The City In Mind: Meditations on the Urban Condition.

• Author: Wemple, Erik
• Position: Cul-de-Sacked

THE CITY IN MIND Meditations on the Urban Condition by James Howard Kunstler Free Press, $25.00

URBAN ECOLOGIST JAMES Howard Kunstler put himself in the vanguard of suburban sprawl critics with his 1993 book The Geography of Nowhere, which inveighed against isolated subdivisions and those big-box commercial clusters just down the highway. Kunstler's timing was perfect, as he put into words what many Americans in the early 1990s were feeling about their man-made landscape. Particularly insightful was his commentary on the role of the car in ending habitable communities. So hostile were modern suburbs to pedestrians, wrote Kunstler, that "any adult between eighteen and sixty-five walking along one would instantly fall under the suspicion of being less than a good citizen."

The broadsides against suburban America earned Kunstler a standing invitation with university audiences and generous allotments of ink in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, and Slate. His criticism--presciently published before such developments as Celebration, Florida, and the popularity of New Urbanism--also spawned a host of imitators, whose anti-sprawl treatises now lard the urban-planning section at Borders.

From such an auspicious start, Kunstler over the past eight years appears to have lost his intellectual compass, perhaps as a result of spinning around too many cul-de-sacs. Proof of the author's nosedive comes in his latest book, The City in Mind, a mishmash of history and planning critique of Paris, Atlanta, Mexico City, Berlin, Las Vegas, Rome, Boston, and London.

Whereas Kunstler once saw sprawl as a mere anomie-inducing national cancer, The City in Mind appears to hold it accountable for all the evil that comes among us. In his rambling chapter on Atlanta, for example, Kunstler cites a September 1999 news story from the Atlanta Journal-Record documenting the death of a three-year-old Gwinnett County. boy who was struck by a car driven by a 14-year-old learning to drive. The incident, through Kunstler's ideological lens, was not a tragic mishap that could happen anywhere, but more of an industrial accident: "Of course, everybody regrets the loss, but all--including the parents--are eager to forgive and get over the unhappy incident and get on with the next order of business: Real estate must be sold, development deals must be signed, the roads have to be widened to accommodate all the extra cars from the new subdivisions and their accessory strip malls."

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