An old interview from 2004: James Howard Kunstler speaks with Julian Darley (mp3, transcript)

3. What is New Urbanism?

Julian Darley: You’ve covered several of my questions. I was going to lead into what do you think will happen to suburbia, but I think you’ve given us a pretty comprehensive look at that. Is there anything else you want to add to this, and I speak from Canada, which is a gigantic suburb.

JHK: Well I’ve been very active in the New Urbanist movement over the last ten years. It’s really a wonderful movement made up of some of the most hopeful, and competent, and honorable people who I’ve met in my culture. You know, I’m fifty-four years old, and these are in my estimation, just among some of the best of the baby boom generation, you know, people of tremendous skill and ability. And they came along at a time that was kind of crucial. They have been out there in the trenches sedulously trying to reclaim and restore the whole body of knowledge that we threw in the garbage in 1950 – the culture of civic design. Which is that body of skill and principle and knowledge and methodology, which allows us to construct meaningful, sustainable, and rewarding human ecologies namely - towns, villages, cities, farming ecologies, rural landscapes.

All of the conditions that are found on what we in the New Urbanism call the transect of the human habitat: a continuum that goes from the center of the city to the wilderness and all the conditions in between that obtain. And all the knowledge and skill necessary to produce these things has been put back into service by the New Urbanists, because we’re going to need it desperately. It happens to be the antithesis to the anti-city and the anti-human ecology of suburbia.

You know and all of the principles that go into the making of suburbia are not found in the principles of traditional town planning and traditional urban design. So the New Urbanists have been working on this very hard. And I think they’ve also gone to heroic lengths to try to understand what we’re going to do with the existing suburban places. Because of course whatever they represent in the form of a misallocation of resources or a misinvestment, there is still I think an understandable wish to try to do something with them. And I think that some of them indeed can probably be reused and fixed. There are already projects in existence in which, for example, dead shopping malls are being converted into village centers and town centers with mixed-use development: places for people to live, people of different incomes, houses, apartments, places for businesses to do their thing, retail, all mixed together in an integral way so that these places add up to more than the sum of their parts. Which is to say that they come alive as civic organisms, you know, just as you come alive as a human organism because the organs of your life are integrally deployed around your body. You’re more than the sum of liver and the lungs and the bones and the skin and the muscle. In that way, a real human habitat is more than just the sum of its parts.

And the whole idea of suburbia for the last sixty years really has been to dis-aggregate those organic relations between, those integral relations between the civic organs, you know, the organs of the residential organs where we have our houses, and the commercial organs where the shopping happens, and the educational organs where the schools and the museums are, and the cultural organs of the theaters and so on. And under the regime of single use zoning, which was the chief governing principle of suburbia, all these things were separated assiduously, and the separation was reinforced with either large streets or formal buffers that took the form of landscaping fantasias, and things like that.

So the main thing about suburbia was it could only be used and accessed by being in an automobile and that of course is its most obvious drawback and from the standpoint of energy it’s what makes the whole program a complete loser for the future. Because we are now stuck in America with tens of thousands of poorly integrated places that can only be used in cars. With massive amounts of mandatory motoring. We’re literally stuck up a cul-de-sac in a cement SUV without a fill-up.

The New Urbanists have tried heroically as I said to imagine methods and ways of fixing these places. I think the general point of view among us is that you can do a certain amount of this with malls and some of the commercial stuff. You can retrofit them, you can in-fill the parking lots you can create streets and blocks and eventually even remove the mall buildings and change them out with real urban fabric. But the suburban residential cul-de-sac subdivisions do not offer a whole lot of hope, and I haven’t seen one example of anyone who’s been able to come up with a scheme for retro-fitting them for the future. So I imagine they’ll be the slums of the future. My image of it is that where there is now one software engineer living in a McMansion outside of Atlanta, eleven years from now there will be twelve families living in that building growing Swiss chard where the lawn used to be. And it’s kind of a sad and tragic and hopeless and pitiful picture of the future.