Kunstler makes connections between the zoning laws and the impossibility of creating a lively town: in most places, residential above shops is not allowed, or large set backs are compulsory, thus destroying any connection between street and building. A recurrent theme is that the neglect of the public realm reflects a particularly American attitude that considers land as a commodity and not a community good, and has negative consequences for society. Town centres disappeared and were replaced by malls, streets were no longer fronted by buildings, housing developments became dormitories to which people had no particular allegiance.
These comments are at the core of Kunstler’s arguments: whilst rail connected neighbourhoods, towns and cities across the country, allowing for dense hubs to develop around the stations, the car and the highway encouraged undifferentiated suburban sprawl and isolated people from each other. Kunstler takes a much wider view but covers some of the same ground (though surprisingly never quotes her) and both had a common enemy in Robert Moses, the so-called ‘master builder’ of New York whose ‘only ideology was to get highways, bridges and tunnels built’ and who ‘showed a strange enmity for railroad trains and mass transit’. Jacobs focussed mostly, though not only, on the neighbourhood.
Neither of the authors were architects or planners, but they were good observers critical of what was happening in their environment. There are parallels with the much earlier Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life and the subtitle of this book is obviously a nod to its predecessor. Kunstler’s book was a wake up call to his compatriots. In the early 90s, Americans were still enamoured of suburbia (most of them still are), global warming was just starting to be debated, the world economy was changing and not to the benefit of the West. Developers and the private car are the instruments that helped the process. The main story James Howard Kunstler wants to tell in this book is how the beautiful and wild landscape of the North American continent was gradually but relentlessly ruined by its inhabitants today, ‘most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy and spiritually degrading’, he laments and the main reason for this destruction is American individualism which leads to the neglect of the public realm.
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