The Ghastly Tragedy of the Suburbs - TED Talk by James Howard Kunstler

Originally shared: Wednesday 30 November 2016

James Howard Kunstler is an author who stirs up strong feelings. In this TED talk he is deliberately provocative in tone and wants to elicit feelings when talking about architecture and town/city planning, something which has been leeched out of all conversation around those spheres. You may agree or you may disagree, but whatever you think this is well worth a watch to my mind.

I highly recommend Kunstler's 1994 book 'The Geography Of Nowhere: The Rise And Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape':

'The Geography Of Nowhere: The Rise And Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape', 1994
By James Howard Kunstler
ISBN-13: 978-0671888251 (Out of print)

I came across this book when looking for writing about cities going through huge moments of change. The title alone had me hooked.

A synopsis
"Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built since the end of World War II. This tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside is not simply an expression of our economic predicament, but in large part a cause. It is the everyday environment where most Americans live and work, and it represents a gathering calamity whose effects we have hardly begun to measure. In The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where every place is like no place in particular, where the city is a dead zone and the countryside a wasteland of cars and blacktop. Now that the great suburban build-out is over, Kunstler argues, we are stuck with the consequences: a national living arrangement that destroys civic life while imposing enormous social costs and economic burdens."

(Though 'out of print' it is available to buy online from the Abebooks here … link)

Also see -
'Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century', 1998
by James Howard Kunstler
ISBN-13: 978-0684837376
Abebooks link

'The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition', 2003
by James Howard Kunstler
ISBN-13: 978-0743227230
Abebooks link

Kunstler's website - http://kunstler.com/