James Howard Kunstler, caught in mid-rant at the fifth annual TND Breakfast. Photo by Mark Englund..

Anyone who has not heard of the New Urbanism or Smart Growth by now has been living at the end of the longest cul-de-sac in the world. And I know that you've heard a lot about it over the years, increasingly so; many of you are now probably advocates for that. I'm not going to lay out the whole program for you because I'm sure you've all seen it several times. But I do want to emphasize the sense of urgency that I think we ought to feel about how we're building and developing our nation.

I believe that America has reached what Malcolm Gladwell refers to as "the tipping point" in this phase of our history. How many of you lived through the OPEC oil disruptions and remember them at all? Okay. That put America through some changes, didn't it? And they happened very rapidly, when they started to happen. And we really felt a sense of urgency when that series of events occurred. There are two oil-producing regions of the world that saved our ass after that event: the North Slope of Alaska and the North Sea Fields, which belong to Britain and Norway. If those fields had not been put into production, the OPEC oil embargo never would have ended, in the larger sense.

Those regions are now passing peak production. From now on, all the oil in the world is going to be controlled by people who hate us. This is a fact. And most of the rest of the oil in the world will be coming from places that are falling into chaos and anarchy. I don't know how many of you saw the New York Times piece about six months ago, about the oil executive—I don't remember if it was Exxon or Shell or who—but he was managing the Nigerian production. He spent all of his time—24 hours a day, seven days a week—bribing local officials and local gangsters to not blow up his pipelines and not blow up his well heads and his terminals. That's all he did. And that's what's happening in the part of the world that is not OPEC—the Third-World part of our oil-producing world.

The fossil-fuel markets are poised to enter a long period of market disorder. Not necessarily huge—I don't know what the degree of it is going to be, but we're going to get it. And this market disorder is going to have deep political and economic consequences, including probably a lot of international political mischief. We've got to prepare for those events.

"There is nothing more tragic than a culture that has no faith in its future."

One of the chief preparations we have to make is to realize that the future is going to compel us to live differently. Not necessarily offer us a menu, but compel us to live differently. And even if this weren't so, the dissatisfaction with our national living arrangement—with suburbia—is obvious. It is broad and it is running very deep. It is grassroots: You can hear it from the soccer moms, you hear it from the commuters who have to drive 60 miles a day, you see it in the town officials caught in the crossfires of the planning board wars (I'm sure many of you—I know some of you have been in the planning board wars). The issues are complex and confusing, and they are often hard to articulate, but the dissatisfaction is very real, whether people can articulate them or not.

Deep down, I think a lot of Americans are left with the dreadful feeling that we have erected and created too many places in this country that are not worthy of us, that are not worth caring about, that are not worth living in, and that sooner or later, when you have built a country full of places that are not worth caring about, you will have a land, a nation, that is not worth defending. That will be the final consequence of what we've done.

[Slide of a suburban commercial strip, with a white water tower looming above the scene. On the water tower is painted a huge smiling face.]

See this here? This doesn't make it better. Nobody's feeling better down here because of this. In fact, they're feeling worse because they know that this is not what it seems to be, what it's pretending to be. This is not Mr. "Have a nice day"; nobody's having a nice day down here. This is the face of a wrathful deity, looking down on us, saying, "You're a wicked people and you're going to be punished! And I'm going to start by making you live in this."

This is the common, daily, commercial environment of America. There are 37,000 places like this in America and we often refer to it as "suburban sprawl." I don't call it suburban sprawl anymore, because that's not really precise enough. I refer to this as the "national automobile slum," because "slum" gives you more of an idea of the quality and the character of what you're getting with this.

Commonly, when you eavesdrop on the national conversation, people will complain about this and say that the trouble with this is that it all looks the same. It all looks the same, that's the problem. And in fact, that's not the problem, because there a lot of things in this world that all look the same. The hill towns of Tuscany all look the same, but nobody comes back from Tuscany complaining, "Oh, I have a headache—those hill towns all look the same. Oh, my god, they're so boring!" Nobody comes back from Paris saying "Oh, those boulevards by Baron Hausman—gag me with a spoon, they're so boring!" No. Because what you're seeing there is tremendous excellence. It's all the same, but it's all excellent. What we're getting in America is yes, all the same, but the problem is not that it's all the same, the problem is that it is all uniformly miserable. These are the environments that we're living in and we have to do better with these.

I think the lesson of this is simple: Americans deserve to live in better surroundings than a national automobile slum. That's not good enough for us.

I'm going to review some basic principles here, because they're terribly important.

If you want to create a place of memorable character and quality, you have to do that by defining space. Those two projects are the same.

This is a lithograph of the main street of my town, Saratoga Springs, about 1850. [The main street] is called Broadway. This thing in the middle is a part of our everyday world that is called the "public realm." That is the part of our world that suffered the most through the fiasco of suburbia. The public realm is the part of our world that everybody ought to have access to most of the time. In America, it comes in the form of the street, for the most part. And in order to create a street that is a meaningful public place, you have to be able to define that space; we do that using the facades of the buildings. The facades of the buildings speak to us using the vocabulary, the syntax, the rhythms and patterns of architectural history, to convey and invoke meanings for us—to tell us where we are.

Human neurology demands that we be oriented in public space: We want to know where we are geographically, but we also want to know where we are chronologically—where our past is located, where we're headed in the future. We need this symbolic language of this stuff in our everyday world to tell us this; if only to enable us to live in a hopeful present, we have to be able to locate the past and the future. I think one of the great tragedies of the whole late-20th-century enterprise of modernism is that it deprived us of a sense of where we had come from and where we were going. And it was impossible to live in a hopeful present, in that sense.

Notice that they are using devices of urban design, which is a whole body of culture that includes skills and principles and ordering systems. We took that body of culture and we threw it in the garbage around 1945 and said, "We're not going to do this anymore; we don't need it." Now, it is our job to go back to that Dumpster of history and get that stuff back so we know how to do this—so we understand what these devices were for.

One of those devices of civic design is the hotel veranda that you see here. It is there for a very explicit purpose. They weren't trying to go for the "old-fashioned look" when they put that on; they thought they were totally up to date. This was state-of-the-art! They put that there because they understood that the veranda was a mediating zone between the public and the private—between the inside and the outside—and it was a device for easing our transitions between these two different states of experience.

When you do this well, and you are able to define space and create a memorable place of character and quality, you end up with a place that is, invariably, worth caring about. And that's our assignment now in the 21st century.

In contrast, this is what you get typically in the new downtown of America: This happens to be the asteroid belt of architectural garbage about two miles north of our town. This is where the malls are. Remember, I said to create a sense of place you have to define place. If you stand on the apron of the Wal-Mart store over here and try to look at the Target store over here, you can't see it because of the curvature of the earth! That's nature's way of telling you that you're not doing a good job of defining space.

Here you have an urban setting where they've gotten it all pretty much right. Not only are they defining space beautifully...you can see how wonderfully well this whole ensemble that goes into the detailing of this street is working in this particular setting. This happens to be one of the great urban residential settings in the world—it doesn't get much better than this: Amsterdam. Not only do you get wonderful houses and a bike path and a place to walk and a place to park your car, you get a canal! You get a wonderful, placid, tranquil body of water on top of that.

We were capable of doing that in America, too. This is a slide of Philadelphia—Society Hill. Wonderful urbanism. Very high densities. Nobody is suffering from a lack of privacy there. There's no "peeping tom" epidemic, because about five minutes after they invented the window, they invented the curtain. This is one of the great discoveries of human history—you have houses closer together, there is a way to prevent people from staring in and looking at what you're doing. Of course, we're capable of doing this in new construction, now.

(This happens to be the Kentlands project in Maryland, done by DPZ, which many of you have known and seen.)

For about 50 years, we went through a period when we couldn't do it. It was terribly traumatic. For 50 years, we did so badly that we actually lost our confidence in our ability to create a future.

And really, that's what the NIMBY ("Not In My Backyard!") wars are all about. The NIMBY movement is much more profound than it seems. It's not just about superficial greed and selfishness. It's really about a lack of faith in the ability of this culture to carry itself forward. All the people who are starting the protests against your project and marching around, they're doing it because for 50 years they've gotten nothing but crap. Everything new that has come into their lives has been crap. They don't want any more of it. They don't want a new grammar school next door that looks like an insecticide factory. They don't want a new segregated pod, which is not only insulting in the way it is thought up, it's insulting in the way it is carried out and built. They don't want any more of this stuff. They don't want houses like theirs next to their houses.

I think one of the great effects of the New Urbanist movement is that it has restored faith in our ability to do things of value. And there hasn't been enough of it in enough parts of the country to really do it across the board. Now what you're getting are little pockets all over the nation, where people know that we can do better than what we did between 1950 and 2000. And the more of this stuff that there is, the more faith and confidence there is going to be. Because there is nothing more tragic than a culture that has no faith in its future. And that's what modernism did to us.

A short history of suburbia
What were we running away from? We were running away from this miserable experience of turn-of-the-century industrial cities. The world had never seen anything like the industrial city before. Toward the end of the 19th century, it assumed this enormous scale, which had also never been seen or experienced before, and was really a miserable thing, a frightening, horrible thing.

It caused tremendous practical problems. There was terrible sanitation, with all these people crammed into buildings that did not have state-of-the-art plumbing and, in some cases, had none. Terrible diseases, people living with little light, bad air, no privacy ever. And of course the specter of crime also was part of the picture.

The 19th century/early 20th century industrial city was what we ran shrieking from during the 20th century. We decided that the antidote to the industrial city was the "little cabin in the woods." If you don't like the industrial city, this is what you're going to live in. So the whole country embarked on a program of making that the ideal living arrangement for all Americans. This derives, of course, from our frontier history and the fact that we did settle the wilderness and we did homestead, so the basic model there is the "little house in the natural landscape."

It has its variants. "The little house on the prairie" is one; "the little cabin in the woods" is another; they're all related. And by the way, we're entitled to feel good about this, because this is part of our history, and it was a very unique and special and dramatic history. But it cannot be the only model that you're choosing to build your world out of. That's the problem: when it's the only model in your mind—the little cabin in the woods.

After the Civil War, by about the 1850s, '60s, '70s, we started to develop the railroad suburb. They are true villas in the country. It was not just a country setting; it was still the country. In fact, many of these people kept cows and chickens, because if you wanted to make a chocolate cake, you couldn't go to the convenience store in 1871 in Riverside, Illinois; you had to get the eggs from the henhouse and get some milk from your cow. The households were organized differently: You had household help, probably, if you were living in a place like this, and they would make the cake.

There were no Kmarts back then; there were no Wal-Marts. It took about 70 years for it to mutate into this. Seven decades, including the great revolution of motoring. This, I think, is the operative concept about what happened to suburbia, is that it became a cartoon of itself. It became a cartoon of "country life." It was no longer country living in any meaningful way; it had become basically industrial living in an industrial box in a fake country setting. You have the industrial lawn pretending to be a meadow (this is what was left of the prairie). You have a few little props like the carriage lamps (flanking the two-car garage) and the screw-on shutters. But the rest of it—you might as well have been living in a packing crate.

Of course, then it mutated further into what is today the most common suburban house: the house with no windows on the sides. This is not the practical problem that people pretend it is. It's not a matter of privacy and it's not a matter of saving money on the windows. They tell you that, but it's not true. It's because these houses want to be, they're insisting, "I'm a little cabin in the woods...I'm a little cabin in the woods...there's no one on either side of me...I can't see them, so they're not there..." That's what's really going on with this.

In some cases, we've moved in the other direction, emphatically back toward the industrial look: [Some suburban houses] look like industrial loading docks, with attached living quarters, because the cars are getting larger and larger; we're driving bigger Plymouth satellites—not because we're having more children (because we're not), it's because we're now carrying 14 pallet loads of dog food home from "BJ's Discount Club." We've been swindled into becoming the wholesale distribution network for the discount retailers. That's become our job. And of course, you need tremendous facilities to do that.

And by the way, nature is present (in the narrow strip of scrubby vegetation growing in the center of the four-car driveway)! This is what I call "the nature Band-Aid," to make us feel better.

Finally, we get the grand McMansion of our time. One of the things that is so amusing about this is—as Hillary Clinton once said, "It takes a village." In this case, it takes a village to be a house. Every house has to be a village, because the public realm of suburbia is so meaningless, it is so devoid of a sense of community or a civic sense, that all of that has to be provided symbolically in the extra roof articulations that are unnecessary. And as we all know, each roof articulation costs $7,000 to $12,000 extra to flash it and put the valleys in. They're all absolutely unnecessary, done only so that Mr. Homeowner can come home and say, "Oh, gosh, thank God I live in a village." And this has to be repeated on every house in the entire subdivision.

This is one of those retirement pods, a senior citizen warehouse where we file them until it's checkout time. [These pods] are like the baggage compartments at the airport. The trouble with this, of course, is that density (the number of units) is one thing, but if you're not using the architectural languages and the syntaxes and the urbanism, and if you're not defining space in a meaningful way, if the public realm is not dedicated to any more meaningful experience than the storage of cars, then it doesn't matter how much density you have around here. This will ultimately be a failure in the attempt to create a meaningful sense of place. It's not just the amount of stuff that's terribly important, it's the design.

We create these environments, such as this one, which is very close to Columbine High School in Colorado, which is now notorious. I think it's notorious because it crystallized for Americans what is really going on, although I must say I don't think it's ever been articulated clearly. We go through these national ceremonies of hand-wringing every time something like this happens, every time someone goes into an office and blows away seven of his coworkers, or a kid goes into a high school and blows away 10 of his classmates.

I think we have to understand that what is going on here is that we're creating environments that produce and generate tremendous anxiety and depression. Tremendous anxiety and depression. And there is not enough Prozac in the world to take care of that. We have a terrible problem in our country because of that—tremendous numbers of people who are not functioning psychologically. Now, certainly not everyone is over the edge and feeling homicidal—that's only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of people out there—but there are an awful lot of people out there who are, day by day, being psychologically beaten down and made to feel fearful and melancholy and sad and hopeless because they're living in a place that is not suspended between a meaningful past and a promising future. They're not living in a hopeful present.

That is the tremendous message that is being given to people who live in these places. The message is that there is no future here. And they take that very personally because they lack experience in the world; they lack experience in interpreting the world. Teenagers are very painfully trying to construct a meaningful world view for themselves, so that they can understand what it is that they are growing into. They need to understand that they have come from a meaningful past and that they are headed toward a hopeful future, or else the present they live in will be devoid of meaning. And that's what these environments have produced for children.

"America cannot afford to keep sleepwalking into the future."

But we are, of course, all new urbanists now, and the future is going to provoke us to do better than that. Mainly, the future is going to prompt us and is telling us very loudly that we have to condense and re-condense American life into these coherent human habits: the village, the hamlet, the town, the neighborhood, the city. The future also tells us loudly that the national automobile slum has got to come to an end.

We're not going to get rid of cars; the car is probably going to remain with us. But it cannot dictate all the terms of our living arrangements.

These (new urbanist) projects are being built all over the United States. They're still terribly hard to build, to overcome the tremendous inertia of "business as usual." The bankers are only used to lending money for certain kinds of projects. The developers are only used to doing certain types (of development). The officials are only used to reviewing and permitting certain kinds, so the inertia alone out there is terrible.

We have a developer from our town, Saratoga Springs, New York—I know that he's been through the tremendously onerous process of going through the permitting to just do something that would make the town better. The town is having a hard time recognizing that.

Notice, in the wonderful project of Harbor Town in Memphis, the tremendous definition of place and creation of a street "wall," so that you're getting the wall of an outdoor public room, which is the best way to create a sense of place in an urban setting. And notice that the problem here is not that everything is all the same; in fact, the unity here is tremendous. One of the things that we have lost in throwing the culture of civic design into the garbage is an understanding that diversity can only work within greater orders of unity—that the world really is hierarchical in that sense, that the world is composed of nesting hierarchies of things. This (Harbor Town) is of the most rigorous kind (of hierarchical order); the fact that this could even be done in America is now a tremendous achievement.

This is a wonderful, wonderful project in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, it's Vince Graham's project, I'On. It's being built out very, very quickly, and has some of the highest quality carpentry—just on that level of building—the carpentry is so superior in that place that it literally makes you feel like you're going to an earlier time in American history, when the carpenters really knew how to construct stuff like moldings. It's just mind-blowing. But the way that they have used the buildings to define space meaningfully is just tremendous. It is a tremendous model for that region of the South. And of course, they're using the vernacular architecture of the Charleston area and they do it beautifully.

This is the now-notorious Seaside. Seaside is now a great object of ridicule among people who don't understand what this movement represents. They usually make fun of it because they say it is elitist. That represents a misunderstanding, by the way, because Seaside was never intended to be a United Auto Workers vacation village or a Welsh coal-minding establishment; it was always intended to be a resort, on the beach, for wealthy people. So we should just accept that as being what was intended.

But the other thing that was intended by Seaside was to demonstrate that you could build in new construction a wonderful place that was worth treasuring. And I think that they accomplished that without any doubt. Without any question, [it was] a tremendous achievement. And they really were the first to re-establish the idea that we could live in a hopeful culture and have confidence that we could do this kind of stuff in new construction and create things that our children wouldn't laugh at.

Mark Johnson, here, from CertainTeed, mentioned being raised in a certain kind of suburban box—I forget the language he used—but there's nobody who doesn't refer to that suburban house in some derogatory way. It's universal: Everybody looks on it with scorn in some way. The question is, are our children going to look back on Seaside and Kentlands and I'On and all these other wonderful projects—I don't think they're going to look back with scorn. They're going to look at these things and say, "My god, these people did tremendous work."

And it's now up to us to not only carry on, but to do better.

This is Riverside, in Atlanta, the project that was done by DPZ and Post Properties, and is one of the few great examples of urban infill in America.

This is Meisner Park in Boca Raton—the only place between South Beach and Miami and Stuart, that actually resembles a human habitat, and not something from another planet. A tremendous success, by the way.

One of the other points that I think is worth making is that the home builders, the house builders, the residential developers are going to have to start thinking about other typologies, too, other kinds of buildings—not just the single-family house, but other things: the two-family house, the four-family house, the apartment building. These things are just beginning to be done now.

This is a new project in Saratoga Springs. It's a four-story, sixteen-unit apartment building that was done by a heroic developer. When he proposed the project, all the other developers and town officials laughed at him, because it hadn't been done in 70 years. Nobody had put up an apartment building in our town. They thought, you can't make any money doing this—it's absurd. But before his foundation was finished, he had all of the units sold. And so in our town, we immediately went through a transformation: We went from point A to point C, skipping point B, which is "violent opposition," because new ideas are generally greeted in three stages:

A. They are laughed at
B. They meet violent opposition
C. They are accepted as self-evident

So we went from point A to point C, to everyone saying "Yeah, we want to do this now." So now everybody else is doing downtown apartments in Saratoga Springs. A new one is being built: The steel has just started going up this week, across the street from my office, on the main street, Broadway, where the Grand Union Hotel was for 100 years, and where a strip mall stood for 50 years after that.

"I think a lot of Americans are left with the dreadful feeling that we have erected and created too many places in this country that are not worthy of us."

This is Celebration in Florida. I'm not a fan of the Disney Corporation, but the work that they did in their town center is exemplary for the kind of building typologies that I hope to encourage you guys to start thinking about: mixed-use, apartments upstairs, perhaps offices on the middle layer, and of course retail on the ground floor. You can make lots of money doing it and you can do a wonderful thing for your culture.

This is another one of Vince Graham's wonderful projects, Newpoint, in Beaufort, South Carolina. Tremendous recreation of a traditional American street, with no compromises whatsoever. Tremendous, rigorous, uncompromising project.

This is a project in Chattanooga done by Victor Dover and Joseph Kohl, the architects out of South Miami, who were assigned to do something about this shopping mall, that had died. What they were assigned to do was to impose a new pattern of streets and blocks over what had been an incoherent suburban mall. When you create these new streets, you have to realize that these are where all the opportunities are for redevelopment, and where all the potential profit is, and also, luckily, combining with the ability to create wonderful streets, wonderful public places and places of civic value. So you're accomplishing all of this at the same time. This is the intermediary stage—the mall building is still here. Liner buildings have been attached to one side to create the street wall. We also have deliberately created public places in the form of neighborhood squares.

Another thing that we have to do is stop using the terms "open space" and "green space," because they're meaningless. We have to use the language of civic design that comes from this culture we threw away. If you want a park, you have to ask for a park. If you want a square, you have to ask for a square. If you ask for "green space," you'll get a berm. If you ask for "open space," you'll get a buffer or a sump. You have to use this nomenclature to get the quality of the stuff that you're really after.

Closing remarks
I hope that you will go back to your home places and consider where our nation is standing right now.

America cannot afford to keep sleepwalking into the future. We need to rethink our living arrangements. The need to do that is urgent. You are the people who are building the places where we live and work.

The groundwork has been laid. The new urbanists have dived into the Dumpster of history and they have gotten the knowledge and the skills and the principles out of the garbage can. These are now understood and published and available to you at a cut-rate. These are all the skills that the previous generation did not have; that's why we got the drive-in utopia that turned out to be such a failure.

We know how to build good places now; there really is no excuse for doing anything less. It's up to you, the new generation of builders and developers, to take the knowledge and skill and put it into bricks and mortar. It's up to you to turn America into a land full of places that are worth caring about deeply, and a country that will be worth defending in the future.

Thank you very much.

James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere, two books that brought the specter of suburbia to light for millions of Americans and struck a nerve among those longing for a better place to live. A prolific novelist and lecturer, Kunstler has captivated academic and professional audiences alike with his biting, on-target delivery. His relentless dogging of suburbia is well founded: "I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work." Kunstler's next book, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, will be published in fall 2001. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.

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