Kunstler v. Kotkin
One believes the suburbs will be rendered useless by the disappearance of cheap oil. The other says the suburbs are the future and need only be fine-tuned. Both have new books out. James Howard Kunstler, author of "The Long Emergency" (Atlantic Monthly Press), explains how the auto-dependent, spread-out development pattern is the most ill-suited system imagineable for the coming fossil-fuel crunch, which he argues will be the death of suburbia (Interview in Grist magazine: http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/05/25/little-kunstler/). Joel Kotkin, author of "The City: A Global History" (Modern Library / Random House), says, quite correctly, that the suburbs rule and are America's choice, for convenience, jobs and affordability; America's cities, Kotkin says, are enjoying very narrowly defined comebacks and aren't properly planning for the future (essay in The New Republic online: http://tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w050523&s=kotkin052305). Town and country has never been so polarized.
posted by Anthony Flint at 11:20 AM
1 Comments:
The answer is something in between: The village. A city is often a conglomerate of villages and the suburb is either a village or a sprawling village. When I first moved to New England, the hot town was Concord because it still had an active village center. Today, that center is more a tourist stop and no longer a place for townies to congregate.
Certainly as people look to buy into some "there" and lonely empty nesters help create a market for villages (witness Pine Hills in Plymouth), we may see a revival of the village.
A village should have a cafe/coffee shop, a pub, a restaurant, a food store, a plaza or common, a place to buy socks, a hardware store, a pharmacy, a few professionals (dentist, doctor), tailor/cobbler, some schools, town offices, a library, and ideally a community center. Extra points for an inn, local agencies, public transportation, a 5&10 (West Concord offers all of this--I'm surprised that developers haven't descended on it, including the ones I've tipped off), a bike shop, and some odd stores and village fixtures (etc.). I remember being laid off and having my car die in December of 1989. Living in Concord, I was able to walk to my temporary new job (store clerk for Xmas season) and wait awhile to buy a new car. I rarely left Concord for two months, and I met many, many Concordians. That's not so much the reality of Concord today, but it's still doable.
It takes a village.
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