In a recent post, I mentioned the writer/social critic, James Howard Kunstler. Kunstler is probably one of the most intense critics of suburban sprawl in the United States. He has gone so far as to call it, “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.” As a born and bred, former suburbanite myself, I share many of Kunstler’s critical views of suburbia and what he calls the “happy motoring fiesta” in the U.S., and have written a little bit on the topic on this blog in the past, mainly here and here. 

I recently stumbled upon an insightful and very funny TED Talk he did a few years ago that ties in quite nicely with the points in my last post about the public sphere and civil society (video embedded below). While he argues in this talk that, “We’re going to have to down-scale, re-scale, and re-size virtually everything we do in this country and we can’t start soon enough to do it,” because he believes we are heading into “the end of the cheap oil era,” the underlying theme of his speech (and argument for why our suburbia is so bad) is actually closely related to the points Benjamin Barber makes about civil society (as I mentioned in the last post). The difference is, Barber focused primarily on the particular human elements of civic life: forums, organizations, institutions, and the like. Kunstler argues here that, actually, the quality and character of such civic life is directly connected to the way we design and build our social environments.

Kunstler speaks of the correlation between how well we define space with architecture and the health or even the very existence of meaningful public spaces and the public life to go along with them. What should be the function of such public spaces, or of the “public realm” in general? For Kunstler it has “two roles: It is the dwelling place of our civilization and civic life, and it is the physical manifestation of the common good.” But, he argues, particularly speaking of our sprawling suburbia, we have become so bad at defining space toward these ends that we now essentially have a nation full of many “places that no one wants to be in…places that are not worth caring about.”

Kunstler goes on to say,

The public realm has to inform us not only where we are geographically, but it has to inform us where we are in our culture. Where we’ve come from, what kind of people we are, and…by doing that, it needs to afford us a glimpse to where we’re going in order to allow us to dwell in a hopeful present.

When I heard that, I was reminded of a trip my wife and I took a few years ago shortly before we were married. We drove a packed U-Haul from her parents’ house in Massachusetts to Alabama. Somewhere along the way (maybe it was in Virginia?), we pulled off the interstate and stopped at some monster outdoor shopping center – the likes of which seem to be popping up all over the country, all with a strikingly similar feel and many of the same stores, as they affect cartoon images of public spaces. We didn’t really know where we were, and there wasn’t anything unique or distinct about this particular place to inform us. We jokingly remarked that we were in “Anywhere, U.S.A.” This has been a common experience for me throughout suburban America. Passing countless strip malls on highways in other cities and states, I have often been reminded directly of other places I’ve been through, but not able to recall exactly what place that was or where, much less know exactly where I was at the time.  

Personally, I think the social and political implications of all of this are very significant, and the consequences seem quite evident. Patrick Deneen, writing about the recent “tea parties,” argued that at their root was a basic, unarticulated frustration, because currently, 

we are…more subject to titanic forces over which we exercise little if any control, and frustrated at the sense of impotence and irrelevance that the impersonality and massness of modern political and economic life thrusts inescapably upon us.

Deneen then goes on to say, “The tea parties were wildly incapable of articulating the true sources of this frustration…”

I think Kunstler has certainly identified at least one source of it, in that – to paraphrase him – our “bad urbanism” and suburban sprawl have degraded the quality of our public realms and likewise, of our public lives, leaving the common good without local, tangible manifestation. In the process we have become more and more separated from one another, from actual communities, and from the mechanisms and processes backing modern life, thus heightening alienation, apathy, and a general sense of irrelevance. 

I’d venture to say that many people feel the frustration of which Deneen writes, but I think many of them fail to make the deeper connections that can be made from Kunstler’s criticism of our disconnecting and debilitating sprawl. As a result, they fail to see that the kind of living we’re widely engaged in is built upon and requires more and more distant, centralized, and bureaucratic forms of power which we have very little say in or ability to influence. It seems that our best counter to this is our capacity to come together publicly to revitalize communities in pursuit of common goods, needs, and communal goals. But our ability to do this very thing is undermined and discouraged by the ways we have chosen to spread out and degrade our places of living.

Before I embed the video, I’ll leave you with this part of his closing statement, which I particularly like. Benjamin Barber has made this exact same point, and I will revisit it soon: 

Please, please, stop referring to yourselves as “consumers.”  OK? Consumers are different than citizens. Consumers do not have obligations, responsibilities and duties to their fellow human beings. And as long as you’re using that word consumer in the public discussion, you will be degrading the quality of the discussion we’re having. And we’re gonna continue being clueless going into this very difficult future that we face.