Kunstler: Rust and Sun

…The rest of the city center is emblematic of all the blunders that poorly-trained municipal planners have imposed all over America — overscaled office towers set back from the street behind meaningless landscaping fantasias, blocks of buildings that present blank walls to streets, and along one weird block, an extremely narrow sidewalk with new street trees planted right in the center, making it impossible for two people to walk together side-by-side. Here and there new condominium towers stood, with cafes on the ground floor, and a number of additional ones were under construction, which was well and good — except they were gigantic towers. I’m not keen on towers. They deform the urban fabric and they will certainly lose functionality as we leave behind the fossil fuel age. There were plenty of vacant lots, too, between the state capitol dome and Lake Austin. The downtown streets were all six-laners, of course, many of them one-way, which prompted the motorists to drive as if they were on an expressway.


The convention center itself was a thing built to such a pharoanic scale that Rameses the Great might have commissioned it for his villa in Easthampton. It was a quarter-mile walk from the front of the ballroom to the coffee set-up in the rear — and this was one of the smaller ballrooms. The larger ones were occupied by some kind of intramural sports association convention full of people wearing sideways hats and weird, calf-length athletic shorts. The Sunbelt is all about sports, where the social aggression seething below the surface has been channeled.

All this was hardly the fault of the New Urbanists, who came there mostly to look and learn, and continue the process of refining their agenda for the years ahead. More and more they are coming to recognize the discontinuities we face in the form of peak oil and climate change. On these points, the leadership may be even more radically active than the membership. The ideas from meetings they held in Austin about how to meet these problems will continue to radiate through the country. They are probably the only group of professionals in America that I know of — including the professional environmentalists — who have a coherent vision of how America might physically arrange daily life in the terrible aftermath of the fossil fuel fiasco. Their ideas have the power to galvanize our otherwise lame political debates of the season. Nobody else in America is really thinking about what we’ll do when the cardboard signs appear on the convenience store pump racks saying “out of gas….”

Kunstler.com