An Unsparing Look at City Building

Todd Ziebarth reviews The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition by James Howard Kunstler
  

In The City In Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, James Howard Kunstler explores how political, social, and economic developments influence city building. In turn, he extrapolates what the form of urban development tells us about ourselves. It is an engaging and worthwhile read.

In this book, Kunstler profiles three cities in the United States—Atlanta, Las Vegas and Boston—and five cities elsewhere—Paris, Mexico City, Berlin, Rome and London. The author hits the hardest when he is discussing the condition of America’s cities. In writing of Las Vegas, Kunstler states: “They say Antarctica is the worst place on earth, but I believe that distinction belongs to Las Vegas, hands down.” And, “If Las Vegas truly is our city of the future, then we might as well cut our own throats tomorrow . . . As a city it’s a futureless catastrophe. As a tourist trap, it’s a megajoke. As a theosophical matter, it presents proof that we are a wicked people who deserve to be punished. In the historical context, it is the place where America’s spirit crawled off to die.”

Kunstler applies his incisive eye and considerable writing talent to the non-American cities as well. In describing his arrival in Mexico City, he states, “It was the rainy season, but the rains hadn’t come in this super El Nino year. Forest fires raged out of control south of the city in the states of Oaxaca and Guerrero and the air pollution approached supernatural levels. At ground level the ozone concentrations exceeded the national safety standard by 200 percent, and trees were dying in Chapultepec Park. Flying into the airport over the ragged rim of mountaintops that enclosed the enormous basin like an ancient fortification, you saw the city smoldering below like a gigantic ashtray.”

While each of the eight chapters in the book is an insightful exploration of the intricate relationships between historical events and city building, Kunstler’s thesis is most profoundly communicated in the book’s sixth chapter, “Rome: In Search of the Classical.” The unifying element in this informative investigation of the evolution of the classical order in Rome, which Kunstler is clearly a big fan of, is a book, or rather an encyclopedia, called The Ten Books on Architecture by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (c. 90 B.C. to c. 20 B.C.). According to Kunstler, this work is the sole surviving treatise of ancient architectural method and theory, and covers a wide range of subjects, including Greek orders, methods for designing temples and private houses, city planning, building materials, aqueducts, construction machinery, military machinery and interior decoration.

After fluidly taking the reader through “the thousand-year train wreck of civilization” after the fall of the Roman Empire, Kunstler shows how the discovery of the only extant version of “The Ten Books on Architecture” in 1420, in a monastery in Switzerland on behalf of one of the power brokers of Florence, influenced the built environment from Italy to France to the United States, right up until World War I.

Furthermore, Kunstler brilliantly uses the principles of the classical order, as articulated by Vitruvius, to show the potential for a logical and deep connection between human beings and the environments that they create—from the idea that buildings should reflect the human qualities of having a base, a middle and a top, thus equivalent to the feet, torso and head of a human figure, to the notion that buildings should express and reflect back a verticality similar to ours, thus completing a feedback loop that reinforces the sense of our humanity in the things we make.

Throughout the book, Kunstler challenges a variety of notions about city building. While he particularly likes to hammer the folks who championed the modern order in urban development, he doesn’t spare our knee-jerk liberal friends either, resulting in two of the more interesting positions that he takes. First, in the course of a fascinating and heated discussion of the proposed redevelopment of South Boston, he takes on the anti-gentrification forces. Although he grants the legitimacy of several of their concerns, such as the question of where the poor will go when they have been gentrified out of their neighborhoods, he argues that anti-gentrification logic has lead us to the current predicament in urban areas—a massive disinvestment in our cities, with the well-off making their homes in the suburbs and the exurbs.

Second, he also challenges the present guardians of the open space movement. While acknowledging the importance of green space in cities, especially in the form of small-scale parks, he argues that our obsession with creating more open space in urban areas prohibits us from dealing with the bigger issue of how to create a more livable built environment. At the end of the day, we are no better off for these “cartoons of the countryside,” because we are stuck in the same, deplorable built environments.

As we take up the daunting task of healing our cities, we clearly need to take a step back and gain some perspective, and this book aids that effort. At the moment, though, it seems we prefer not to. According to Kunstler, “We flatter ourselves to think of our era as the crowning destination of history—as though another thousand years won’t eventually overheap us, too, and countless thousands more after than, and then more thousands still, until everything remembered is forgotten.” As the author makes clear, if arrogance continues to rule the day in this country, our current problems will pale in comparison to the environmental gifts—both built and natural—that we leave for future generations.