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.

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

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

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