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

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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.

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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.

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