[by Jim Kunstler]

Readers of my stuff and audience members at my college blabs have been complaining lately that I wrote The Long Emergency as a wish-fulfillment fantasy because I hate suburbia. So perhaps it's a good time for me to clarify my thoughts on suburbia.

First, we need to recognize its origins. Even the Romans had suburbs, and the wish to inhabit the borderlands (to borrow John Stilgoe's term) of the largest cities is not a new thing. But in America the pattern evolved to an extent never before imagined. America's cities emerged hand-in-hand with industrialism, and by the mid-1800s the industrial city was regarded as undesirable. As soon as the convulsion of the Civil War was over, railroad suburbs were created for the very well-off, and systems for designing them were innovated by the likes of Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, creators of New York's Central Park. There were very few of these special places, and they formed the basis of what would be known as the American Dream .

The idea behind these suburbs was simple and straightforward: country life as the antidote to the horror of the industrial city, with its moiling slums, its noise, congestion, bad air, disease, and obnoxious industrial operations. One could access the city by day for business and be back in a rural villa for dinner thanks to the railroad.

The suburb of the streetcar era was an elaboration of this pattern for a growing upper-middle class (and the streetcar era was relatively brief). It allowed a finer grain of suburban development because the stops could be much closer together.

The Model T Ford was introduced in 1907 and built on assembly lines in 1913, which made them cheap and affordable. When the disruption of the First World War was over in 1918, the automobile permitted an extenstion of the suburbs far beyond (and between) the streetcar lines. The great boom of the 1920s was largely a result of all this activity. This project was interrupted by the Great Depression and the Second World War, and then furiously resumed when the war was over. Up until the 1970s, suburbia was a kind of accessory to America's manufacturing economy. But as industrial production moved overseas, the creation of suburbia itself insidiously replaced it as the engine of the US economy.

This brings us to where we are today, with an economy driven by a land development pattern and a system for delivering it that is hugely destructive of terrain and civic life. Since it depends utterly on reliable supplies of cheap oil, we can assert that it has dubious prospects as both an economic enterprise and as a living arrangement. The obdurate refusal to recognize its limitations begins to have tragic overtones for our society.

Having directed so much of our post-war wealth to constructing the infrastructures of suburban everyday life, we are now trapped in a psychology of previous investment that makes it impossible for us to imagine letting go of it. This is expressed in Dick Cheney's tragic phrase that the American way of life is non-negotiable. Now, circumstances will negotiate it for us.

It is true that I hate what the suburbs have done to my country. But the assualt on our landscape and the withering of our civic life was an obvious evil before the specter of peak oil signaled an absolute end of suburbia. What I certainly despise as much as suburbia itself is the stupid defense of it by people who ought to know better, such as columnists for the New York Times . I also believe that this stupid defense will continue and spread and become a tremendous, tragic exercise in futility for a people who could be putting their minds to a much better purpose in finding other means to carry on the larger project of civilization.

04 October 05

James Kunstler is the sharpshooting author of The Geography of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere and the recently released novel, The Long Emergency, as well as the only guy in a bowtie Morphizm doesn't want to crush into a bloodied pulp. His doomsday predictions can be had for free at his blog, Clusterfuck Nation, as well as here. Which makes him cool.

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