The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition by James Howard Kunstler

The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition Reviews

• 
  Lobstergirl

  
  If you accept that Kunstler here has written meditations,* which his subtitle asserts, rather than a book with an argument about how cities are and how they should be, supported by case studies, this book is perfectly serviceable. It’s a little flabby and unfocused, in contrast to his earlier work The Geography of Nowhere. He covers eight cities – Paris, Atlanta, Mexico City, Berlin, Las Vegas, Rome, Boston, and London – each in different ways. For Mexico City we get 23 pages of Aztec history (including a theory on the psychology of the Aztec mind) before Kunstler starts discussing the present day megalopolis. Paris plods through a soporific look back at Haussmann’s demolition and reconstruction while London concerns itself almost entirely with ideas on parks and landscaping. Rome bores in on the classical elements of architecture. Boston examines gentrification and modernist boxes (he has a Tom-Wolfeian aversion to modernism or seemingly even anything boxy). Only in the chapters on Atlanta and Las Vegas (both American, not coincidentally) does Kunstler seem completely in his element, because he finds these cities wholly grotesque.
  
  Kunstler’s biggest complaint has always been that the built environment was increasingly built for cars, not pedestrians. His biggest bugaboo is the suburbs (“people ought to live …[in] the town, the city, the neighborhood, or the village”). His biggest fear, along with ugliness, is Peak Oil. (I don’t believe we’ve reached it yet, despite his predictions to the contrary.) In Atlanta, Centennial Park, built for the 1996 Olympics, is “a concrete pad surrounded by bowling-trophy-like pylons of no identifiable cultural reference”. The city’s “post-modern air-conditioned glass box office towers form a spine of orientation that makes sense viewed from the road at 70 mph, but dissolves into incoherence at ground level, where the towers prove to be miles apart. Between them lies an incoherent streetscape of engineered uniform traffic geometries, curb cuts, cheesy strip malls, parking lots, fry pits, baffling blank-walled museums and a meager residue of prewar fabric…” Urban design in Atlanta can be summarized as “the outside doesn’t matter.” It’s hot outside, it’s air-conditioned inside, so why would you ever be outside apart from getting in and out of your car? And why should people who spend all their time in cars or in buildings care about the visual landscape outside these things? The sportschunk of the city “was cut off from the rest of downtown by suburban-style landscape buffers, parking wastelands, and forbidding highway geometrics.” The location of a potentially promising housing development on the city’s perimeter “made it impossible to connect with the surrounding street system - …an incoherent spaghetti wad of suburban collector streets, superblocks, and residential cul-de-sacs.” At Berlin’s Kulturforum, everything grates – berms are meaningless, medians float in the “asphalt lagoons”; trash litters the ground because people haunted by urban ugliness can’t be bothered to keep it clean.
  
  If Kunstler is bothered by Berlin, you can just imagine how he feels about Las Vegas. Actually you don’t have to imagine because he calls it “the worst place on earth.” Although theoretically downtown Las Vegas can be walked,
  
  …the scale of things on the Strip ultimately defeated these lame attempts [gigantic outdoor television screens] to make up for fundamentally bad design. You’d see packs of tourists, many of them elderly, wearing the childish souvenir t-shirts, polyester sports caps, and boatlike high-tech sneakers that unfortunately have become the demeaning uniform of their age cohort, dragging themselves across the moonscapelike expanse of the Caesar’s Palace frontage – where the view from the sidewalk afforded glimpses down into a huge, craterlike sunken parking pit – the oldsters humping through the heat and the suffocating automobile emissions with expressions of nauseated wonder on their pink sunburned faces as though they had been snookered, by the Devil’s own entertainment director, into a reenactment of the Bataan Death March.
  
  It was even more appalling to watch them cross a major intersection, such as Tropicana Avenue and the Strip. The hotels on the four corners – Excalibur; New York, New York; MGM Grand; and the Tropicana – contained all together more hotel rooms than the entire city of San Francisco. From an engineering standpoint, it was the Godzilla of all suburban sprawl interchanges: eight travel lanes each way, times four, plus triple-left-turn lanes to mitigate the “stacking ratios.” Here was a road 150 feet wide, half the length of a football field, not including the bonus territory added by immense curb ratios. Since the New York, New York, hotel and casino had opened in 1996, filling in the northwest corner of Trop and the Strip, huge mobs were now ricocheting back and forth among the four gigantic casinos. This new foot traffic queered all the equations of the highway engineers…
  
  His chapter on London takes a little detour at the end to Missoula, Montana, where he was invited to give the talk “Can America Survive Suburbia?”. He attends a meeting of the city council, where the pro-growth town faction battles with the anti-growthers over some new development. The anti-growth faction complains that their city does not have enough open space.
  
  This was very funny because Missoula happened to be located in a part of the country where you could walk five minutes out of town in any direction and find yourself facing the greatest contiguous wilderness in the lower forty-eight states, including man-eating bears, cougars, and other bioregional incunabula. The problem as I saw it from a civic design point of view was that Missoula had too much “open space” right there in the center of town. As in many towns of the American West, Missoula’s streets were uniformly too wide and its buildings too low and too spread out with too many parking lots between them. Civic space in Missoula was poorly defined, the building facades were of a uniformly dreary, artless quality, on the whole poorly maintained, too, and there was no systematic planting of street trees. The only dedicated park was located in the flood plain of the Blackfoot River, and its only design feature, besides an absence of houses and stores, was a lonely carousel standing in the slush-covered hardpan. The edge of the city – indeed much of the land along its main traffic arteries, too – contained the usual horrific clusterfuck of chain stores, franchise fry-pits, muffler shops, parking lagoons, and the rest of the typical nauseating furnishings of drive-in commerce found in every American town, big and small. The trouble with Missoula was not lack of open space. The problem was that everything it contained was poorly made, not worth caring about, and unworthy of the condition of collective self-respect called civilization. ……Wherever I go in the United States these days, it’s the same story. We want Open Space, that’s all. We ask for an abstraction, and an abstraction is delivered – in the form of bark-mulch berms planted with juniper shrubs and other such landscape “buffers” between the Kmart and the apartment “complex.” We get these little cartoons of the countryside deployed everywhere, and we are no better off for them. We want these “nature” Band-Aids because the wound to our urbanism cannot heal…….The scores of thousands of discount malls, and the subdivisions of vinyl doublewide manufactured “homes,” and the tragic collector boulevards lined with “power centers,” and the high schools with ample parking for the whole senior class, and all the rest of the cheap, ugly, provisional stuff that we’ve filled our world up with is too much with us. We gave up on the human habitat in America generations ago. Now we just grimly put up with what we’re stuck with until the next annual trip to admire the scenery in a sacred “wilderness”…
  
  Normally I enjoy the little typo here and there in a book from a major publisher, but this torrent was ridiculous, and highly distracting.
  
  berkserker for berserker
  forty-nineth for forty-ninth
  United State for United States (twice)
  the population of Indianapolis was listed as 314,00
  bourgeoning for burgeoning
  gottem for gotten
  alter for altar
  briney for briny
  capitol for capital
  locamotives for locomotives
  Portugese for Portuguese
  evermore for ever more
  indiginous for indigenous
  ethologist for ethnologist
  Boromini for Borromini (twice)
  Haupstadt for Hauptstadt (twice)
  Deutsche Genossenschaffbank for Deutsche Genossenschaftsbank
  also: extraneous quotation marks, missing plural forms, missing “ofs”, extra “thes”
  
  
  * Unsurprisingly, given the slapdash manner in which the book seems to have been edited, the title page gives the subtitle “Meditations on the Urban Condition” while the cover goes with “Notes on the Urban Condition”.
• 
  Keith

  I like this book because Kunstler's attitude about American cities is similar to mine (exacerbated by my time living in Europe). He does an excellent job of connecting the following: urban planning; oil; cars/public transportation; health/obesity; architecture (form, function, and everything in between); unpredictable circumstance (war, finance, natural disasters); conflicting priorities of urban vs. rural; the stagnating effect of history; clash of cultures; political leadership. Among others. It's hard not to think about the issues in this book while walking around a city everyday.
• 
  Kara

  Great book for anyone interested in urban archeology. Explores why some cities work fantastically and why others built w/out the thoughts of sustainability, community, and walkability are doomed to fail. Highly recommended.
• 
  Jamie

  This book is a bit different from most in the urban planning field. The author uses much more bombastic and colorful language than one might expect. It's refreshing once one realizes and accepts the tone of the book.
  
  I like that architecture, aesthetic, and design are a sizable component of the book. I think those components that tie into the subjective feel of a city are too often overlooked. This is apparent when I look around at many of the new mixed-use developments being built these days. The general form is good, but the street and sidewalks outside don't feel comfortable and inviting. Much of the book centers on the subjective feel of a city.
  
  I found most of the history of the profiled cities very interesting. It inspired me to look into ancient cities and civilizations more because I found the sections on Rome and Mexico City fascinating. Kuntsler made me realize how little I know about the ancient world (and many other things too). He's a wealth of information and generally presents his knowledge in an interesting and coherent manner.
  There were a few times that I felt like the level of detail on a particular subject went a little deep, but they were few.
  
  Overall, the book is interesting as a multi-faceted look at cities in the U.S. and abroad. But be prepared for a healthy dose of negativity and strong opinions. The title is appropriate: it's a semi-rambling collection of history, urban policy commentary, and subjective opinions, but it's enjoyable due to the sheer amount of knowledge that Kuntsler possesses and the energetic writing.
• 
  Ellie Danisch

  Unfortunately, this novel and all its facts within it was written in the 2008 era, so reading this post-2016 wasn't as fulfilling due to certain societal, financial, and political circumstances inevitability changing with time. Although, James Kunstler organizes his ideas in a well-mannered function that leaves readers well acknowledged with specific urban conditions at its worst and its best allotments. It's actually kind of interesting to digest the history Kunstler suggests and how it all affected the present day of each city he discusses. Luckily, Kunstler emphasizes a potent sarcastic wit that not only leaves you chuckling at such bureaucratic mistakes, but keeps you awake at the point of times when accurate descriptions could have become boring.
• 
  Sara

  Not a fan at all. Do I agree with some of his points about where urban planning has gone wrong, yes. But I feel like he simplifies the social element of the urban order a bit too much. He is extremely opinionated in a way that comes across as condescending...let's just say you can imagine that he does a lot of mansplaining. He totally lost me when he started citing psych research that indicated the Aztecs somehow had less psychological sophistication than the European invaders. I stopped reading at that point.
• 
  mike

  I know, I know. Calling it "just OK" is harsh. But a good non-fiction work shouldn't preach to the choir. This one does, and by the end, makes this choirboy briefly question whether he even belongs in the fold.
  
  Kunstler's opening salvo -- at least, the one I read first -- was
  The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, an eye-opening book that had me nodding my head and that I happily rated at the four-star level.
  
  Nearly two decades later, though, I have this sense that Kunstler is still writing the same book, fighting the same battle. Suburbia is still the fountain of evil. "Cars" is still a four-letter word.
  
  I remain as critical as ever of sprawl, but since "Nowhere" was written, entire forests have been cut down for hagiographies of sustainable, livable cities. (And if you weren't sitting next to me in the choir, the hairs on the back of your neck just stood up at those leftist buzzwords.)
  
  As Kunstler slashes his way through too-easy targets like Las Vegas, his prose becomes more pointed and hyper-political. A reference to a particularly vile development as "an abortion" sticks to me in a non-specific way, rather like one can remember the commercials with the sock puppet but can no longer recall what they were for.
  
  In a final flurry near the close of the book, Kunstler nearly loses me. Becoming increasingly critical of modernism and everything it produced, Kunstler takes on I.M. Pei as a one-man graffiti artist ruining his beloved Boston. The Big Dig becomes a great idea that doesn't go far enough; Kunstler sees the resulting "green space" as a gutless cop-out and demands more development of the space above the now subterranean highway. Racial and cultural biases come to the surface with sweeping condemnations of Italian mobsters and the Irish who came in behind the Yankees and took over the place with an iron fist. (Those Irish come in for particularly withering criticism for being pro-truck, of all things.)
  
  By the time he praises gentrification and brushes affordable housing aside as an artificial construct that isn't even a good idea, you get the feeling that he'll end up praising the rich. He doesn't disappoint, giving the upper class credit for creating a demand for culture (which, presumably, the rest of us don't want or don't get).
  
  He surprises nobody, then, as he characterizes a return to "classical" architectural vocabulary as the truly courageous stance: an admission that yes, there is a "right" aesthetic that we should stop fighting and resume building.
  
  If I were inclined to disagree with him, I might find him an overzealous, reactionary blowhard. Standing where I do, I instead lament the divisiveness and invective and worry about the effectiveness of this sharp-tongued narrative.
  
  Do I dare go back to "Nowhere" and see if it was also like this? Maybe it's myself, not Kunstler, who has changed.
• 
  Michael

  i was really excited to read this book.
  
  cities can differ from each other widely, and in many ways. aside from their languages, economies, densities, and architecture, i find that the culture that permeates a city is in many ways what effectively defines it. the trouble with this however, is that it's often difficult to pin such a thing down without sweeping generalizations, anecdotal evidence, or personal experience, which of course will vary from person to person. some places are just simply more vibrant than others, and anyone that seeks to write about it isn't likely to make many friends, much less a publisher. because capturing the feel of a city in any sort of objective capacity is such a nebulous task, there is an understandable lack of literature on the subject.
  
  i was hoping the city mind could be such a book that manages to present strong opinions and insight backed by history, and in some ways it is. unfortunately, i found the book to fall short, in addition to being sorely in need of some serious editing. kunstler is well versed in civic history, but he spends far too much time on recounting the major events that led up to whichever city the chapter is focusing on, instead of applying their significance to the city in it's current incarnation.
  
  while histories are important to understand and internalize, the author often fails to bridge the gap from past to present. a 20 page account of cortez's capture of tenochtitlan was unnecessary in a 30 page chapter on mexico city. the entire paris chapter was devoted to haussmann's transformation of paris in the second empire. boston's chapter was balanced, but cluttered. berlin's chapter simply doesn't go anywhere. again, a lot of the things outlined by the author are important to know in the context of how they have shaped the attitudes and mores of a city; ultimately the author failed to provide much of that context, and often times the history lessons came to a dead end. at best, kunstler's chapters come off as unorganized rambling.
  
  despite all of this, the book was an enjoyable read, and perhaps i'm being too harsh on it on account of my own expectations. kunstler writes in a very entertaining style, even if at times condescending. though by his own admission, he sought out to present cities as they exist today against a historical backdrop. my frustration was not necessarily that his arguments were weak (some of them were, others were quite fascinating) but that he didn't spend enough time bringing it all together. the end result felt rushed, and often left me wondering what exactly the author was trying to communicate.
• 
  Cate

  The City in Mind continues in the same vein as Kunstler's previous non-fiction works (Geography of Nowhere, etc.) with criticism of the oil dependent modern American city and praise for classicism. Kunstler examines the histories and current (as of 2001) predicaments and successes of eight cities--Paris, Atlanta, Mexico City, Berlin, Las Vegas, Rome, Boston, and London.
  
  Kunstler's wit for the tragic suburban landscape is insightful and biting as he describes Atlanta as "one big-ass parking lot under a toxic pall from Hartsfield clear up to the brand-new completely absurd Mall of Georgia" (p. 43). Kunstler also cleverly discusses the mistakes of modernism and suggests they can be countered by classicism. "The good news is that the twentieth century is over. We don't have to be modern anymore. We can be something else" (p. 190). Although this idea is hopeful, the general condition Kunstler describes is that America is, architecturally speaking, hell.
  
  Kunstler hits at the core of the American dilemma when discussing the history of that giant British city we owe so much of our cultural heritage from--London. From London we learn that our romantic view of nature, inherited from the British, is destroying us. As a result of industrialism, Americans believe that "Nature is sacred and everything else is hopelessly profane, and that's the end of it" (p. 226).
  
  This is exhibited in the American desire for "open space" or "green space", which is to say we've given up entirely on the idea that we can build an environment worth caring about. Instead, we throw in the towel and pat ourselves on the back for preserving "open space" we know we would've wrecked anyway. Kunstler sums up the whole mess as such: "We gave up on the human habitat in America generations ago" (p. 249). Whether there is any hope or not for us Americans to mend our ways depends largely on our ability to recognize the problem--and once again Kunstler has succeeded at his perfect, and painful, diagnosis.
  
• 
  Ross

  While providing stinging criticism of some the the world's leading urban places, Kunstler reviews the unique histories and his insights from eight cities in Europe and North America. Published in 2003, his predictions of a 'repo economy' that we now know as the sub-prime mortgage crisis have largely come to past. The smashing denunciation of the American suburban economy Kunstler pioneered in "The Geography of Nowhere" (1993) has finally gained mainstream traction.
  
  I enjoyed the histories of "great men" in urbanism including Georges Eugene Haussmann who with Napoleon III transformed Paris from a medieval rats' rest to the idyllic city of lights. However, it was Kunstler's defense and ardent desire for the reapplication of classical design that was most provocative. He claims the whole of modernism is inhumane and an abject failure. A simplified example of this application would be identifying the bottom, middle and top of buildings, which is truly hard to due in contemporary architecture renderings. City building is the highest order of art. It is the hallmark of carrying on the human project of civilization.
• 
  Munthir Mahir

  Exactly what it says it is on the cover, "notes on the urban condition." Incoherent notes though, they are marshelled to build a case for the authors disparate theory of urbanism. A theory he either deliberately ignores to articulate or fails to articulate. There is no method in his examinations of urbanism, in times reducing the examination to a single feature on a column and in times detailing in one too many pages, and in an almost hubris manner, the link and relation of Aztec social and political culture with current urban mexico city - which I found full of untested and unproven assumptions. The same unfocused and unrelated anecdotes through out the book along with the highly personalized (unscientific) observations made this book weak. Another claim that the book did not achieve is providing vocabulary for articulating what [we] love and loathe about [our] surroundings. There might be some new words we might not have known before, but I doubt many would come away with any more ability to read, interpret and express our surroundings.
• 
  Catwalker

  This book offers descriptions and analysis of the style and character of eight cities in Europe and North America, focusing on how each city came to be as it is as well as how the structure of the city affects the lifestyle of those who live there. In earlier books, Kunstler has talked about how urban design can help give meaning to urban life; here, he examines if and how it has been accomplished in several of the world's great cities. While the automobile is not the only wrench in the works of designing truly livable cities, it's clear from these descriptions that human-scale landscapes and car-scale landscapes are not compatible, and this accounts for many of the misfires in urban design in the 20th century.
  
  I was sorry that the book did not go on to include Hong Kong, Beijing, Mumbai, Singapore, Rio de Janeiro, and Brasilia. I'm hoping that Kunstler is working on a second volume to look at those.
• 
  Joe

  Excellent historical read on the development and state of cities in the world, taken city by city. The chapter on the history and state of Mexico City is mind boggling. Cities are the product of human reasoning applied to our environment. So too can cities be judged according to reasonable criteria. There are reasons why some cities are great and others suck. Read on to know why..
• 
  Greg

  Informative and irreverent, textbook and editorial at the same time. Kunstler has the ability to concisely describe the strengths and weaknesses of various types of urban form. His grasp of world history allows him to link physical traits of a city with its historic events or periods. If I could choose one person to trade brains with, I would choose Kunstler.
• 
  Billy

  More good stuff from JHK. This is the history of the western world as told through the stories of Paris, Atlanta, Mexico City, Berlin, Las Vegas, Rome, Boston and London. Where we went right and where we're going wrong (Mexico City, Atlanta, Las Vegas -- no surprise there). Worth reading but not up to the level of his The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere.
• 
  lauren

  This book is hilarious! This guy can smack talk cities like no ones business. Read his comments on Atlanta and Las Vegas for some good laughs. And he has some pretty interesting things to say about the history of certain major cities as well as what works and what he thinks are their tragic flaws.
• 
  Ian

  The third book an unofficial trilogy by Kunstler. This book is the perfect closing statement to both of his "Nowhere" titles.
  
  This book has a more historical perspective which only serves to educate us further about these great living organisms we call Cities.
• 
  Julia

  Interesting tidbits, biting commentary, exaggerated prose. Snapshots of some cities through the lens of a very biased mind -- but not really a balanced perspective of city life. Also, the author has an annoying tendency to assume I know more about architecture than I do!
• 
  Kathryn

  Parts of this were so funny I laughed out loud. Other parts were so offensive I was embarrassed to be reading it in public. I'd say it started strong and got less and less interesting as it went along.
• 
  Richard Bravman

  A stimulating and enjoyable commentary on the (not so good) state of urbanism in the US and beyond, how we find ourselves here, and what we might do about improving our lot. Highly recommended for anyone caring about cities and their impact on our quality of life.
• 
  Nate

  Basically the planning history of some famous cities. Kunstler gives us insights into the consequences of our actions. Who knew so much was at stake in those boring city council meetings?
• 
  Bonnie Jeanne

  The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition by James Howard Kunstler (2002)
• 
  Elizabeth

  Best in his discussion of Paris (which he clearly loves). His history is a bit weak when it comes to Aztec cities. Not up to the standards of some of his other books on the urban environment.
• 
  cwrigh13

  i'd like to thank james howard kustler, the academy, buddha, mohammed and jove that i don't live in america.