Cities of the Future Won't Look Like Ours

By James Howard Kunstler, Kunstler.com. Posted October 23, 2006.

Back in the early 20th Century, when the cheap oil fiesta was just getting underway, and some major new technological innovation made its debut every month -- cars, radio, movies, airplanes -- there was no practical limit to what men of vision could imagine about the future city, though often their imaginings were ridiculous. The representative case is Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret; 1887 -- 1965), the leading architectural hoodoo-meister of Early High Modernism, whose 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris proposed to knock down the entire Marais district on the Right Bank and replace it with rows of identical towers set between freeways.

Luckily for Paris, the city officials laughed at him every time he came back with the scheme over the next 40 years -- and Corb was nothing if not a relentless self-promoter. Ironically and tragically, though, the Plan Voisin model was later adopted gleefully by post WWII American planners, and resulted in such urban monstrosities as the infamous Cabrini Green housing projects of Chicago and scores of things like it around the country.

Other visions of that early period involved Tom Swiftian scenes of Everest-size skyscrapers with Zeppelin moorings on top, linked to zooming air trams, while various types of personal helicopters swooped between things. Virtually all these schemes had one thing in common: the city of the future they depicted was vibrant. We know now, here in the USA anyway, that this was the one thing they got most wrong. By 1970, many American cities were stone dead at their centers, especially the industrial giants of the Midwest. Ten years later, the American city of the future was the nightmare vision of Blade Runner, an acid rain-dripping ruin fit only for androids.

These days, a new generation of mojo architect savants such as Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas are retailing an urban futurism that is basically warmed-over Corbu with an expressionist horror movie spin, featuring torqued and tortured skyscrapers, made possible by computer-aided design, clad in Darth Vadar glass or other sheer surfaces, with grim public spaces exquisitely engineered to induce agoraphobia. There's more than a tinge of sadism in all this, though Koolhaas is much more explicit in his many writings than the less-voluble Libeskind about consciously surrendering to a zeitgeist of cruel alienation. But these are also very rarified exercises among a tiny group of mutually-referential fashionista narcissists, while the general public itself -- at least the fraction that thinks about anything -- only grudgingly goes along with it as a sort of drear obeisance to the religion of art.

An alternate awful urban vision of the future, advanced by public intellectuals such as author Mike Davis (The Ecology of Fear), is actually more about the city of the present: the third world mega-slum as embodied by such ghastly organisms as present-day Lagos, Lima, and Karachi. This is a vision of plain toxic hypertrophy with no particular artistic or architectural overlay to it. These cities have organized according to a simple logarithmic progression of horrible conditions -- more people, more pollutiaon, more poverty -- nourished by cheap energy globalism, with the expectation that they will only continue along that path and get worse.

Yet another vision of the future is supplied by the New Urbanists, who have campaigned for a return to the body of principle and methodology drawn from successful historic practice rather than science fiction, politics, or metaphysics. That is, they rely on urban design that has proven to work well in the past and is worth emulating -- by which I mean the relations of buildings to public space and with each other, not the deployment of sewer lines and other infrastructure. The New Urbanists are marginalized because their reliance on tradition is considered sentimental and nostalgic. Their work is viewed by the mandarins of architecture through the lens of Modernist ideology, which, going back a hundred years to Adolf Loos's declaration that ornament is crime, has worked to decouple contemporary practice from what they regard as the filthy claptrap of history. Of course, Modernism itself has self-evidently become historical in its own right, and the more this is true, paradoxically, the more its defenders insist that history does not matter. Whatever else this represents in the form of intellectual imprudence, it at least promotes a discontinuity of human experience which cannot be healthy.

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