an online planning and development network. You can check them out at Planetizen.com. They have an email newsletter, a podcast, a discussion forum and tons of great articles. I actually registered my remarks on one column that I’m sure KunstlerCast listeners would like to check out. It’s called, “How Mechanization Can Help Cities Rethink Parking” and it’s by architect Shannon Sanders McDonald.

And if you thought the parking garages in our recent program sounded bad you’ve got to check out Planetizen.com and look for this article and check out the diagrams. Basically this is what parking garages would look like if they were designed by Gobots. [laughs]

James Howard Kunstler: Just what we need, more techno-fantasies.

Duncan Crary: Well, one garage lowers your car through like a shaft underground and basically the garage parks your car for you. There’s also…there’s another little thing called a car loft. Have you…Jim have you seen these?

James Howard Kunstler: Oh yeah.

Duncan Crary: You basically drive your car into an elevator and it brings your car up to the floor of the building where you live.

James Howard Kunstler: Does it bring it into your bedroom though? Can you have sex with your car?

Duncan Crary: [laughs] Well, yeah well you might get the chance if your three-year-old, like, gets in your car and drives through your wall.

James Howard Kunstler: I like to think of the car coming into your bedroom and then you have to try to seduce it, you know?

Duncan Crary: [laughs] OK. On that note let’s get to some of these questions. This is Nate Berg host of the Planetizen Podcast reading questions that he solicited from the Planetizen community.

Nate Berg: As a critic not formally trained in planning or architecture, how do you address critics that say you don’t really have the formal knowledge base to be making judgments about urban design and development?

Duncan Crary: Jim, would you like to respond to that?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, it’s certainly a fair question for people to wonder what my credentials are. I mean, I’m mouthing off about these things and here are all these planners with credentials and they see me mouthing off and they resent it. I understand that.

It’s pretty obvious though that the kind of training that so-called urban planners have gotten over the last 50 years has included almost nothing about real urban design. And certainly nothing about the real historical methodologies of how to construct and assemble a human habitat that’s worth being in.

Mostly they get trained in statistical analysis, and traffic engineering, and mitigation of water run-off and things that…you know, they’re not unimportant or certainly haven’t been unimportant to the way we set things up during the time they were practicing. But we’re entering a new period where it’s not going to just be about water mitigation and not just going to be about handling traffic, and not just going to be about counting the number of so-called consumers who pass from point A to point B on a given day.

It’s going to be about—we’re going to really have to return to methodologies that were lost, and that’s one of the reasons that I was so attracted to the New Urbanists. Because these were people who realize that their training was inadequate. They’d come out of the architecture schools and the urban planning schools, realized they knew nothing about really designing and assembling places that were rewarding to be in.

And they had to go back themselves into the dumpster of history and get all the literature and read the Vitruvis and read Hegeman and Peets’s great Civic Art Compendium from the 1920s and go visit the places where people still lived in wonderful habitats, and measured things.

The early New Urbanists were freaks for measurement. They would go to a European town and they would measure the heights of the curbs and the distance between the shop front and the street, and how big the medians were, and the ground floors of the building, where the transition lines began and the depth of the balconies and the porticos.

They had to sort of reestablish what the perimeters were going to be for creating an environment that people wanted to be in. The really big lesson of urban planning and design from our time is that given the kind of education the professionals received, look at the environments they created.

Look at how awful they are to be in. Look at how unpleasant and fearful they are. And think of children having to be on an eight-lane highway on the shoulder in their bicycle going to Baskin & Robbins from their housing subdivision. Was that a great job of urban design? I don’t think so. They really sort of disgraced their profession and they deserve all the opprobrium that is being heaped on them.

We’re certainly going to be doing things differently in the decades ahead. If nothing else, the scale of the way that we build things and assemble them is going to be much more modest because we’re going to be a less affluent society. We’re going to have less energy to indulge in. We are not going to be able to traverse these pharaonic distances.

And that is going to influence the next generation of people who get into urban design. They’re already out there. I meet them in my travels, many of the members of the Congress for the New Urbanism, the official party of the New Urbanists, the official professional society.

A lot of these young people have very laboriously self- educated themselves in the things that they’re not getting in their schools and they come into this cohort of people who think similarly. They get a lot more training from them, from the older guys who are around.

So I’ve just been part of that process as a journalist, really. And I’ve absorbed a tremendous amount of information, knowledge, skill, methodology. I have to add, I don’t practice as a consultant. I don’t charge any towns for my services in urban design and I make a real point when people ask me of saying that that’s beyond my competence. I’m not a professional consultant and I don’t ask to be paid for it. I will come to a university, or to a civic organization and I will give a speech or a talk, or I will inveigh against their past practices, but I don’t fob myself off as a practicing urban designer.

Duncan Crary: Well you don’t need me to defend your credentials, but I do want to point out you said you were a journalist when you began this. The role of a journalist is to cut through political spin, to sort through academic jargon and to shed light on some valid ideas and criticisms, and it seems like that’s what you’ve done with The Geography of Nowhere and your other books.

James Howard Kunstler: Well that seems to be the effect. And certainly the hyper-specialization that has gone on in American graduate schools and in professional practice in the last 50 years has been so extreme that there are just very few generalists out there who are even willing to look at the big picture. You have the traffic engineers who are solely concerned with the geometry of the turns and banking the freeway ramps. They don’t care about what your experience is in the city of Milwaukee or Oklahoma City—all they care about is taking care of the cars.

You have the parking experts who are only concerned with car storage. They don’t care about what the quality of the street is like outside of their car storage units, the parking structures. You have the municipal officials that end up being more concerned with economic development issues—which themselves are perverted because they tend to involve national chain stores, or chain hotels, or convention center schemes—duplicating the infrastructure in other cities and towns right next door. That whole economic development field is full of ‘voodoo’ economics.

So you get a lot of preoccupation with stuff that has nothing to do with how we feel about the places that we live and whether we care about them, and whether they make us feel OK, whether they really provide a dwelling place for us to have civilized life.

Duncan Crary: Well I think we have time for one more question, so here’s Nate again.

Nate Berg: And the next question comes from Jennifer Evans-Cowley, a professor of Urban Planning at the Ohio State University. She asks, “What is the one thing that cities could do to most improve the quality of the built environment?”

James Howard Kunstler: I think there’s a couple of things: One thing is to come to terms with the fact that the automobile really is going to be less of a presence in our life in the years ahead, and to start making decisions that are going to reflect that. No more parking requirements for any kind of activity at all, whether it’s a restaurant or a store or an apartment complex. Just forget about it. Forget about accommodating the cars because we’re not going to have that many with us.

The other really important thing is we have to develop a real firm consensus about standards of excellence in architecture. Right now, pretty much anything goes. The “starchitects” have their little world of trying to mystify us in order for them to seem more like supernatural beings—we’ve got to stop that. We have to arrive at some real firm standards about what will produce a rewarding environment.

Now here in my town, for example, we have a design review board. It has been unbelievably ineffective and incompetent for its entire life, which has been about 50 years. Why? Because there is no firm consensus among the board members about what their standards are. They’ve never written them down really. They’ve never even created a list of the things that they agree about. And so, they’re left purely with their personal tastes or what their mood is the night that some applicant comes in, and that’s just not enough.

There’s one guy on the board who likes modernism because he likes it, for whatever reason. He’s nostalgic for the 1950’s. OK, who knows? He’s nostalgic for the trappings of his childhood. There’s somebody else on the board who just doesn’t have a clue about things like proportioning. There are other people on the board who think that everything’s a style issue.

These things aren’t about mood and style. They’re about agreeing that the behavior of buildings on a main street has to be consistent, that there are unities of design that matter in a street or neighborhood to even allow diversity to occur.

If you look at some of the best streets in America, let’s say you look at 82nd Street between Madison and 5th Avenue in New York City. There you have a series of row houses, and there are some basic unities that exist in that street. The buildings are generally under six stories high. They’re generally made of masonry or brick, and they’re generally 25 feet of frontage. And within those unities, you get some marvelous diverse architectural expressions. You can do your building in any style: Greco-Roman, Gothic, Aztec revival, whatever you want. And the street hangs together, it’s a beautiful street, and it’s the highest priced real estate in America.

But we just don’t have any standards and we don’t have any agreement among either the citizens or the people who regulate this stuff that goes on in our town. And it’s perhaps a product of our immigrant culture and the fact that we have so many different ideas about what’s OK. We need some real firm architectural standards about what’s OK, what works, what’s really rewarding.

Duncan Crary: Well thanks a lot, those were some great questions from the folks at Planetizen. Be sure to visit them at Planetizen.com. Special thanks to Nate Berg, assistant editor of Planetizen and host of the Planetizen Podcast.

We had way more question submissions than we could possibly get to in one KunstlerCast, so we’ll probably be hearing from these folks again soon. Jim, thanks a lot. I’ll see you soon.

James Howard Kunstler: See you, Duncan.

[music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast, featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll free at 866-924-9499. Send email to . You can download episodes of this program, read transcripts, learn about our theme music and join our mailing list at KunstlerCast.com. I’m your host, Duncan Crary, thanks for listening.

[music]

Direct Download (7.1 MB): KunstlerCast_09.mp3

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The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #8: The Glossary of Nowhere. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[Intro music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to the KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl, featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency and World Made By Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: The Glossary of Nowhere.

Duncan Crary (interview): Hey, Jim.

James Howard Kunstler: Hi, Duncan. How are you?

Duncan Crary: I’m back.

James Howard Kunstler: How’d you turn up here? You just rolled in under the cover over darkness or something?

Duncan Crary: Well, I’ve come here—I’m going to put you to work today. I think one of the most powerful things you ever wrote was in the intro to The Geography of Nowhere, where you’re explaining why it is you wrote this book. I’m wondering if you could read that for our listeners.

James Howard Kunstler: All right.

Excerpt from The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, by James Howard Kunstler, 1993. Read by the author.

Thirty years ago, Lewis Mumford said of post-World War II development, “the end product is an encapsulated life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before a television set.” The whole wicked, sprawling megalapolitan mess, he gloomily predicted, would completely demoralize mankind and lead to nuclear holocaust.

It hasn’t come to that, but what Mumford deplored was just the beginning of a process that, instead of blowing up the world, has nearly wreaked the human habitat in America. Ever-busy, ever-building, ever-in-motion, ever-throwing-out the old for the new; we have hardly paused to think about what we are so busy building, and what we have thrown away. Meanwhile, the everyday landscape becomes more nightmarish and unmanageable every year. For many, the word development itself has become a dirty word.

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 computer track home wastelands, the Potemkin shopping village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the “gourmet mansardic” junk-food joints, the Orwellian office “parks” featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chaingang guards, the particle board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call “growth.”

The newspaper headlines may shout about global warming, extinctions of living species, the devastations of rain forests, and other world-wide catastrophes, but Americans evince a striking complacency when it comes to their everyday environment and the growing calamity that it represents.

I had a hunch that many other people find their surroundings as distressing as I do my own, yet I sense too that they lack the vocabulary to understand what’s wrong with the places they ought to know best. And that is why I wrote this book.

Copyright © James Howard Kunstler 1993.

Duncan Crary: Wow. Do you remember that? That was 15 years ago you wrote that. Not much has changed.

James Howard Kunstler: I’ve changed though. My brain has shrunk from too many offgassing carpets.

Duncan Crary: One thing you mentioned is that you wrote the book to give people a vocabulary to articulate their disgust with the suburban—

James Howard Kunstler: I was struggling with it myself, you know. I actually went through a period 10, 15 years before I wrote that book of trying to formulate a vocabulary for myself to understand it. I made several attempts to produce written essays on the subject. And I found myself repeatedly defeated, largely because, like a lot of other normal people who are affected by this, I kept defaulting to these style issues.

I didn’t quite understand the physical form issues and design issues. Really (it) wasn’t until I encountered Christopher Alexander and Andres Duany and many other contemporaries in the field that I began to really understand what I was talking about.

Duncan Crary: Well, Jim, would you mind if we do a little “Kunstler Glossary of Terms” of sorts?

James Howard Kunstler: If you can come up with one, sure. I’ll see what I can do.

Duncan Crary: All right, well, I’ll tell you—I’ll come up with the expression and you explain for our listeners what it means. OK? Let’s start with parking lagoon. What are parking lagoons?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, that one was perhaps a little ironic, because the word “lagoon” evokes a lovely kind of tropical place that you’d like to hang around and you’re on your yacht and it’s a lovely kind of place.

[laughter]

James Howard Kunstler: Whereas the parking lot is the opposite of that. It’s a demoralizing repellent place and I was just trying to mess with people a little bit.

Duncan Crary: You can park your yacht-sized car in the parking lot.

James Howard Kunstler: Right. Well, you… that was an implication of it.

Duncan Crary: OK, how about one-story UFOs?

James Howard Kunstler: I don’t know if one story is even that important because there are plenty of UFOs that are two story. I may have actually gotten that from somebody else although I have no recollection of who it might have been. The whole idea was the development as UFO landing strip, and the idea that you’re actually not building anything, certainly not anything memorable. You’re just building a place for something out of this world to put down on. The trouble is, of course, is that they don’t fly away.

Duncan Crary: Nature Band Aids.

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, Nature Band Aids. Those are the little juniper shrub, bark mulch ensembles beloved of the landscaping professionals because they get paid a lot of money to install them and that’s the sort of default remedy for bad buildings. You have a mutilated town, with terrible buildings having been built in the last 30 years—the Burger Kings and all that crap—and you put a Nature Band Aid in front of it to “conceal the building” if possible. You know, when the shrubs grow large enough. And also to make yourself feel better about being “green.” You know “I’m green. I’m a good person, with good intentions.”

The whole thing has been a complete waste of time and money and effort. If we put up buildings that were worth looking at in the first place, we wouldn’t need the Nature Band Aids.

An interesting exercise, for those of you who still do foreign travel: go to the Plaza in front of the Pantheon in Rome. It’s a nicely proportioned outdoor public room with walls that are composed of the size of the buildings around it. There’s probably not one green thing within the whole ensemble. There may be one flower box. They understand in these other countries that you don’t have to “green” everything up. The architecture itself does the work of being wonderful.

Duncan Crary: Well, in a way, berms are Nature Band Aids, although they don’t include juniper shrubs and bark mulch beds. But it’s so crazy, when you go to these planning board meetings, that they insist on a berm. As if whatever you’re building is so hideous that you must have this barrier to obstruct your sight of it.

James Howard Kunstler: Well absolutely. In fact they usually do have plantings on them, that’s the whole point, and they’re called “buffers.” I think that’s generically the name. Typologically the berm is one kind of buffer and that’s a raised kind of little esker that runs between the K-Mart and the Wal-Mart and, you know, you put a bunch of birch trees on it and that’s supposed to make things all right.

One of the things I really love out here, it’s one of my favorite—and this is putting my ironic hat on—one of my favorite constructions out here is that they have this sort of Veteran’s Memorial Park between the Wal-Mart and the Lowe’s in the pod where all of that stuff is. No one ever goes to it, I mean, it was just simply an exercise in grandiosity by the people up in Wilton, New York. They’ve built kind of a semi circle of flags to show how much they care about their country. Then they stick this thing on a scrap of land between the Wal-Mart and the K-Mart. You know it was just ridiculous. It probably cost $300, 000 and the taxpayers in the town paid for it.

Duncan Crary: Well, that brings us to our next term, which is patriotic totems.

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, actually I usually apply that to flagpoles because the idea is you put up a horrible building, like some corporate box, some degrading piece of crap, and then you put an ensemble of three flags in front of it which are not really there to show your patriotism. They’re there to ward off criticism because if you put a flag in front of something that brands it as being something you identify your culture with. So, you’re not supposed to diss your own culture because that’s not nice. So that’s why there are so many flags in front of the corporate buildings.

Duncan Crary: Yeah it’ll be like the state flag, the U.S. flag, and then the company flag or something like that.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah or the Canadian flag or something because they want to be nice to the Canadians who visit here. But it’s always lower than the U.S. flag.

Duncan Crary: So Jim, what is the happy motoring scene?

James Howard Kunstler: Well that is the program. The happy motoring program is what we’ve got in America for gettin’ around. You know the thing is it was really a wonderful—it must have started out as a wonderful experience. I mean imagine being in the United States in 1927 when there are only a few million cars in the country and the open road was really the open road. The countryside had not been screwed up with all of this stuff. It must have been a wonderful experience for the next decade, two, or three, really before World War II. Of course, we had our own oil supply in this country and it was really cheap. It must have just been fabulous.

But of course that’s not the experience of our generation or your generation, which is just below mine. With ours, we got all of the post World War II crap and so that changed everything. It was just a system that got totally out of control and now it’s nearing its end. We can’t imagine living without it and the whole thing is just tragic and awful. I think it’s really important to make the point that the whole happy motoring program was not a diabolical scheme worked up by the Devil to make the American people unhappy. It really seemed like it would be a great thing in the early decades and people, I think, were rightfully enthusiastic about it. They just couldn’t tell how out of control it would get and it’s sad.

Duncan Crary: The topics you write about are really depressing and soul crushing, but they’re funny. Like when I first went to see you speak, I was cracking up. Every time you talk about bark mulch beds [laughs] and juniper shrubs, I still laugh—it’s funny.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, you know, it’s very simple. I actually said in the first chapter of Home From Nowhere, quoting Samuel Beckett, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” When you go see a Laurel and Hardy movie, you know, Laurel and Hardy are hitting each other with two by fours and dropping pianos on each other and running each other over in their Model T Fords. That’s not happy stuff, but we laugh at it. It’s hilarious. If they were giving each other flowers or sitting in a good restaurant having a wonderful meal, that wouldn’t be funny at all.

Duncan Crary: Yeah.

James Howard Kunstler: But comedy is all about people being uncomfortable.

Duncan Crary: So Jim, what’s with your expression “It’s all good“? Where did that come from? What is that?

James Howard Kunstler: That’s interesting. You know I attracted a certain number of correspondents, people were writing to me—writing fan letters—readers, and there was this one particular guy who I still correspond with regularly after seven years and he’s a very interesting cat. He’s a Vietnam Veteran Zen master kind of personality and he introduced me to the (phrase) “It’s all good.” He meant it kind of ironically. I took it that way, and I thought it was funny.

When he signed off in his letters, he always drew a happy face with the slitty little eyes and the smile. So it just seemed to be about the best way to sum up the American experience of our time.

Duncan Crary: When I saw it, it reminded me of… I was showing you before we started recording, for the listeners out there—I’ve got the R. Crumb Handbook, and right after “A Short History of America,” the cartoon series, there’s a quote. You’re quoted in the book.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, I didn’t even know that until you showed it to me today. But I’m very honored to be in R. Crumb’s book because he’s a great genius of our time.

Duncan Crary: [laughs] Yeah, the alternative cartoonist for those of you listening. Right after that and right next to your quote there’s a picture of this guy sitting on a milk carton in this dumpy abandoned yard and he goes, “I just sort of went with the flow, man.”

[laughter]

James Howard Kunstler: I know. Crumb has really got our number.

Duncan Crary: [laughs]

James Howard Kunstler: Notice, by the way, he moved to France about 10 years ago. I just think that he finally realized that actually, you don’t have to put up with this if you’ve got enough dough.

Duncan Crary: OK, well thanks Jim for going through that lesson. I hope all you listeners are ready for the pop quiz that we’re going to have on the glossary of terms.

So, thanks a lot Jim.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, it’s always a pleasure to be here.

[music begins]

Listener Caller: Yeah, this is Brad from Cincinnati, Ohio and I have to agree with what you said about architects. It’s kind of a sad reflection on the profession when the greatest architecture that was ever made was all made before there was any formalized training in architecture. It’s not like medicine, where the greatest surgeries of all time ever happened before there was formalized training in surgery, it’s the exact opposite. So when your entire profession revolves around gradually getting worse at what you do through formalized training, that’s normally a bad sign.

Duncan Crary (as host): You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll free at 866-924-9499.

Send email to

You can download episodes of this program, read transcripts, learn about our theme music, or join our mailing list at KunstlerCast.com. I’m your host Duncan Crary, thanks for listening.

Direct Download (7.1 MB): KunstlerCast_08.mp3

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The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #7: Fate of Flagstaff & Hydrogen Cars. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[intro music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to The KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency and Word Made By Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: The Fate of Flagstaff & Fossil Fuels.

Duncan Crary (interview): Jim, we’re back for another conversation about the end of suburbia, the cheap fuel (fiesta) and other disasters. Do you feel up for the challenge?

James Howard Kunstler: Roll heavy and gun up!

Duncan Crary: You know, lot of listeners probably don’t realize that each program is monitored by Sammy The Wonder Dog. Right?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah well we’re not quite sure he’s a dog. I tell visitors that he’s a flightless fruit bat.

Duncan Crary: [laughs]

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, he’s here snorching away, making funny little weird little sounds.

Duncan Crary: You get extra credit if you can hear him.

James Howard Kunstler: And identify what part of his body it comes from. [laughter]

Duncan Crary: OK, on that note, we have another listener call. This one comes from Flagstaff, Arizona. So let’s hear what this caller has to say.

Listener Caller: Hi. This is Matt from Flagstaff, Arizona. Long-time listener, first-time caller. I’ve two questions for Mr. Kunstler. First, you visited Flagstaff last year and I agree with your assessment that much of the so-called sunbelt is pretty much f—ed. However, Flagstaff is, I’m sure you noticed, much different from Phoenix.

It is a small city, in many ways similar to the kinds of cities you say will have a better chance of surviving the end of the era of cheap oil although it is fairly sprawling. We also have much better access to water in the form of a very large aquifer than much of the rest of Arizona although there’s little in the way of agriculture in the area. Do you think Flagstaff is better suited to survive than places like Phoenix of Tucson?

Second, in The End of Suburbia you are very critical of hydrogen-powered cars, implying that they were extreme safety hazards. However, Honda is putting a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle on the road this year and apparently the safety issues have been resolved. Is it possible that technology really might be able to help us avoid the worst of the post-petroleum era? Thank you very much. Bye.

Duncan Crary: Well, Jim, what is the fate that awaits Flagstaff, Arizona?

James Howard Kunstler: By American standards today, especially Western standards, Flagstaff is a fairly pleasant place … because it’s not Phoenix.

Phoenix, which is—I don’t know—about 100 miles south of there is just this unspeakable UFO landing strip that’s just totally out of control and, plus, it has no future. Now, Flagstaff is a much tinier, tinier version of that and as such is more manageable but it still shares the characteristics of most Western places in so far as there’s very little pre-automobile fabric there.

There are very few buildings from the pre-Word War II era. Most of the stuff there comes in the form of the strip mall or the pod or something like it and it’s just unfortunate.

Unfortunately, most of Flagstaff, Arizona looks like the service road that surrounds Newark Airport. It has somewhat more interesting terrain and it’s got some nice pine tree-kind of flora.

Duncan Crary: Well Jim, I’ve never been to Flagstaff, Arizona but I was looking it up on the Internet and I notice that a lot of the people are concerned that tourism is a big draw to Flagstaff—people come for the scenery and the scenery is getting gobbled up by development, which is a common situation. Right?

James Howard Kunstler: That has been the case in a lot of Arizona but, of course, they’re one of the epicenters of the housing bubble implosion so I would say they’re probably nearing the end of building out further and further and further into the mountains there. They’re going to have to face the consequences of that housing bubble which is going to be pretty severe even in Flagstaff.

Phoenix, of course, is just beyond belief and probably beyond help.

Duncan Crary: One thing Flagstaff has going for it, I was reading, it does have some good rail lines going through there.

James Howard Kunstler: Actually, I wouldn’t know about that. I got stuck in the airport in Phoenix. I couldn’t get a connecting flight to Flagstaff, which I was supposed to get.

I had to rent a car to get there and then I had to construct this really elaborate strategy for going to a hotel, leaving at about 3:30 in the morning to avoid the rush hour traffic because to get to Flagstaff from the airport you have to traverse the entire Phoenix metropolitan area from north to south.

I was on the highway at about four o’clock in the morning and you’re already hearing radio bulletins about, “There’s a huge truck trailer wreck over there on Ames Boulevard. Don’t go anywhere near there.” It’s four o’clock in the morning and they’re already having these incredible traffic snarls. But I did manage to get up out of there and get over to Flagstaff. Like I said, like most Western towns, it’s basically pretty grim. The whole thing is sort of like one big strip mall.

Duncan Crary: Well, the second question was about the new Honda hydrogen fuel cell car. What are your thoughts on that?

James Howard Kunstler: The caller suggested that I thought the big problem was merely the storage problem. I mentioned it in the chapter I wrote (in The Long Emergency). But that wasn’t my main beef with the hydrogen car. My main beef with the hydrogen car is that it basically takes more energy to produce the hydrogen than you get from the hydrogen that you’re producing.

So it’s kind of like the old Polish blanket trick, as we used to say, where the guy wants to make his blanket longer so he cuts 12 inches from the top and sews it on to the bottom. Only in this case, you’re cutting 12 inches off the top and you’re hemming it and you’re only getting nine inches on the bottom. Right?

So there’s that issue. There’s a lot of issues with hydrogen. It’s expensive and uneconomical to produce. It’s very hard to transport. You can’t run it through the same kind of pipes that were designed for the natural gas network because it has strange physical properties.

It’s the lightest of all the elements. It leaks out of almost anything that you contain it in because it can get out of the tiniest little aperture. It tends to eat through the seals that are designed for the valves and for the connectors because it’s an element that wants so much to combine with other elements that it corrodes the things around it very easily.

You can’t transport it by the kind of trucks that we take gasoline on because, being the kind of element that it is, when you compress it, it still takes up so much room that you can only get the equivalent of, like, 800 kilograms of hydrogen on a truck that’s designed to carry 44 tons of gasoline. So the actual, flammable, hazard part of this story is, for me, the smallest part of this story.

I don’t think that the hydrogen car is ever going to really happen. Now, look: you can’t stop the big car companies from producing these stunts and PR shows that they’re putting on. But just because they can produce one—or maybe 20—hydrogen cars doesn’t mean that a system is going to be in place for us to run 100 or 200 million of them. So it’s really very, very unlikely. I think that people who have invested their wishes and hopes in the hydrogen car are going to be very disappointed.

Duncan Crary: Well, I want to talk to you about this. In The Long Emergency you go through a number of different alternative fuel sources, and you basically say they’re all fantasy. I know that people can drive a car across the country on used French fry oil, but as you said, you can’t power the American automobile fleet on this stuff.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, it’s a matter of scale. They don’t scale. They don’t scale up. Yeah, you can do all of these things on the science project basis, and you can do some of them even on a somewhat larger basis. But can you do it on the basis of powering the whole society on this? And the answer is, “No.”

We’re already beginning to see all kinds of unanticipated consequences from this ethanol program that we put in place about two years ago. And it’s reverberating in parts of the system, really quickly, that people never expected, that are leading down the path of hunger and famine because gas tanks and hungry bellies are now competing for the grain supply.

Duncan Crary: Jim, what do you say to the people who say, “OK. I know you can’t replace gasoline with one alternative fuel, but how about a cocktail? Let’s use many different types of alternative fuel. That’s the solution to this problem.” What do you say to those folks?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, it’s an understandable wish that we would want to keep our happy motoring system going, because we have invested so much in it, and it’s almost inconceivable to most Americans that we would have to do without it. But I think the truth of the matter is that the automobile and all of the things associated with it are going to be a diminishing presence in our lives, whether we like it or not.

And what disturbs me—actually, this is a symptom of our even larger inability to have a coherent discussion about our problems in this country. As you go around the country, what you realize is the only thing that we’re talking about is how we’re going to run the cars by some other means than gasoline or diesel fuel. And to me, this is really a tragic thing, because we have to talk about a lot of other things.

Last night, I gave a lecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic (Institute), and one young foreign student—he was from India, actually—got up and was going on at some length about all the technological means for producing new transit systems and new elegant ways of getting people from point A to point B. And my response to him was that the one thing that we’re never talking about is walkable cities or walkable neighborhoods.

And it doesn’t require any heroic new technologies or new discoveries. In fact, it is, when all is said and done, absolutely the most pleasant way to live and to get around. Anybody who’s spent more than an hour and a half in the center of Paris understands this—or for that matter, a dozen other European cities.

Duncan Crary: That’s how I feel when I watch a movie like The Death of the Electric Car. I don’t care if they find some magic fuel. I don’t want to have to drive my car anywhere.

James Howard Kunstler: It’s a total dodge. Dude, listen. I go around, and every college lecture I give, there’s invariably, inevitably, somebody who gets up and says, “I got a brand new Prius.”

Duncan Crary: Yeah. Congratulations.

James Howard Kunstler: Congratulations. “Pin a medal on me. Give me a brownie point.” And then I have to sort of disillusion them and tell them… The problem in America is not that we’re driving the wrong kind of cars, per se.

The trouble in the United States is we’re driving incessantly. We’re driving every kind of car there is, incessantly. And we’ve got to find a way out of the incessant motoring and a way to live without it, and a happy way to live without it—not a punishment way to live without it, but a way to be happy and do it. And it means, really, a completely different paradigm for everyday life.

Duncan Crary: Yeah. I don’t even care if the fuel you’re running your car on is spewing out some gas that’s good for the environment.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, like nitrous oxide. We’d all feel better if the gas is…

Duncan Crary: [laughs] But you’re chewing up every last bit of land to pave—

James Howard Kunstler: By the way, this is characteristic of one of the most famous alternative motoring projects in America, which is Amory Lovins’ Hypercar project at his Rocky Mountain Institute.

It shows how cracked we are, because here you have a guy running this environmental institute, this guy who’s regarded as one of the great geniuses of his generation, Amory Lovins, and he spent 15 years developing this project to design a car that gets such supernaturally wonderful mileage that it’ll be just the greatest thing ever.

And he never realizes that the main unintended consequence of all this is that it just promotes the idea that we can continue being car-dependent. It’s totally, totally insane. And that’s where we’re at as a country.

Duncan Crary: Well, Jim, that’s it for another show. Thanks a lot for talking with us.

James Howard Kunstler: Nice podding with you, Duncan.

Listener Caller: This is Margaret Luckett in New York State—Tivoli, New York. I’m calling because I just found The KunstlerCast, and I’m just so delighted to have found it. So thanks for having it, and I look forward to hearing a lot more shows. Bye-bye.

Duncan Crary: You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast, featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll-free at 866-924-9499.

Send email to

You can download episodes of this program and read transcripts at KunstlerCast.com.

I’m your host, Duncan Crary. Thanks for listening.

[music]

Direct Download: KunstlerCast_07.mp3

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The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #6: Zoning. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to The KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl, featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency and World Made by Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: zoning.

Duncan Crary: Jim, welcome back to another KunstlerCast.

James Howard Kunstler: Nice to be back in my Künstler realm.

Duncan Crary: I want to start today’s show with a story, but I think you’ll know where I’m going with this. One of my favorite things to do in my neighborhood is walk through the miles of alleys in downtown Troy. And they’re very interesting; in fact, Norman Rockwell once painted one of these alleys in “The Homecoming (Soldier)”.

But it occurred to me the other day that the alley is actually outlawed in most of America.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, it’s become sort of an anachronism in urban design. It’s something we used to do when our cities were organized differently, years ago. And it was a benefit, it was an amenity because you were able to put all the services in the alley and get them off the front of the house. That’s where you could put the garbage, and the stable—later the garage—and the electrical poles and everything, and that allowed the front of the house to have a lot of decorum and beauty, and made our streets beautiful; and we stopped doing that.

Probably the main reason why that’s not done anymore is that the fire marshals all over America have determined that they can’t get a fire truck down the alley. Therefore, we must eliminate them. Actually when Andres Duany and his crew of planners tried to do a project in Florida that had service alleys, the fire marshals hassled them about it really, really hard.

And so Duany actually took them out to this giant parking lot—a Wal-Mart parking lot or something—at six o’clock in the morning, and they put down tape to indicate what the size of these alleys would be. And they had the fire marshals drive their trucks down these taped out lines to demonstrate that they could get their trucks down there. And so the complaints of the fire marshals weren’t even grounded in reality—it was just a complete fabrication and delusion. But it caught on and became popular all over America to not do this, to not have alleys and to deny them and not let people build them.

Duncan Crary: OK, Jim, fire codes are just one of many elements putting pressures on the towns to adopt these zoning codes that prevent things like alleys and smart planning. When did America adopt this one-size-fits-all zoning mentality?

James Howard Kunstler: It’s kind of a tortured story and it goes back to the early 20th century when the city was really changing very rapidly, becoming, in many ways, an extremely unpleasant place because the scale of industry was getting enormous and it was all mixed in with the other stuff, and it was hurting property values.

So we developed this idea in the early 20th century that you had to rigorously segregate all the uses in the city. The residential neighborhoods had to be rigorously cordoned off from the places where industry was allowed to do its thing and be dirty and noisy, smelly and all that. And that became the classic model for zoning.

And it certainly is understandable in the sense that the industrial city had never really been seen before. It was a new emergent thing that was developing; people really weren’t prepared for it. It self-organized in the classic sense of emergence and then there it was; what do we do about it?

So zoning is supposedly the rational response to it.

Duncan Crary: From what I understand, if you lived in an industrial city you could have a soap factory go in right next to your house, you had no control over it at all. So there was some good reason in trying to prevent that, some more order?

James Howard Kunstler: That’s the point I’m trying to make. It was a rational response to a set of circumstances, which at the time were pretty difficult. How do you manage, how do you regulate the behavior of these industrial activities, which are taking our cities and making them really unpleasant in a way that we’ve never experienced before?

And of course, the scale issue was also a new thing because of the size of the factories. As you leave the late 19th century and get into the early 20th century with things like electrification and the assembly line, all of a sudden factories are no longer just 300-foot long boxes in the middle of the city. Now, they’re the size of a whole neighborhood—an automobile plant in the 1920s was huge.

So we developed this idea called zoning. And then the 1920s are over, and you had the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression and the construction industry is really one of the hardest hit industries during the Depression, and not a whole lot is built during that period.

And the zoning codes are now in place; we’ve had the first iterations of the suburban residential neighborhood, cul-de-sacs, and subdivisions in the 1920s.

But a lot of that comes to a halt with the Depression and World War II. And it’s after World War II that we really start to get going on the refinements of zoning, and we start to enter this ‘territory of the absurd’. And among the things that we do is that we decide that shopping is now classified as an “obnoxious industrial activity” that nobody should be allowed to live anywhere near.

So not only does that create huge problems for traffic now—by doing that you basically mandated that everybody has to get in their car 11 times a day to make a trip for every little thing they need. But you’ve also now eliminated the most common kind of affordable housing that is found virtually everywhere else in the world, except the United States after 1950, which is people living above retail establishments, people living above stores—normal urban typologies of buildings that are more than one-story high.

And after 1950 we built very few commercial retail buildings that are more than one story high. And so that then engenders this unanticipated consequence of having an affordable housing crisis. We’re now obliged to provide this artificial commodity called ‘affordable housing’ because we were too stupid to provide it organically by allowing buildings to be more than one-story high.

It’s really a horrible, awful, tragic tale.

Duncan Crary: I believe, in The Geography of Nowhere, you mentioned that a lot of towns across America just adopted the same zoning codes.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, there was a company somewhere in Indiana—I forget the name of it now. It was an engineering company that built a template for zoning for pretty much any municipality. It was like the generic vanilla zoning code.

Duncan Crary: Which is part of the reason why every development, housing development in America looks almost the same.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, there was also a very, very firm and strong level of consensus among the people who are delivering suburbia about how things should be done. By that, I mean: the traffic engineers, the developers, the real estate salespeople all agree that this is the way we should do it. The streets should all be 80 ft. wide, and the houses should all be on a half-acre lot, and the shopping centers should all be far away from this so that people aren’t bothered by grocery shopping.

And that’s how it becomes normal. And the consensus is adopted by all the professional organizations like A.S.H.E., the American Society of Highway Engineers, and all of their cohorts, and the professional builders, etc., etc. For about 60 years now we’ve had this very, very firm agreement about how this stuff should all work.

Now, the fact this it is all on the verge now of collapsing is another story. But as one of my favorite correspondents never tires of saying, “Shit happens, and shit un-happens.”

Duncan Crary: Well I think one of the larger issues that you mentioned in The Geography of Nowhere is that urban planning has now simply become public administration, pushing papers, and you know all these SEQRA requirements, and—

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, urban planning has no design component anymore. It’s simply about administering the codes, and about the minutia and trivia of measuring the width of the curb cut, and making sure that the signage is exactly within a centimeter of the specifications, and having nothing to do with excellence in design or having standards of excellence, or having a consensus for excellence, or least of all any consideration for how the buildings will behave in their relations with the other buildings so that we have some kind of a coherent urban structure. So that’s totally absent.

They threw it in the garbage in about 1950. They decided “We don’t need this anymore. All we need is the traffic engineering; and the highway geometries, and statistical analysis, and nothing else is necessary. So here’s 5,000 years of architecture and urban design, and we are throwing it in the dumpster now along with the old Boston cream pies, and the half-eaten tuna fish sandwiches.”

Duncan Crary: Well I used to work for a suburban weekly newspaper for like a month, until I couldn’t stand it—

James Howard Kunstler: I did too, but I did it for almost a year.

Duncan Crary: I used to actually interview you, Jim. You probably don’t remember. I probably spelled your name wrong, too. But one of my jobs was to sit in on these suburban town planning meetings.

James Howard Kunstler: That’s an odious chore, isn’t it?

Duncan Crary: Yeah. They caught me on TV a couple times. The TV news would be there and I’d be sleeping. [laughs]

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, you have to get some toothpicks and put them under your eyelids when you’re in a situation like that.

Duncan Crary: But here’s the thing. One of these town planners, I mean this is a big suburban mess of a town, he actually told me that he was looking forward to moving to Manhattan when he retired, to be able to live in a walkable mixed-used community.

James Howard Kunstler: Well these poor bozos, they come out of planning school because they made some bad choice or they were deceived into thinking that they were in a design discipline, and then they spend the next 40 years working for a city piling up a pension plan. They hate their work; they hate themselves for doing it. They realize that the whole thing is a mummery.

Finally they gaze at that golden, glowing finish line of retirement. And then they can go to a place where it’s exciting, that’s mixed-used—a place that, in short, displays all the qualities that they’ve been preventing from occurring in the place they’re in charge of for their whole career. Or they move to Key West, or Europe, or some other place.

So yeah, the damage that these municipal officials have done all over America is just out of this world.

Duncan Crary: So we’ve spoken about the new urbanists before, we’ll speak about them again, but what are they doing with zoning? Are they developing more zoning codes, or are they just trying to get rid of it, or what?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, there have been these tremendous efforts for 15 years to reform the existing zoning codes that mandate the suburban outcome everywhere. The new urbanists have certainly come up with some wonderful templates and models, which have been adopted by quite a few municipalities around the country. But they’re still only a small statistical fraction of most of the places. Most of the places in America remain clueless, and it’s very tragic.

I have sort of a different view of what the outcome is going to be. I do have this, what I call “Long Emergency” point of view about where we’re headed. I think that the suburban codes will be self-evidently useless within a fairly short span of time, and they’re basically not going to be reformed after a certain point.

What I think you’ll see is they’ll just basically be abandoned and ignored, because we’re going to be a much less affluent nation. We won’t be able to pay for the enforcement of these codes, nor are we going to follow a lot of the mandated coddling of the automobile, because the automobile is going to be a troubled element of our life.

It’s going to become incrementally less of a mass democratic prosthetic extension of our lives, and become incrementally more of an elite activity. There’s going to be a lot of political friction over people who are not in the elite paying for the motoring comforts of people who remain in the elite. That’s going to be a problem, and that will be expressed politically on the local scene in the people who are appointed to boards, etc., etc.

So, incrementally I think we’ll get back to a place where we’re going to recover some sanity. But it may not be a very coherent kind of reform process; it may be, by default, the abandonment of practices that have proved to be unsustainable.

Duncan Crary: Well, I’m looking forward to that day. Jim, thanks a lot for speaking with us.

James Howard Kunstler: Nice to be here with you in our little realm.

[music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’ve been listening to The KunstlerCast, featuring James Howard Kunstler.

To leave a listener comment call toll-free at 866-924-9499. Send email to

You can download episodes of this program, and read transcripts at KunstlerCast.com.

I’m your host, Duncan Crary. Thanks for listening.

[music]

Direct Download: KunstlerCast_06.mp3

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The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #5: Starchitects. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[intro music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to the KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and World Made by Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: Starchitects.

Duncan Crary (as interviewer): Hello, Jim, we’re back for another KunstlerCast. Nice to see you.

James Howard Kunstler: Nice to see you, Duncan.

Duncan Crary: They actually put us on the real airwaves out in Olympia, Washington.

James Howard Kunstler: How dare they.

Duncan Crary: [laughs] If you can believe it. The KunstlerCast is now playing on Northwest Indy Radio.

James Howard Kunstler: Did you get your check because I didn’t get mine? It’s probably in the mail.

Duncan Crary: This is a public service that we’re doing. OK, so you can listen to us on the air in Aberdeen on 94.3 FM and in Olympia on 92.9 FM. They’re going to be playing us at 10:35 a.m. Fridays and 4:35 Sundays. Pretty cool, huh?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, cool. I’ve never been on a radio before… I mean, as a show.

Duncan Crary: Well, in honor of our new listeners in Washington state, we’re actually — we got a call from Seattle, Washington.

James Howard Kunstler: Dude.

Duncan Crary: Let’s hear what this young woman has to say.

Listener Caller: Hi, Jim and Duncan. This is Sylvia calling from Seattle and I want to say that I’m really enjoying the show so far. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about some buildings that we have in Seattle and what’s going on with new architecture around the country.

So we have a couple of projects. There’s the new public library which is kind of this futuristic cubist disaster. It kind of looks like a cardboard box that’s been half torn apart, only instead of cardboard, it’s made out of reflective paneling and it doesn’t match any of the other buildings around it.

Then another disaster that we have in Seattle is what’s called the EMP, which is the Experience Music Project, right by the Space Needle in the Seattle Center. This looks like a bright colored amoeba. It’s just completely different shapes, it doesn’t match anything, of course, how could it?

I’m wondering — my question, I guess, is: when cities have the opportunity to create something new, it seems like they either make it a cartoon or some futuristic box that is kind of screaming for attention. I’m wondering, why is it that people are not interested in building classic buildings that blend in? So, if you could help me understand this a little better, I would really appreciate it. Thanks so much, guys.

Duncan Crary: Jim, have you seen these things? I’ve actually seen these buildings in person.

James Howard Kunstler: I’ve seen and been in the Seattle Public Library designed by Rem Koolhass.

It’s not that hard to understand what’s going on. The city officials are not that sophisticated. They’re probably not stupid, but, basically, what they’re hoodwinked into is a kind of fashion contest with other cities, a status fashion contest.

The big status symbol for the last 20 years has been to get a museum or a library designed by one of a certain roster of star architects or Starchitects as they’re called. It’s a revolving door of Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhass, Peter Eisenman and a bunch of other people.

The results have been disastrous for practically every place that’s done this. The case of the Seattle library is interesting. Yes, it is a building that is intimidating and the inside of it is an interesting thing because it completely disorients you. You go up these stairways that are designed to make you feel disoriented and to not really particularly lead to a place that you understand.

The ideology of academic architecture these days is based on the wish to confound our expectations about how buildings will work and about how cities will work and how the buildings will relate to the cities.

So, the program with Rem Koolhass — and he states this explicitly in his own writings — is to confuse the person using the building and create as much anxiety as possible in the users and to mystify them. The whole object of this whole exercise is to make the architect seem more supernaturally brilliant for having created all these mystifications. The more mystification they create, the more it supposedly means that they know things that you don’t.

Duncan Crary: All right, Jim, but what I don’t understand is: not only have these guys like Koolhass conned all the mayors of these cities around the world, but the American Institute of Architects is giving this guy awards. He got an award for this public library which looks like a Droid transport carrier out of a George Lucas film.

James Howard Kunstler: All the big architecture prizes are going to these horrendous despotic high tech buildings that look like they’re constructed out of Gillette Blue Blades or some other really frightening material.

It is a con game and it’s also a game of the “Emperor’s new clothes.” These guys are all trying to support an ideology which says, in essence, “The more we can mystify the public, the more brilliant we will appear to be.”

Duncan Crary: Yeah, it’s almost like how Rudy Giuliani once was talking about art, there was some art show in Brooklyn that was controversial and he goes: “Art is something I don’t understand. If I don’t understand it, it’s art.” I feel like, that’s the level of this con. These buildings look like crap!

James Howard Kunstler: Well, that’s the other end of the spectrum which is a kind of Philistinism which is “I don’t know nothing about art, but I know what I like.” There is such a thing as — there’s a different path.

Let me perhaps put it this way: One way of understanding the urban principles involved is to know that there’s a difference between background buildings and monumental buildings.

Monumental buildings have a certain obligation to help us feel oriented, to know what they are, to be typologically consistent with our expectations, and also to present a sort of sense of decorum to the city.

The city can be an intimidating place for the person who lives there. It’s a place where you’re meeting a lot of strangers constantly, you’re around people you don’t know. There are a lot of exciting, stimulating, but also kind of intimidating things that happen to you in the city.

So one of the purposes of architecture for a few thousand years has been to reassure us that when we’re in the city, we’re in a place that is safe, in which transactions occur that we can understand. We’re in surroundings that are coherent, that the outsides of the buildings embellish the public realm and honor the public realm.

It honors our presence in the public realm by speaking to us in languages, and vocabularies, and syntaxes, and grammars, and rhythms, and patterns that we understand from our own culture.

So, when you bring into that setting this effort to mystify and confuse everybody and create, deliberately, more anxiety, you’re doing a real disservice not only to the individual people who inhabit the place, but to the idea of civic life as a general proposition.

Duncan Crary: I want to get back to this “Emperor has no clothes” idea. I think you nailed it.

James Howard Kunstler: That’s not an original thought on my part, by the way, Duncan. I mean, there are a lot of people who are on to the “Emperor’s new clothes” element to this racket.

Duncan Crary: Well, there’s a reporter, I happen to really enjoy his writing –but he was writing about my hometown, Troy, and I think he suffered from the “Emperor had no clothes” situation with this EMPAC building. Now, you were speaking at RPI recently, did you see this thing? It’s a galactic battlestar –

James Howard Kunstler: Yes, it’s the mothership. The tragic thing about it is that the Rensselaer Polytechnic campus is one of the more coherent ensembles of buildings in the United States of urban college campuses. Most of it is a Beaux Arts period, Greco-Roman sort of neoclassical ensemble of buildings.

It’s very handsome, very orderly. It creates a sense of coherence and order which helps young people who are struggling to develop a point of view about the world and to feel that their existence has purpose and order.

So, being in these settings actually is enhanced by being surrounded by things that reflect a certain amount of coherence. Into this, they’ve now introduced this kind of mothership UFO but it’s perfectly consistent with the trend of what’s gone on in every campus in every city in America.

Duncan Crary: But, Jim, this campus happens to be perched on top of a hill, so it’s the skyline of my city. Now they’re blasting these green and red lights on it at night, like, “Oh, look at this thing.”

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, it’s like if you were to put on a clown suit and jump up and down on the highest part of your city and point at yourself and say, “Look at me, I’m special.”

Duncan Crary: [laughs] But they have a school of architecture at RPI. What are architects actually learning in school?

James Howard Kunstler: By the way, we should now have a Special Olympics for architects so they can jump up and down in their clown suits and be as a special as they want.

Yeah, it’s tragic. RPI, of course, is not really a special case. You can probably count on one hand the architecture schools around the country that are actually teaching something that has a future. Most of them are pretty much stuck in the fashionista/mystification racket.

And RPI, unfortunately, is one of them. Although there, even they have heavier emphasis on just some of the technical considerations, like these claddings that are made out of rare metals like titanium, which is an unbelievable squandering of resources. They’re really into a lot of the high tech stuff.

Many of the buildings that are getting these awards from the architecture societies and the Pritzker Prize and all that, they’re doing it by dabbling in high techism.

There is not necessarily anything really wonderful about cladding a building with titanium, from a technical point of view. It doesn’t improve the insulating or heating properties or air conditioning properties, it’s just a stunt really.

Duncan Crary: Jim, you lecture all around the country and you do speak to –

James Howard Kunstler: I actually call it flapping my gums.

Duncan Crary: [laughs] But you do speak at some — you’ve spoken at architectural institutes and things like that?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, I’ve been to many of the biggies.

Duncan Crary: So have you talked to these architects? What the hell are they learning in school? Do they apologize to you when they hear you? Or do they argue with you?

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, no. They argue with me strenuously, especially at the more elite universities. I’ve been to Harvard, I don’t know, three or four times and they think that this is a joke that I’m complaining about it. They think that mystification is wonderful. It makes them feel more superior.

They’re totally along with that program and they’re certainly prompted and supported in it by their professors who also get a huge lift out of feeling like superior supernatural beings from another planet. They’ve succeeded in mystifying people and making them feel uncomfortable in the buildings that they have to go to everyday.

Another interesting case, by the way, is MIT, which is down the street from Harvard. They were gifted with the famous Frank Gehry building known as the Stata Center, which is kind of a classroom complex. It was supposed to be the centerpiece of their “new” main street which is called “Vassar Street” off of Mass Avenue.

The building’s only been open for about two years and they’ve already incurred something like $100 million lawsuit. Because the roof doesn’t work and the way that the entrances were designed, they were perfectly designed to direct large pieces of ice to fall on the heads of people on the sidewalk. [Duncan laughs] As if they couldn’t have predicted that from these steel shed channelized roofs that they have over the entrances. So they’re in a lot of trouble with that. They’re going to probably have to do a lot of costly retrofitting.

The inside of the building, by the way, doesn’t work very well for the people who work there. There are all these glass walls where people wanted to have private offices, so they could sit in there and drink their coffee and be alone and not be bothered. Instead, they got glass walls for all their offices, and they would be taking corrugated cardboard cartons that their computers came in and taping them to the glass walls of their office so that they could have some privacy.

So the whole thing is sort of a fiasco in spite of the fact that it’s a playful building and looks cute on the outside on one side.

The whole issue with Vassar Street, too, has gotten very funny because most of the buildings along Vassar Street, now, at ground level, actually present the heat air conditioning exhaust vents at , like, eyebrow levels so that when you’re going by, you get blasted with either hot air or cold air, depending on the season.

Duncan Crary: All right, Jim, I think that pretty much wraps it up for this week. We’ve settled the score with these architects but if there are any architects out there and you want to call up and defend yourself, our listener comment line is 1 866 924 9499. Thanks a lot, Jim.

James Howard Kunstler: Nice speaking to you, Duncan.

Duncan Crary (as host): You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll free at 866 924 9499.

Send email to . You can download episodes of this program and read transcripts at KunstlerCast.com.

I’m your host, Duncan Crary. Thanks for listening.

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