Still Standing Amid the Wreckage By James Howard Kunstler

[BREWER]

Posted for fair use and discussion.
http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/05/sti...kage.html#more

Still Standing Amid the Wreckage
By James Howard Kunstler
on May 14, 2012 9:17 AM


The New Urbanists held their big annual meet-up for four days last week and I stomped a big carbon footprint flying down to West Palm Beach for the doings. I don't know who exactly picked West Palm, but it was at once peculiar, disheartening, instructive, and exhausting.

The Congress for the New Urbanism has been throwing this yearly fandango since its founding in 1993 as a fire-eating reform movement dedicated to transforming the horrifying and toxic human habitat of America. Hopes were lofty in the early days that the US public would recognize the self-evident benefits of ditching suburban sprawl for walkable towns, but it didn't quite work out that way. The last frantic phase of sprawl-building commenced exactly the same time, jacked on easy lending steroids, and upping
the stakes of the battle. That story ended in the baleful collapse of the housing bubble and the sad particulars need not be rehearsed here.

During the boom of the 90s and aughties, about 99.5 percent of the new real estate development was done by the conventional schlock sprawl-builders and the New Urbanists did much of the remaining .5 - which was enough to get their point across. Some of their projects (e.g. Seaside, Fla.) are now iconic examples of excellence in urban design artistry. Many others were botched by compromises made in the planning board battles, and another bunch were either half-assed from the get-go or plain fakes. These traditional neighborhood developments were almost always built on greenfield sites, provoking controversy that could not be briskly dismissed.

At the same time, quite a bit of New Urbanist work was done in re-making existing town centers and in retrofits of sclerotic older suburban parcels, and their influence was later seen in the many big city streetscape redesigns from Times Square to Santa Monica. Their laborious work in reforming the intricate idiocies of zoning law made possible better development outcomes in towns all over the land which adopted so-called Smart Codes.

The housing bubble bust massacred the New Urbanists. Many of the firms had tied their fortunes to the production house builders and the commercial real estate developers doing large projects, often hundreds of acres, and when the market imploded around 2007 their work dried up. Now there is very little new real estate development of any kind going on around the country. Many talents languish while the nation broods over the fate of its obsolete suburban dream and fails to recognize that we have to make drastically new arrangements for inhabiting the landscape.

But the mood at the 2012 CNU was still buoyant, considering. For all their vocational anguish, the New Urbanists are still about the only intellectual cohort in the USA with a coherent vision of what has gone wrong in our society -- our ruinous investments in futureless infrastructure -- and what can be done about it -- the reconstruction of traditional human habitat as the armature for enduring economies. Compared with the brainless religious zealotry and sexual hysteria of the right wing and the ruinous social services pandering of the left, the New Urbanists look like the only organized group of adults in the nation who have not completely lost their minds. So it was a pleasure to spend four days among them. They are a valiant band of cultural warriors.

Events are now in the driver's seat. The long battle against the continuation of suburban sprawl is over, despite the happy-talk noises made by what's left of the real estate industry. Half a decade of absolutely flat oil production -- propaganda to the contrary -- guarantees that the suburban project is finished. We're done building things that way (even if we don't quite realize it yet) so the New Urbanists have won the argument by default.

Quite a few non-New Urbanist "pundits" such as Ed Glaeser, the asinine Joel Kotkin, and dashing Richard Florida predict that the action has shifted to the big cities, and that may appear to be the case for this deceptive moment. But the mega-cities are in for a tsunami of troubles all their own in the form of vanishing wealth, fiscal disorder, sclerotic infrastructure failures, service interruptions, and ethnic turf battles as the effects of the epochal economic contraction bite deeper and harder. The inescapable downscaling of America means that we are heading toward a new disposition of things on the landscape in just the way the New Urbanists have prescribed: a declension of ecologies ranging from dense, walkable human-dominated urban habitats in the form of traditional towns and cities through a range of rural conditions running from farmland to wilderness necessary to support the health of the planet.

Time and nature will help take care of the accumulated suburban dreck on the ground. Humans are very skillful sorters of things and the disassembly of salvaged materials will be a big industry in a world taking a "time out" from industrial progress. The timeless principles that the New Urbanists revived will be the common sense of whatever we build in the future, even when the planning board battles of recent years are long forgotten. We will almost certainly return to social conditions in which nobody will dare put up a building devoid of conscious artistry. There's a lot to like in this quadrant of the long emergency.

The 20th reunion of old CNU friends was a little disenchanted by the conference site. West Palm Beach contains one of their showpiece projects, the nightlife and shopping district called City Place that was created out of a bombed out neighborhood. Casual observers crack on City Place as an "urban mall," but it's really just Rosemary Street rebuilt of new traditionally-scaled buildings with shops and bistros programmed in. A lot of it is generic chain business. Another sad element is the cartoonish, low quality finish of the buildings - sprayed on stucco and ornaments with no conviction. Both of these failures of quality represent the fast buck mentality of the big commercial developers and the larger vulgar so-called consumer culture they served. But City Place does include some pretty well composed public space in the form of a central plaza and a palm court running off it, and it was full of people enjoying themselves in the cafes those nights, and the ensemble managed to incorporate a very nice Beaux Arts church-turned-theater (the Harriet Himmel) in the Spanish neo-classical manner.

The trouble was when you strayed a block off Rosemary Street the fabric of the city fell apart. Some of it was just vacant land. Further east between Olive Street and the intercostal waterway stood a swath of oversized giant condo towers that represented the worst of the lamented housing bubble. Many were "see-through" buildings of empty, unsold units. The streets along these behemoths were as dead as any neighborhood on a Zombie planet, and traversing them to get anywhere was hugely depressing. The convention center, where the CNU meeting actually took place, stood off in its own twilight zone of separation, cut off from the beginning of City Place by the ghastly ten-lane Okeechobee Boulevard. The five-block walk (of very large super-blocks) to and fro from my hotel was like unto reenacting the Bataan Death March under that brutal Floridian sun.

Things are changing fast now though. The New Urbanists still standing are the strongest and most nimble. They are also the ones most deeply engaged in the trenches of architectural education, and they are as certain to win the ideology battles still raging in that realm as they won the battle over suburban sprawl.

Most of all, though, I'm glad to be home in my quiet backwater of this poor floundering nation.

[Flashyzipp]

Great article, thank you so much for sharing this!

[Gingergirl]

New Urbanism dates back almost 100 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Urbanism

Early efforts in the 1929 Raburn Community seems to have never been completed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radburn,_New_Jersey

Appears to have become a strong influence on the HMO model...especially in the area of governance.

The concept was not will recieved commercially, but in the 1970's defaulted to public housing design in the US and England. Later thought to have comtributed to rising crime in those communities.

Interesting quote from the Australian architect responsible for introducing the design to public housing in New South Wales:

Philip Cox, was reported to have admitted with regards to an American Radburn designed estate in the suburb of Villawood, "Everything that could go wrong in a society went wrong," "It became the centre of drugs, it became the centre of violence and, eventually, the police refused to go into it. It was hell."

Inspite of the evidence, New Urbanites want us to build and finance these low-cost paradises.

[Be Well]

Compared with the brainless religious zealotry and sexual hysteria of the right wing

This is why I have a hard time reading his articles.

[Dobbin]

New Urbanism dates back almost 100 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Urbanism
Early efforts in the 1929 Raburn Community seems to have never been completed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radburn,_New_Jersey
Appears to have become a strong influence on the HMO model...especially in the area of governance.
The concept was not will recieved commercially, but in the 1970's defaulted to public housing design in the US and England. Later thought to have comtributed to rising crime in those communities.
Interesting quote from the Australian architect responsible for introducing the design to public housing in New South Wales:
Philip Cox, was reported to have admitted with regards to an American Radburn designed estate in the suburb of Villawood, "Everything that could go wrong in a society went wrong," "It became the centre of drugs, it became the centre of violence and, eventually, the police refused to go into it. It was hell."
Inspite of the evidence, New Urbanites want us to build and finance these low-cost paradises.

A little more on this which you mentioned but did not cite:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America...public_housing

The American Radburn design for public housing is a reference the civil engineering designs for public housing estates applied in the 1970s in Sydney, Australia and other places. It is typified by the backyards of homes facing the street and the fronts of homes facing each other over common yards.[1] It is often referred to as an urban design experiment which is typified by failure due to the laneways used as common entries and exits to the houses helping ghettoise communities and encourage crime; it has ultimately lead to efforts to 'de-Radburn' or partially demolish American Radburn designed public housing areas.[2] It is an offshoot of American designs from English garden city theories which culminated in the design of the partially built Radburn, New Jersey estate.[3]

When interviewed in 1998, the architect responsible for introducing the design to public housing in New South Wales, Philip Cox, was reported to have admitted with regards to an American Radburn designed estate in the suburb of Villawood, "Everything that could go wrong in a society went wrong," "It became the centre of drugs, it became the centre of violence and, eventually, the police refused to go into it. It was hell."

Funny, the earlier citation for Radburn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radburn,_New_Jersey) seems to speak highly of the concept. Of course the original was not built out to it's full plan, and perhaps the intended market for occupancy was not low income humans?

Are the subsequent Villawood and other failures sort of like pearls before swine? Perhaps yet another ill adapted but high minded government boondoggle?

I'm not sure I would throw out New Urbanism on the basis of failed government programs. Rather consider the prospective clientele more closely: what their needs, their interests, their previous experience might include? (I expect I could trot far with further negative descriptive of the low income humans, but I'll leave that for others.)

Over at the nearby Dairy, the cows live in frightful condition (IMHO.) I've seen it. All pushed in side by each with frames around their heads. They seem happy though, for pretty mindless beings. (again IMHO) Meanwhile, I exist in not exactly rapturous splendor here in this circa 1908 barn/stable/wotever. But I'm happy. And it's what I know. Pretty much ALL that I know. Ask me to live where the cows live and I would be miserable. Invite the cows here and shortly rapture would become rapeture and I expect they would be unhappy as well.

We all have our "environment."

Dobbin

[marsh]

Not everyone is able to be an urbanite. I suggest the book "The Dollmaker" for those who wish to see what happens when you transplant a free, independent mountain soul into a city.

When I read the article, all I could think of was ICLEI and Agenda 21 Sustainable Development.

[The Mountain]

Nations and cultures have different needs and psychologies. What works for Japan could never work in the US, for example. Here in India, developers are currently going crazy trying to accommodate the burgeoning middle class that has had enough of tiny, laterite-brick houses. Giant (relatively speaking) apartment towers are mushrooming up everywhere, often putting three or more 17+ story buildings on a 5-acre parcel. Each story holds 3-4 apartments often with 4-5 residents each, so you can imagine the density. Parking is an afterthought, and even the largest shopping malls in Delhi apparently have almost no parking(!). The problems come when the developers leave out things like adequate power provision for their properties, or build on the outskirts of the cities where the "sewer" is just an open drain. Here, I believe, is where the first workable arcologies are going to have to be built. An arcology (as defined more by science fiction than Paolo Soleri) solves the problem of power, sanitation (including sewage treatment and garbage), urban sprawl, land usage, and even policing. It does offer new challenges in terms of disease, crime, and to some extent, engineering, but being self-contained it's easier to implement solutions. It would probably never work in the US, might work in Europe, and would probably be adopted in other Asian countries, but here, it's almost certainly the best solution to the problem.