Reading James Howard Kunstler‘s The City in Mind was a depressing experience. While I am inclined to agree with Kunstler’s main premise–his love for livable cities, and his dislike for suburbs and for development in which the automobile is favored at the expense of clustered living in which you can shop, go to work, and meet people in a local cafe, all within walking distance or easily accessible via quick public transportation–and to admire his vigorous and sometimes vituperative prose, I was also (perhaps contradictorily?) annoyed by his moralism, his snobbery, and his often dubious generalizations. The moralism and snobbery are evident in Kunstler’s utter disdain for Las Vegas; he writes as if the delirious simulations of Caesar’s Palace and the Bellagio and New York, New York were somehow an insult to the human spirit–it’s worse than reading Adorno’s denunciations of jazz. As for the dubious generalizations, I find many of Kunstler’s broad historical strokes–swooning over the enlightened despotism of Louis Napoleon, or blaming Aztec human sacrifices for the woes of Mexico City today, or celebrating contemporary gentrification as a way to renew inner cities–hard to take. At his best–denouncing the evils of modernist architecture, and praising the active street life of Paris–Kunstler pretty much just repeats arguments that were propounded more rigorously, as well as more generously, by Jane Jacobs. At his worst, he seems ignorant of how power and class work; he is all too ready to denounce the greed and stupidity of real estate developers (about which he will find no disagreement from me) but unable to grasp the systematic workings of economic exploitation and social exclusion in the modern and postmodern world.
The City in Mind
Reading James Howard Kunstler’s The City in Mind was a depressing experience. While I am inclined to agree with Kunstler’s main premise–his love for livable cities, and his dislike for suburbs and for development in which the automobile is favored at the expense of clustered living in which you can shop, go to work, and meet people in a local cafe, all within walking distance or easily accessible via quick public transportation–and to admire his vigorous and sometimes vituperative prose, I was also (perhaps contradictorily?) annoyed by his moralism, his snobbery, and his often dubious generalizations. The moralism and snobbery are evident in Kunstler’s utter disdain for Las Vegas; he writes as if the delirious simulations of Caesar’s Palace and the Bellagio and New York, New York were somehow an insult to the human spirit–it’s worse than reading Adorno’s denunciations of jazz. As for the dubious generalizations, I find many of Kunstler’s broad historical strokes–swooning over the enlightened despotism of Louis Napoleon, or blaming Aztec human sacrifices for the woes of Mexico City today, or celebrating contemporary gentrification as a way to renew inner cities–hard to take. At his best–denouncing the evils of modernist architecture, and praising the active street life of Paris–Kunstler pretty much just repeats arguments that were propounded more rigorously, as well as more generously, by Jane Jacobs. At his worst, he seems ignorant of how power and class work; he is all too ready to denounce the greed and stupidity of real estate developers (about which he will find no disagreement from me) but unable to grasp the systematic workings of economic exploitation and social exclusion in the modern and postmodern world.