Suburbia’s Worst Enemy

Since the 1994 release of The Geography of Nowhere, author James Howard Kunstler has been among the most acerbic critics of North American urban design. Kunstler has argued that suburban sprawl has left citizens almost entirely dependent on cars, just as the world nears the historic peak of oil production. What happens after we pass that fossil fuel “tipping point”? That’s the subject of Kunstler’s latest book, The Long Emergency, in which the author describes the massive changes that Americans — and their neighbours — will experience as the age of cheap oil drips to a close. In what The Guardian describes as “a 300-page dirge to the doom that awaits us,” Kunstler predicts the end of cheap aviation, the withering of the American southwest, the collapse of global trade and a shallow grave for suburbia, among other horrors.

Such predictions are now being taken seriously by some local governments, as a recent report to Burnaby city council shows. As we prepare for the World Urban Forum, writer Charles Montgomery tracked down the cantankerous Kunstler to discover what his Long Emergency might have in store for the Lower Mainland.

Charles Montgomery: You call suburbia the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. Why?

James Howard Kunstler: Because it was a living arrangement with no future, and we poured all the wealth of our post-Second World War society into the infrastructure of it.

The Tyee (Canada)