Weez Blog

Jim Kunstler : Future Fragmenation

There are spaces worth caring about, public and private. Buildings designed like DVD players. Car strip mall kmart walmart accomodating cluster fuck. (Wish I had all the words that were in the mini diatribe string.)

Successful places have an active and permeable edge.

How hard can this be? Shops on the bottom that go up to the sidewalk. Other stuff going on above the shops.

The role of green in City Center is formal. Not a cartoon of the north woods. The remedy for mutilated is not green bandaids. The way to fix it is to redesign cities.

Cities became an urban horror. Suburbs were a response. A fake cabin in the woods. We no longer get country living. We get a cartoon of country living, in a cartoon of country life. Our architecture (flat, planed, disinfected), cities and burbs, reflects our fragmented culture. Community is fractured by the spaces we have.

We can't continue. The car culture is finite. We will be fighting over oil with people who don't like us. Communities have to be rescaled. We will have to live closer together. Cities will have to get smaller, we will grow food closer to where we live, travel less. Period.

The response- new urbanism. Human habitat, livable space...it is an ecosystem. An organism.