Cities: December 2007 Archives

What I Saw in America: It's a Destructive Life

Via Rod Dreher, who says, "it's like having Christmas with James Howard Kunstler": "A deep irony pervades the film at the moment of it joyous conclusion: as the developer of an antiseptic suburban subdivision, George Bailey is saved through the kinds of relationships nourished in his town that will be undermined and even precluded in the anomic community he builds as an adult."

ORK Posters! ...neighborhood posters

Cool posters showing the names and locations of neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston.

Rolling Stone: James Howard Kunstler: The Long Emergency

A summary of Kunstler's 2005 book on the impact of declining oil production and increased consumption: "Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other arrangements for the way we live in the United States. America is in a special predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a society in the twentieth century. Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot away and to replace them with suburbia, which had the additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world."