Remarks by
James Howard Kunstler to
the International Rails to Trails Conference

San Diego, January, 1998

    Some of you may know me as the author of two books about the mess we have made of the everyday environment in America. I have attempted to describe the mess and offer some ideas about what we might do to correct the situation. The ideas do not necessarily originate with me. I am almost always reporting ideas that come from other people or groups of people. My role is to try to put these ideas into some larger context so that non-experts and non-specialists can understand what is happening in our culture.
    In the process, one can't fail to be impressed with the power of the collective intelligence of our species. Human beings are amazingly resilient. I'm sometimes overcome by the strange, delirious feeling that we can actually find our way out of this mess -- the mess being our damaged human ecology and its place within the damaged planetary ecology. At the same time, of course, the collective stupidity of the human race is equally impressive. It sometimes feels that there is not enough Prozac in the world to cure the human condition. The enterprise of civilization is a difficult venture and we seem to always live in an air of suspense over our ability to carry it forward.
    A big conference is sometimes a way for people to reinforce each others' world view. I don't see myself as a cheerleader, and I will offer some thoughts that may challenge the accepted wisdom of this organization. (Or maybe not. Maybe I'm in complete accord with your ideas. We'll just have to see.)
    Anyway, we're having a very hard time in the United States thinking about the issue of how we live and carrying on a public conversation about it. Some of our beliefs seem downright delusional -- culturally psychotic -- for instance, the idea that having electronic pen-pals is virtually the same thing as being part of a community. I happen to believe that the virtual is not an adequate substitute for the authentic, and that going down that pathway of delusion will have some dangerous consequences for us individually and as a culture. It already has, really. There are plenty of people in America who believe that watching soap operas on television is the same thing as having relationships with friends and family. In any case, it's hard for them to tell the difference. I'm compelled to wonder whether people under a spell like this are capable of self-governance?
    Today I want to raise some issues that I think represent fundamental points of confusion in this discussion about how we live, and I'll try to give an account of them which I hope might be clarifying, that may furnish us with some common vocabulary, or terminology to understand the current situation and what we can do about it.
    First, how do we identify the place we're living in, that is, the character of it, the nature of it. I call it the national automobile slum. This defines the generic human ecology of America, and, indeed, some other parts of the world. The national automobile slum is composed of the freeways and the housing pods, and the commercial highway strips, and the office parks, and the parking lagoons, the muffler shops, the drive-in banks, the franchise fry pits, and all the other familiar furnishings of our human ecology. I encourage you to adopt this terminology -- national automobile slum, in your own local debates -- in your planning boards and town councils and letters to the editors -- so that we can create a consensus about what it is we're actually living in and give it a name.
    Now, life in the national automobile slum has some strange cultural implications and consequences. The chief consequence is that in the past 60 years we have created thousands of places that are not worth caring about, and they now tragically add up to a nation that may not be worth defending. How many 19-year-olds will give their lives in the sands of Iraq to protect the berm between the Wal-Mart and the Safeway?
    Another somewhat lesser consequence is that we have all but destroyed the distinction between what is the town and what is the country, what is the urban and what is the rural. In the national automobile slum it's all a big mish-mash. This expresses itself, for instance, in our ideas about parks. We're very confused. We no longer know what parks are for because we no longer know what the city is for. We now think that the park is the place where you go to get excitement. We now program our new parks as though they were televisions. The biggest, splashiest, new parks in our leading cities -- Yerba Buena in San Francisco, Pershing Square in LA, Pioneer Square in Portland, are filled to the brim with architectural structures, weird grade changes, water-features -- we no longer call them fountains (the difference is that a fountain lasts for seventeen generations while a water-feature breaks after seventeen months). Then we have to bring in the craft fairs, and the clowns and jugglers, and food festivals. It's like TV. Never a moment's peace.
    The reason we do this is that we have totally forgotten the reason for parks. They are supposed to be natural islands of tranquillity and repose embedded in the vibrant fabric of the city. The park is where you're supposed to go to escape the excitement and stimulation of the city for a little while, in order to recompose your spirit, a place of quiet reflection and refreshment -- with some greenery to oxygenate the air and cut the glare.
    But most American cities are dead. Go to Cleveland, or Dayton, Ohio, or Detroit, or Lansing, or downtown Des Moines, Charlotte, or Minneapolis. Dead. These are not vibrant, stimulating places. Nobody lives there, the commerce and the culture are both on life support. American cities have been dead for so long now -- for perhaps three generations -- that most Americans don't have a clue about what city life means. They certainly don't have a positive idea of it, only negative: there's no normal life there; the only living organisms in the city are either vermin or dangerous human predators; the fabric is rotten, depressing, and disgusting, and that's all we know about cities. And we reject cities.
    Along with the fact of our dead cities we have our complete failure to sustain an idea of the livable city, an inability to imagine a spiritually rewarding urban life, or to conceive of the physical fabric that might act as a worthy container of civic life. The park is not supposed to the anti-city, it is supposed to be an integral part of the city, an organ of the city, and hence our complete failure now to understand what it is and how it is supposed to perform. Notice, by the way, that in other cultures they do not have this problem. I was in Paris a week ago. In the dead of winter. They still understand what a park is. They even have different kinds: the formal park with the gravel paths and the mathematically precise rows of plane trees, and the romantic picturesque park. When I was there, the parks were all full of people -- the Place des Vosges, the Parc du Buttes Chaumont, the Luxemburg Garden. In the dead of winter. People were enjoying these islands of tranquillity because the rest of Paris was brimming with life and commerce and the stimulation of beautiful buildings, and beautiful food shops -- everywhere! -- and normal people going about their business in the midst of all this stimulation and consciously created beauty.
    In America, we reject the idea of the city. This is unfortunately a tradition for us. American cities grew up with industrialism and all of its nasty procedures, and we reject all that. It's understandable, I suppose. There was no medieval Milwaukee. There was no renaissance Chicago. Plus, we have our parallel historical traditions of the frontier and cheap land and the little cabin in the woods. A hundred years ago we went through a brief spasm of urban intoxication called the City Beautiful movement. From 1893 -- you can date it precisely to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago -- to about 1918, we employed the language of neoclassical architecture and the principles of baroque civic design to make our cities worthy of a new great world power we had become among the other nations. We developed a powerful consensus among cultural and political leaders that this was necessary, and during this period we built our best public buildings, public places, and public monuments.
    After 1918, at the end of World War I, we took all the intellectual energy and all the money that had been going into the City Beautiful movement, and we redirected it to the task of retrofitting all our towns and cities for automobiles, and making them more disgusting than they had been during the rise of industrialism.
    After that -- I'm condensing all this history -- we get the Great Depression starting in 1929 with the Wall Street crash, and after ten years of that we get World War II. During the 1930s and 40s, almost nothing is being done to maintain American cities. They just sit there and rot -- like the moldy old sofa on the porch of the fraternity house, with the stuffing coming out and the squirrels living in it. By 1953, there is one universal image of the American city -- and, naturally, it comes from television: Ralph Kramden's apartment. That miserable slummy hole. And so Americans -- aided by the FHA and the War Veterans Department, and the new home mortgage subsidy, run shrieking for the suburbs, away from Ralph Kramden's apartment to the automobile utopia of Levittown.
    For the last 40 years, of course, the cities have only grown worse -- in some cases, like Newark, Detroit, or Muncie, Indiana, reaching a nearly terminal stage -- while the enterprise of building suburbia as a substitute for towns and cities became the very basis of our economy. In fact, it has become the very essence of our national existence. We give this enterprise the name: the American Dream.
    There are, of course, a number of problems with the American Dream and all the equipment needed to support it. Some of them are obvious to you. For instance, the fact that suburbia has no future as a human ecology. I don't need to elaborate on that. But it has some other less obvious, insidious effects. By its very nature, suburbia is neither the country nor the city. It has all the congestion of the city, and none of the social or cultural amenity. It's public realm is squalid for both the rich and the unrich. The supermarket parking lots of Beverly Hills are not appreciably less depressing than the supermarket parking lots of Camden, New Jersey. Suburban dwellers are not leading rural lives. They're not practicing agriculture in any meaningful sense. In fact, they are destroying it by occupying its former territory.
    American suburbia is essentially not a place to live but an idea of a place to live, an abstraction of a place to live. It is a cartoon of country life. The house in the fake natural landscape. The little cabin in the ersatz woods. The little ensembles of juniper shrubs around the house must be understood as a cartoon of the North Woods. This abstract removal from reality, this cartoonification of American life can be described as a form of cultural psychosis.
    Having become abstracted and alienated from the human need to live in the civic setting, we now think the cure for this disease is another abstraction: green space, open space. Notice how vague these terms are. And, naturally, it is not working for us. When you ask for an "open space," you get a berm between the K-mart and the apartment complex. That's how it's delivered. And it's all specified in your zoning codes. It's certainly not a park. It's where the psychotic teenagers go to torture the kitty-cats. Ask for a "green space" and you will get a bark mulch bed with the little juniper shrubs -- symbolic cartoon fragments of the North Woods. This is consequence of that kind of abstraction. We have forgotten what the city is, we have forgotten what the country is.
    About a year ago, I was invited to the city of Spokane to give a talk. Some guys from the city planning department took me on a "tour of the city." They showed me the "view over the river gorge" from this place, and the "green space" along the top of the gorge, and so on for two hours. And pretty soon, it began to hit me: these guys literally don't know the difference between the city and scenery. They think it's the same thing. Incidentally, there is a downtown Spokane -- it was once the center of a pretty lively railroad and lumbering economy -- and it's all preserved in amber in a grid of streets called downtown. But that's not what they showed me. So it becomes obvious after a while that even the professional city planners are terribly confused. They don't know what the nature of the city is. They don't make a distinction between what is the city and what is the country.
    I say all these things because I'm a little concerned that the Greenways movement is in some way an expression of this same problem -- a failure to conceive of human life in the civic setting. It's true that we need other ways to get around besides the automobile and the freeway. But movement itself is not place. We can have a Greenway system that is fully equal to the automobile freeway system and still have no worthwhile destinations. We can continue to compose our human ecology -- our everyday world -- out of places that are not worth caring about -- and connect them with greenways.
    We will not save the rural unless we rediscover the civic. We will not preserve the scenic land, the agricultural land, or the remaining wilderness unless we redevelop a firm knowledge of what the town and the city mean. They are the dwelling places of civilization. They are indispensable.
    That's why I want to invite you to join with the movement called the New Urbanism in common cause. The New Urbanism is a movement among young architects, and civic designers, and environmentalists, and politicians, and even journalist rabble-rousers, to reform the human ecology of America.
    The New Urbanism recognizes that it is absolutely necessary to create a civic setting for everyday life that is worthy of the human spirit, that is materially and spiritually rewarding. The New Urbanism declares that the public realm exists and matters, and that it must be consciously honored and embellished -- made beautiful with architecture and formal civic design -- in order for civic life to operate successfully. The New Urbanism declares that knowledge needed to restore civic life already exists. We don't need a $50 billion federal research grant to reacquire these skills. It exists in 50 centuries of human culture. It exists in established principles of civic design. We can emulate proven, successful patterns.
    We don't have to design buildings with blank walls and no visible door. That's culturally psychotic and it's time to move beyond that. I shouldn't have to undertake a reconnaissance mission every time I have to go to a college campus and give a lecture. [. . . .] There are many proven, successful ways to signify that a particular hole in the wall is the entrance to a building by making it look more important and more beautiful than the other holes in the wall. We know this. We just have to reacquire the will to practice it.
    The New Urbanism declares that the best solution to an ecologically unsustainable, spiritually depressing, socially inequitable, economically unaffordable, politically suicidal way of life is to restore the traditional walkable neighborhood in increments of villages, towns, and cities -- and to do it artfully, to make sure that they are places worth caring about. It is a physical form that complies with the pattern on which this nation built itself for the first 350 years of its existence -- really until the end of World War II. It is a physical form that is consistent with many of our most cherished notions about what made this nation great in the first place. I think the New Urbanism is one of the most hopeful cultural movements underway in our time. I share the conviction of its founders that if we can repair the fabric of our everyday world, many of our damaged institutions will follow into a state of restoration, including schools and the family.
    So, I ask you to join us in this effort to repair our human ecology. To see beyond the issues of transportation and recreation to the larger issue of how and where we live.
    Whether we love suburbia or not, the future is telling us very loudly that we are going to have to live differently. Economic and ecologic forces are underway that will require us to live differently.
    I don't know what it will take for us to find our way out of the suburban wilderness. We're pretty lost right now, pretty deep in the woods.
    Life is tragic. This is not a Hollywood movie with a guaranteed happy ending. We're not entitled to survive our follies simply because we're Americans. Life is tragic and history is merciless, and history won't she a tear if we pound our civilization down a rathole.
    We're going to have to bring a special dedication and a new rigor to the task of restoring civic life and city life in our nation -- both materially and spiritually -- or we are liable to lose the things we value most: our beautiful country and the institutions of our democratic republic.