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Back in the early 20th Century, when the cheap oil
fiesta was just getting underway, and some major new technological innovation
made its debut every month – cars, radio, movies, airplanes
– there was no practical limit to what men of vision could imagine about the future city, though
often their imaginings were ridiculous. The representative case is Le
Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret;
1887 – 1965), the leading architectural hoodoo-meister
of Early High Modernism, whose 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris
proposed to knock down the entire Marais district on the Right
Bank and replace it with rows of identical towers set between
freeways.
Luckily for Paris,
the city officials laughed at him every time he came back with the scheme
over the next forty years – and Corb was
nothing if not a relentless self-promoter. Ironically and tragically, though,
the Plan Voisin
model was later adopted gleefully by post World War Two American planners,
and resulted in such urban monstrosities as the infamous Cabrini Green
housing projects of Chicago and scores of things like it around the country.
Other visions of that early period involved Tom Swiftian scenes of Everest-size skyscrapers with Zeppelin
moorings on top, linked to zooming air trams, while various types of personal
helicopters swooped between things. Virtually all these schemes had one
thing in common: the city of the future they depicted was vibrant. We know
now, here in the USA
anyway, that this was the one thing they got most wrong. By 1970, many
American cities were stone dead at their centers,
especially the industrial giants of the Midwest.
Ten years later, the American city of the future was the nightmare vision of Blade Runner, an acid rain-dripping ruin
fit only for androids.
These days, a new generation of mojo
architect savants such as Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas are retailing an
urban futurism that is basically warmed-over Corbu
with an expressionist horror movie spin, featuring torqued
and tortured skyscrapers, made possible by computer-aided design, clad in
Darth Vadar glass or other sheer surfaces, with
grim public spaces exquisitely engineered to induce agoraphobia. There’s
more than a tinge of sadism in all this, though Koolhaas
is much more explicit in his many writings than the less-voluble Libeskind about consciously surrendering to a zeitgeist
of cruel alienation. But these are also very rarified
exercises among a tiny group of mutually-referential fashionista
narcissists, while the general public itself – at least the fraction
that thinks about anything – only grudgingly goes along with it as a
sort of drear obeisance to the religion of art.
An alternate awful urban vision of the future,
advanced by public intellectuals such as author Mike Davis (The Ecology of Fear), is actually more
about the city of the present: the third world mega-slum as embodied by such
ghastly organisms as present-day Lagos, Lima, and Karachi.
This is a vision of plain toxic hypertrophy with no particular artistic or
architectural overlay to it. These cities have organized according to a
simple logarithmic progression of horrible conditions – more people,
more pollution, more poverty – nourished by
cheap energy globalism, with the expectation that
they will only continue along that path and get worse.
Yet another vision of the future is supplied by the
New Urbanists, who have campaigned for a return to
the body of principle and methodology drawn from successful historic practice
rather than science fiction, politics, or metaphysics. That is, they rely on
urban design that has proven to work well in the past and is
worth emulating – by which I mean the relations of buildings to public
space and with each other, not the deployment of sewer lines and other
infrastructure. The New Urbanists are
marginalized because their reliance on tradition is considered sentimental
and nostalgic. Their
work is viewed by the mandarins of architecture through the lens of Modernist
ideology, which, going back a hundred years to Adolf Loos’s
declaration that ornament is crime,
has worked to decouple contemporary practice from what they regard as the
filthy claptrap of history. Of course, Modernism itself has
self-evidently become historical in its own right, and the more this is true,
paradoxically, the more its defenders insist that history does not
matter. Whatever else this represents in the form of intellectual
imprudence, it at least promotes a discontinuity of human experience which
cannot be healthy.
The New Urbanists are also
disdained for their modesty of ambition. They are not interested in the
biggest this or that. Their plans are typically scaled to the quarter-mile
walk and rarely include super-sized buildings. The cutting edge holds no
attractions for them in and of itself. They want to create neighborhoods and quarters, not intergalactic space
ports. They want the streets, squares, and building facades to provide
decorum, legibility, and even beauty, while the
latest crop of Modernists seek to confound our expectations about the urban
environment as much as possible, in the service of generating anxiety rather
than pleasure. The Modernists use the lame adjective edgy to describe their methods. It
is supposed to signify excitement, novelty, and especially innovation, but
mostly they have managed to innovate only new ways to make people feel bad
about where they are.
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The future direction of urban experience depends a
great deal on an understanding of history, and of recent history in
particular, because the hyper development of the past two hundred years has
followed the arc of increasing energy resources and, above all, we are now
facing the world-wide depletion of energy resources.
As the industrial age gained traction in the early
19th century, so did the demographic trend of people increasingly moving from
the farms and villages to the big cities. Industrial
production was centralized in the cities and recruited armies of workers
insatiably. Meanwhile, mechanized farming required fewer farmers to
feed more people. The railroad, by its nature, favored
centralization. By 1900, cities such as London
and New York
had evolved into mega-urbanisms of multiple millions of people. Around
the same time, electrification was generally complete and with it came
skyscrapers serviced by elevators. Over the next twenty years, oil
moved ahead of coal as the primary fuel for transport and, especially in the US where oil
was cheap and abundant, led to mass automobile ownership. That, in turn,
sparked the decanting of households into massive new suburban hinterlands,
and to the extreme separation of activities by zoning law there, which
climaxed – with interruptions for depression and war – in the
evolution of the late 20th century car-dependent metroplexes
like Los Angeles, Houston,
Phoenix, and Atlanta. That is where things stand now.
Now my own view is that we face severe energy
problems in the decades ahead and they will not be ameliorated by any
combination of alternative fuels or schemes for running them. This
permanent global energy crisis will have all kinds of consequences, most
particularly on our cities. These looming circumstances imply several
major trends which contradict conventional expectations, especially of continued
urban growth.
One certain impact will be the contraction of
industrial activity per se and of the financial sector whose instruments and
certificates represent the expectation of growth in accumulated wealth.
This alone will comprise a basic challenge to industrial capitalism –
apart from the sociopolitical strife that such
financial catastrophe is apt to generate.
I hasten to add it is a mistake to suppose that the US industrial
economy has already been replaced by a so-called “information”
economy or a consumer economy. In reality, manufacturing activities
have been insidiously replaced over the past twenty years by a
suburban-sprawl-building economy – and
the mass production of suburban houses, highways, strip malls and big box
stores is just a different sort of manufacturing than making hair driers and
TV sets. The sprawl industry also drove a reckless debt creation racket and
multiple layers of traffic in mortgages and spinoffs
of mortgages (such as the derivatives trade based on bundled, securitized
debt) which represents, at bottom, hallucinated wealth that in turn has
spread false liquidity through the equity markets and is certain to affect
them badly sooner or later. All this is what we have been calling the
“housing bubble” and it is now beginning to fly apart with deadly
effect.
Much of the suburban real estate produced by this
process is destined to lose its supposed value, both in practical and
monetary terms as energy scarcities get traction. So, on top of the
sheer distortions and perversities of the glut in bad mortgage paper, America
will be faced with the accelerating worthlessness of the collateral –
the houses, Jiffy Lubes, and office parks –
as gasoline prices go up, and long commutes become untenable, and jobs along
with incomes are lost, and the cost of heating houses larger than 1500 square feet
becomes an insuperable burden.
All this is to say that the suburban rings of our
cities have poor prospects in the future. They therefore represent a
massive tragic misinvestment, perhaps the greatest
misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It is hard to say how
this stuff might be reused or retrofitted, if at all, but some of it, perhaps
a lot, may end up as a combined salvage yard and sheer ruin.
Another major impact of the coming energy scarcity
will be the end of industrial agriculture. Without abundant and cheap
oil and gas-based fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fuels for running
huge machines and irrigation systems, we will have to make other arrangements
for feeding ourselves. Crop yields will go down – a big reason, by the
way, to be skeptical of ethanol and bio-diesel
alternative fuel schemes based on corn or soybean crops. We will have
to grow food closer to home, on a smaller scale, probably requiring more
human and even animal labor, and agriculture is
likely to come closer to the center of economic
life than it has within memory – at the same time that mass production
homebuilding, tourism based on mass aviation, easy motoring, and a host of
other obsolete activities fade into history.
I think this will lead to an epochal demographic
shift, a reversal of the 200-year-long trend of people moving from the farms
and rural places to the big cities. Instead, I believe we will see is a
substantial contraction of our cities at the same time that they densify at their cores and along their waterfronts.
A preview of this can be seen in Baltimore
today. The remaining viable fabric of the pre-automobile city is
relatively tiny and concentrated in the old center
around a complex harbor system. With little
need for industrial workers, vast neighborhoods of
row housing built for them are either abandoned or inhabited now only by such
economically distressed people that abandonment is inevitable. The
pattern of contraction may not be identical in all American cities.
In some it will be a lot worse. Phoenix,
Tuscon, and Las
Vegas will just dry up and blow away, since local
agriculture will not be possible, and they will be afflicted with severe
water problems on top of all the other problems growing out of energy
scarcity and an extreme car-dependent development pattern. Cities in
the “wet” sunbelt such as Houston,
Orlando, and Atlanta, will probably
still be there but revert to insignificance for the additional simple reason
that a lack of cheap air conditioning will make them unbearable.
It is worth keeping in mind that cities generally
are located on important geographical sites – harbors,
rivers, railroad junctions – and some kind of urban settlement is
likely to persist in many of these places, unless climate change drowns
them. In recent years, most waterfront property has been reassigned
from industrial and commercial uses to condominium sites, and greenways. This
will not continue. If we are going to have any kind of commerce between
one place and another, we will have to reactivate our waterfronts for
shipping – and not necessarily of the automated steel container
variety. Like virtually everything else in the coming energy scarce
world, maritime trade will have to be rescaled. It may even have to
rely on wind power again to some extent. These operations will require
wharves, warehouses, cheap quarters for sailors and
all the other furnishings typically required through history.
Those who are infatuated with skyscrapers are going
to be disappointed. I do not think we will be building many more of
them further along in this century. We will have trouble running the
ones we have, since most of the glass towers built after 1965 have inoperable
windows, and even the ones that have them would have to be retrofitted for
coal furnaces, and a less than absolutely reliable electric power grid may
make life in a twenty-fifth floor apartment impossible when the elevators go
out. In short, I think we will discover that the skyscraper was purely a
product of the cheap oil and gas age. Exciting as they may be, we might have
to live without them.
The process I have described will probably be messy.
Social turbulence should be expected. For instance, the urban underclass will
be squeezed even harder than the suffering middle classes, and they already
have a nascent warrior culture that could easily redirect its energies from
hip hop entertainments to real guerilla warfare if
the competition for resources became desperate. Economic distress in the US is also likely to only aggravate unfavorable conditions in Mexico, sending increased streams
of impoverished migrants north. Meanwhile, the faltering US middle classes
may be so inflamed by the loss of their entitlements to an easy motoring
existence that they will vote for maniacs and venture into scapegoating. I certainly expect the American public and
their leaders to mount a vigorous defense of
suburbia, even if it proves to be a gigantic exercise in futility and a waste
of precious resources.
We will be lucky if we can make the transition from
our current circumstances to a future of re-sized, re-scaled cities and a
reactivated productive rural landscape outside them, with a hierarchy of
hamlets, villages, and towns in between, and some ability to conduct commerce
and manufacturing. This would, in effect, be a reversion to prior
living arrangements, and to some extent it is a model proposed by the New Urbanists – or at least a template they would
understand as fundamental. Many things might stand in the way of this.
The physical disaggregation of civic life in our
small towns is now so extreme that nothing might avail to repair it,
especially since we will have far less capital to work with. The suburbs
running from Boston through New
Jersey to Washington
have paved over some of the best farmland in the nation’s most populous
region and it may be centuries before it is restored to productivity, if
ever. Physical security may become so tenuous that people will sell
their allegiance for protection, or take to living behind fortifications. In
earlier periods of history when societies got into trouble – for
instance, the plague years in Europe –
rural places were beset by banditry and lawlessness, adding another layer of
difficulty to food production on top of the loss of the peasant labor.
We don’t know how any of these things may
actually play out. I have not even mentioned the potential for geopolitical
mischief, which could skew the picture a lot more.
But the urban future isn’t what it was cracked
up to be when we were riding high, surfing the big waves of cheap energy in
the seemingly endless summer of oil. It won’t be fun fun fun ‘til Daddy takes
the T-bird away. It won’t be a Herbert Muschamp
smorgasbord of delicious, rarified architectural
irony. The Koolhaas celebration of alienation
will not seem worth partying for. The metaphysics of Libeskind and Peter Eisenman
will stand naked in the transparency of their phoniness. By and by, even the
mega slums of the third world will contract as the surplus grain supplies of
the formerly-developed nations are reduced to nothing and export ceases.
I often wonder what people will think decades from
now if they are able to view those old Doris Day and Rock Hudson comedies of
the mid 20th century. Invariably these stories took place in a
Manhattan of sparkly new glass towers, and streets full of cars with tail
fins, and companies that ruled the world, and men and women who had come back
from a World War full of confidence that there was no limit to what people
with good intentions could do and nothing that they couldn’t
handle. We are their children and grandchildren and it is a different
world now.
By :
James Howard Kunstler
http://www.kunstler.com/
James
Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature
writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling
Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis.
His
latest nonfiction book, "The Long
Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the
21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic
crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive
dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the
American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over
oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides,
Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.
You
can purchase your own copy here : The Long
Emergency . You can get more from James Howard Kunstler - including his artwork, information about his
other novels, and his blog - at his Web site : http://www.kunstler.com/
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