Respect for the Human Scale

James Howard Kunstler has written numerous books about urbanism and “the fiasco of suburbia,” including The Geography of Nowhere, Home from Nowhere and The City in Mind. In his most recent book, The Long Emergency, Kunstler explores the shocking implications of the imminent decline of oil and natural gas for the American way of life. His forthcoming novel, World Made by Hand, is set in a small upstate New York town in a not-too-distant “post-petroleum” future — a place where highways and suburbs have been abandoned and life has become “extremely local.”

Nikos Salingaros is a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a renowned urban theorist. The author of Principles of Urban Structure and A Theory of Architecture, Salingaros links mathematical, fractal and network theory to urban planning and architecture. Over the years he has been a close collaborator with numerous noted architects and urban planners, including Christopher Alexander, Andrés Duany, Léon Krier and others.

Next American City took some time to speak with Mr. Kunstler and Mr. Salingaros about peak oil, crime, Vegas, transportation and both the failures and successes of urbanism.

Next American City: Lewis Mumford once commented that “the current American way of life is founded not just on motor transportation, but on the religion of the motorcar, and the sacrifices that people are prepared to make for this religion stand outside the realm of rational criticism.”

Today the religion of the motorcar remains strong. Is there any hope of changing course in the coming years, or are we doomed to repeat the auto-centered planning mistakes of recent decades?

James Howard Kunstler: I don’t think we’re going to have to make a whole lot of further accommodations to the automobile. I’m serenely convinced that the automobile is going to be a diminishing presence in our lives. We’re not going to come up with any “miracle” or “rescue remedy” for the petroleum scarcity problem.

I think you’re going to see an interesting political problem arise, where motoring simply becomes an elite activity again and will be greatly resented by the masses of Americans.

That’s the second half of the Mumford question. The first half has a lot to do with what I call the “psychology of previous investment.” The investment we’ve made now in the happy motoring life is so enormous that no matter what reality is telling us about it, we’re probably going to see a big campaign to sustain the unsustainable at all costs. I maintain that this will probably work out as a gigantic exercise in futility and a further waste of our remaining resources. We’re probably going to campaign to keep suburbia going, but it’s not going to pay off for us, and it’s really basically a waste of our time and our resources.

NAC: Is it too late to make the necessary changes?

JHK: From my point of view, I think the mistake a lot of observers and commentators make is in assuming that there’s some sort of smooth transition between where we’re at now and where we’re going. I maintain that there’s actually a lot of noise in the system, and what we’re faced with is some sort of discontinuity that is liable to be rather sharp and produce a lot of disorder.

NAC: So it’s not that you think it’s impossible to run a modern society on much less energy, with maybe healthier city planning, it’s just that we’re not going to do it in time?

JHK: Well, no, I think I’d go further and say that most of the thinking about alternative energy solutions is delusional. We’re not going to run Wal-Mart and the Interstate Highway System or Walt Disney World on any combination of the alternatives that are in play right now, or even close to it. We’re going to have to make very different arrangements, and we’re simply not psychologically prepared for that reality.

NAC: Nikos, where do you stand on the issue of peak oil and the depletion of energy?

Nikos Salingaros: I want to pick up on [James’] point on investment and the societal blindness that follows. The [biologist and author] Jared Diamond writes about that [in his book Collapse]. Civilizations can see the coming collapse, they just cannot bring themselves to make any change — there’s just so much inertia in the system that they just go toward the collapse. Why’d they die? It doesn’t sneak up on them.

So James has picked this up. There’s so much investment in the whole structure. “What’s good for the automobile is good for the United States” — not to name any particular car companies. Nobody’s going to change. And the change will be unexpected. The change may come gradually, there may be some catastrophic developments with the oil becoming extremely scarce, but I will not venture to predict what will happen.

Now, going back to the first part of the question about religion, I have written many articles on the “pseudo-religious” aspect of architecture. People get infatuated with ideas, and it becomes a religion for them. And the automobile is really more than a utility. It has occupied such a central place in the American psyche and now the world psyche; it offers the insulating cocoon, and at the same time total perceived liberty of communication between point A and point B in the continental United States.

And even those who realize the delusion — it still takes them two and half hours to drive across the city because of terrible traffic. So it’s not so easy. But even so, we stick to the ideal, and that’s where the religion comes in; there is a dogma: The automobile makes you free to go anywhere you want at any time. In the middle of the night you can go to Wal-Mart to shop and buy a consumer toy that will break down in six months.

The automobile insulates you. Our society spends billions piping information into our homes and minds about a hostile society ... it’s them, everyone outside, they’re nasty, they’re going to kill us. So they force us to retreat to our little enclave in suburbia, and our car is our cocoon, so we enter our car to navigate through the hostile territory, along with everyone else. We don’t realize that we are them. Like Pogo used to say, “The enemy is us.” But there’s been such a massive brainwashing over the decades about the perceived freedom and protection that the car gives us.

NAC: Is there a connection you can see between the religion of the automobile and the religion of modern architecture?

NS: Well, there is a tentative link, because the arch-destroyer of cities, [the famous architect and urban planner] Le Corbusier had the latest sports cars of the ’20s always parked inside his buildings, or he would draw a car in front of his buildings. So in his mind, modern architecture was linked with the automobile. And all his urban megalomaniac plans have the superhighway filled with racing cars. I think Le Corbusier vastly underestimated the number of cars you would need. So in all his drawings you see sports cars cruising on free highways.

I’m thinking of Phoenix, Tucson and Las Vegas. These places will simply dry up and blow away.”
— James Howard Kunstler

NAC: It kind of makes you wonder what he would think if he saw the world that we’ve built now.

NS: Well, he saw the world then, and he despised the world, and he wanted to destroy the world that we know and love. He was not only a megalomaniac, but also a sadistic psychopath.

NAC: Going back to Mumford, one of his criticisms of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities was that she blamed urban planners for the problems of American cities without addressing larger, more destructive forces at work. By the same token, Christopher Alexander has suggested that the New Urbanism has failed, in part, for a similar reason: For being too accommodating to the pressures of banks and developers at the expense of a more step-by-step process to create truly living cities.

JHK: Well, this is an interesting question for me, because I went up to Toronto and interviewed Jane Jacobs at length in the last couple of years of her life, and I found it very hard to direct her attention to the issue of the suburban fiasco per se. She just kept on deflecting my questions about it.

You know, Mumford and Jacobs had quite a rivalry. Mumford supported Jacobs very strongly in the beginning, and then turned on her, rather viciously. I’m not sure quite what that was about.

Mumford was in a strange position because he identified very clearly the pernicious forces that were in motion. But unfortunately he was writing about them even before they attained their apogee of influence in our culture. What we see in the suburban paradigm really is a self-organizing, emergent structure that’s responding to the conditions and circumstances of a particular time and place — namely, the mid-twentieth century — and the circumstance of abundant, cheap oil, which the United States possessed in spades. So we set out on this project ... and it also coincided with some other things — the end of the Second World War, and in effect the Great Depression, or the extension of the Great Depression through the hardships of war. I’ve always maintained that suburbia was a present we gave ourselves for having triumphed against those combined adversities.

NAC: Nikos, in your book on urbanism you mention that there are things we can learn from shanty towns that grow organically.

NS: Well, yeah, the organic growth is Christopher’s [Alexander] bottom-up, step-by-step principle, in practice. Not because those people apply Christopher’s ideas; they don’t know Christopher’s ideas, most of them cannot read. But this is the way that structure evolves and is put together. Human beings without any training will go through this extremely sophisticated, scientific procedure and put together the shanty towns. I have managed to get Andrés Duany interested, and we wrote a lengthy paper on social housing in South America, where we apply Christopher’s ideas with a combination of a top-down intervention in order to propose a better model for social housing.

NAC: So we can learn something from the developing world?

NS: Oh, we learn the most fundamental things about human scale. We so-called civilized or more technological people have lost the human scale. And if we only learned that single thing it would transform our cities overnight. Respect for the human scale includes pedestrian links. But more than that, it’s the human scale, the range of human scales, from the size of a finger to the size of the head, to the size of a human body, to the distance of a short walk.

NAC: That’s what you’ve called “fractal.”

NS: Right. A fractal hierarchy of scales, which we have eliminated from our cities. If we can reintroduce them in the physical structure and then accommodate them in the physical structure to human beings who want to walk three meters, and who want to lie against a low wall, sit on a low wall, sit on a bench. Now we eliminate them, because we think, “This place will be invaded by vagrants.”

You know, something happened with the departments of urbanism in our major universities. They were closed down and moved into the sociology department, and merged with urban crime and urban social ills. And that tells you something: Our society looks at urbanism in terms of drug dealing and homeless people, and has forgotten the geometry of urbanism. And we — I mean our friends, James, Andrés, Christopher — all talk about geometry. It’s about geometry. OK, there are social problems, but those are separate problems. We should not sacrifice our cities and our children’s futures to be able to enjoy urban life just because of crime. Crime has always existed. And it should not displace the whole concept of urbanism.

NAC: Well, it may or may not be true that suburbanization decreases crime anyway ... although, maybe it makes people, as you said, more secure, more insulated.

NS: It gives the impression of vastly improved security.

NAC: Let’s sidestep. Jim, can you talk about your thoughts on LEED certification?

JHK: Well, I put that in the category of what I call “blowing green smoke up our ass[es].” I saw a fantastic example of that last night. In a commercial break from the Iowa caucus returns, there was a commercial from General Motors for a hydrogen car, and the story they were trying to put across was, “We’ve already invented this, and you can go out and buy it tomorrow.” Which is complete nonsense. We don’t have any hydrogen cars, we don’t have a fleet of hydrogen cars, and we certainly don’t have any network of hydrogen filling stations even on the drawing boards that would service these things. So the whole thing was just an exercise in unfortunately bending and twisting the reality of the American viewing public. And we do an awful lot of this.

There’s a larger thing here that I feel that I need to discuss. Unlike a lot of other people who are looking at the city scene and trying to make sense of this, I have a real contrarian view. I think that what we’re about to see is an epochal reversal of the 200-year-old trend of populations moving from the small towns and the farms to the big cities. That is going to reverse, and we’re going to see big cities contract substantially, and people moving back to smaller cities, smaller towns, and indeed to an agricultural landscape that is going to require a lot more human attention to make productive.

What I think this is really about is the metroplexes and mega cities that have come to seem normal to us in our time — I don’t think there’s a chance in hell they’re going to sustain themselves, and as Nikos says, it’s all a matter of scale.

The energy resources of the future will not permit places like Orlando, or Houston, or indeed any major American city at its current scale to stay the way it is. Now, something will be in almost all of these places, because almost all of them occupy important sites. There are some that don’t. I’m thinking specifically of Phoenix, Tucson and Las Vegas. These places will simply dry up and blow away, because they’ll have additional problems on top of energy problems, of not being able to produce food locally, etc. And water problems. But all the other major American metroplexes are going to contract, and it’s only a question of how disorderly this process is going to be.