An excellent video by renowned author James Howard Kunstler on why public spaces should be inspired centres of civic life and the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead, he argues, what there is in America is a nation of places not worth caring about.
It is 21 minutes long by the way.
Processing...
Wow… he sums up what I think about current city planning perfectly. I visited Wellington in the weekend, and, between Auckland and Wellington is a great comparison of these useless 50’s style planning and the great urbanism. It’s a shame this government is pushing to remove the MUL.
I have seen a couple of videos of this guy and while he has some good points I find his work to be just too one sided. There is no critical evaluation, just pushing one hard line the whole way.
I agree to some extent Nick. However, he does make some excellent points. His books “The Geography of Nowhere” and “Home from Nowhere” are good reads.
This guy is amazing, absolutely true about America; I have both lived there (in Atlanta, GA) and visited several cities, including Detroit, NY, LA, Nashville and other. In comparison to European cities Americans have created a space like mega malls and automobile wastelands where people go in, do their business and hop back in their metal box and drive to their suburbs to retire for the evening, then get up in the morning, drive to work spending hours in traffic. What I find breathtaking is after 60 years of building freeways, no one seems to get it. We still have sprawl, there is no Vulcan lane type streets in Atlanta or Detroit. Town Planners must design a space with a sense of place not just a area where people have to go there because they have to, as he cleverly pointed out. Unfortunately in NZ we have adopted the American way of thinking, and it’s going to spell our demise if we do not change our ways. There is hope for Auckland if further intensification continues and 700,000 people are added to the current MUL then Auckland’s density will be similar to European one, perhaps lower. What I prefer is intense suburbs with good transport links and integrated town centres that are close, that the link up to the city. For example make Albany a major town centre with 20,000 people in and around it – build up not flat 1 or 2 stories.
He certainly does raise some good questions regarding the economic and social viability of the American suburb/freeway/strip mall model if universal access to private vehicles and cheap fuels becomes restricted. There are theorist like Paul Mees that say well actually the suburb can operate just fine without auto-mobiles if we put a bit of thought into the public transport routes, but I do wonder what places like Auckland, the fringes of Melbourne and most cities in the US would be like if gas was $5 a litre. I’m inclined to agree that sprawling, monofunctional residential zones of low density without any local services or access to non-car transport are going to be the slums of the limited-oil future. If there are no jobs or serviecs and you can’t get away easily then what will become of the place?
If peak oil hits hard, Western Europe will be on top of the world’s economy again (trip back to the 1850s) along with China…
I think these places get it and that is why this is where you see huge investment in HSR…
China has a very strong appetite for oil and gas too, although the backbone of their economy seems to be coal. Apart from the emissions issue this will probably place them quite well in the event of oil depletion.
Arguably if NZ can reform its transport sector it would be well placed in a limited oil economy, given the abundance of renewables and coal. It has always baffled me why a compact country so rich in cheap sources of electricity would develop a transport system almost entirely based on totally imported fuel oil and imported vehicles. New Zealand pays such a high proportion of its GNP on transportation costs and almost all of it flies straight offshore.
NZ had a fairly balanced transport system until the 1950s. Wellington’s is still fairly balanced. The problem in Auckland occurred because of the various debates in the early 1950s that led to the abandonment of the Halcrow Report and its replacement by the 1955 Master Transport Plan, drawn up by a bunch of road engineers. The decisions made in the early 1950s have triggered pretty much everything since in terms of our transport policies – at least in Auckland.
Pretty basic self evident stuff I would have thought. The interesting thing is the decline of mega-malls in the the US. In 2009, no new stand alone internalised shopping centres were constructed. They all had spaces opening outwards toward the street. Yet we are still building them. Makes you wonder how behind NZ is with such things.
He is very passionate and funny, an excellent public speaker…