TED Talks Daily - (#7) Elise’s Top Ten: The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs | James Howard Kunstler

Episode Date: September 20, 2025

In James Howard Kunstler's view, public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life and the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead, he argues, what we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, the show where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. Welcome back to my top 10 TED Talks, our first ever podcast playlist where we share a curated list of talks from the archive on our feed all at once. Whether you've been with us since the first talk I shared in this playlist or you're just jumping in right here, this is one of my favorites for many reasons. And one of the reasons is that you have to go way back to find it. Social critic James Coonsler's 2004 talk, the ghastly tragedy of the suburbs. and the very real reasons behind why they're so ugly. The delivery of this talk really cracks me up,

and I think it's worth watching on TED.com for his visual examples. But as a listen, it's also a good one. It's asking us to reflect on the way that the design of our neighborhoods can make us more or less human and connected. The immersive ugly, of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible. We can't overestimate the amount of despair that we are generating with places like this. And mostly I want to persuade you that we have to do better if we're going to continue the project of civilization in America.

There are a lot of ways you can describe this. You know, I like to call it the National Automobile Slum. You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. You can call it a technosis externality cluster fuck. And it's a tremendous problem for us. The outstanding, the salient problem about this for us is, that these are places that are not worth caring about.

We're going to talk about that some more. A sense of place. Your ability to create places that are meaningful and places of quality and character depends entirely on your ability to define space with buildings and to employ the vocabularies, grammars, syntaxes, rhythms, and patterns of architecture in order to inform us who we are.

The public realm in America has two roles. It is the dwelling place of our civilization and our civic life, and it is the physical manifestation of the common good. And when you degrade the public realm, you will automatically degrade the quality of your civic life and the character of all the enactments of your public life and communal life communal life that take place there.

The public realm comes mostly in the form of the street in America because we don't have the thousand-year-old cathedral plazas and market squares of older cultures. And your ability to define space and to create places that are worth caring about all comes from a body of culture that we call the culture of civic design. This is a body of knowledge, method, skill, and principle that we threw in the garbage after World War II and decided we don't need that anymore, we're not going to use it. And consequently, we can see the result all around us. The public realm has to inform us not only where we are geographically, but it has to inform us where we are in our culture. Where we've come from, what kind of people we are, and it needs to, by doing that, it needs to afford us a glimpse to where we're going, in order to allow us to dwell in a hopeful present.

And if there is one great catastrophe about the places that we've built, the human environments we've made for ourselves in the last 50 years, that it has deprived us of the ability to live with, in a hopeful present. The environments we are living in more typically are like these. Now this happens to be the asteroid belt of architectural garbage two miles north of my town. And remember, to create a place of character and quality, you have to be able to define space. So how is that being accomplished here?

If you stand on the apron of the Walmart over here and try to look at the Target store over here, you can't see it because of the curvature of the Earth. of the earth. That's nature's way of telling you that you're doing a poor job of defining space. Consequently, these will be places that nobody wants to be in. These will be places that are not worth caring about. We have about 38,000 places that are not worth caring about in the United States today.

When we have enough of them, we're going to have a nation that's not worth defending. And I want you to think about that when you think about those young men and women who are over in places like a rock spilling their blood in the sand and ask yourself, what is their last thought of home? I hope it's not the curb cut between the Chucky Cheese and the Target store

because that's not good enough for Americans to be spilling their blood for it. We need better places in this country. Public space. It's a place worth caring about. It's well-defined. It is emphatically an outdoor public room. It has something that is terribly important.

It has what's called an active and permeable membrane around the edge. That's a fancy way of saying it's got shops, bars, bistros, destinations. Things go in and out of it. It's permeable. The beer goes in and out. The waitresses go in and out. And that activates the center of this place and makes it a place that people want to hang out. You know, in these places in other cultures, people just go their voluntary.

because they like them. We don't have to have a craft fair here to get people to come here. You know, you don't have to have a Kwanza festival. People just go because it's pleasurable to be there. But this is how we do it in the United States. Probably the most significant public space failure in America designed by the leading architects of the day, Harry Cobb and I.M. Pei, Boston City Hall Plaza,

a public place so dismal that the winos don't even want. winos don't even want to go there. And we can't fix it because IMPA still alive and every year Harvard and MIT have a joint committee to repair it and every year they fail to because they don't want to hurt IMPA's feelings. This was the winner of an international

design award in I think 1966, something like that. It wasn't paying cop another firm design this, but there's not enough Prozac in the world to make people feel okay about going down this block. This is the back of Boston City Hall,

the most important significant civic building in Boston. And what is the message that is coming, what are the vocabularies and grammars that are coming from this building and how is it informing us about who we are? This, in fact, would be a better building if we put mosaic portraits of Joseph Stalin, Paul Pot,

Saddam Hussein, and all the other great despots of the 20th century on the side of the building because then we'd honestly be saying what the building is really communicating to us. You know, it's a despotic building. It wants us to feel like termites. You know, this is a building designed like a DVD player. Audio jack, power supply. And look,

You know, these things are important architectural jobs for firms, right? You know, we hire firms to design these things. You can see exactly what went on. Three o'clock in the morning of the design meeting, you know, eight hours before deadline for architects trying to get this building in on time, right? And they're sitting there at the long boardroom table with all the drawings and the renderings and all the Chinese food caskets are lying on the table. And, I mean, what was the conversation that was going on there?

because you know what the last word was, what the last sentence was, of that meeting. It was, fuck it. That is the message of this form of architecture. The message is, we don't give a fuck. We don't give a fuck. Okay.

The pattern of Main Street, USA. In fact, this pattern of building downtown blocks all over the world is fairly universal. It's not that complicated. Buildings more than one story high, built out to the sidewalk edge so that people who are, you know, all kinds of people can get into the building. Other activities are allowed to occur upstairs, you know, apartments, offices, and so on. You make provision for this activity called shopping on the ground floor. This is how you compose and assemble a downtown business building. And this is what happened in Glens Falls, New York,

when we tried to do it again, where it was missing, right? So the first thing they do is they pop up the retail a half-story above grade to make it sporty. Okay, that completely destroys the relationship between the business and the sidewalk, where the theoretical pedestrians are. Of course, they'll never be there as long as it's in that condition.

Then because the relationship between the retail is destroyed, we pop a handicap ramp on that, and then to make ourselves feel better, we put a nature band-aid in front of it. And that's how we do it. I call them nature band-aids because there's a general idea in America that the remedy for mutilated urbanism is nature.

And in fact, the remedy for wounded and mutilated urbanism is good urbanism, good buildings, not just flower beds, not just cartoons of the Sierra Nevada, mountains, you know, that's not good enough. We have to do good buildings. The street trees have really four jobs to do, and that's it, to spatially denote the pedestrian realm, to protect the pedestrians from the vehicles in the carriageway, to filter the sunlight onto the sidewalk, and to soften the hardscape of the buildings, and to create a ceiling, a vaulted ceiling over

the street at its best. And that's it. Those are the four jobs of the street trees. They're not supposed to be a cartoon of the North Woods. They're not supposed to be a set for the last of the Mohicans. You know, one of the problems with a fiasco of suburbia is that it destroyed our understanding of the distinction between the country and the town, between the urban and the rural. They're not the same thing. And we're not going to cure the problems of the urban by dragging the country into the city, which is what a lot of us are trying to do all the time. A lot of this comes from the fact that the industrial city in America was such a trauma

that we developed this tremendous aversion for the whole idea of the city, city life, and everything connected with it. And so what you see fairly early in the mid-19th century is this idea that we now have to have an antidote to the industrial city, which is going to be life in the country for everybody. And that starts to be delivered in the form of the railroad suburb, the country villa along the railroad line, which allows people to enjoy the amenity of the city, but to return to the countryside every night. And believe me, there were no Walmarts or convenience stores out there then. So it really was a form of country living. But what happens is, of course,

it mutates over the next 80 years, and it turns into something rather insidious. It becomes a cartoon of a country house in a cartoon of the country. And that's the great non-articulated agony of suburbia, and one of the reasons that it lends itself to really. ridicule because it hasn't delivered what it's been promising for half a century now. You know, and these are typically the kind of dwellings we find. They're, you know, basically a house with nothing on the side because this house wants to state emphatically, I'm a little cabin in the woods, there's nothing on either side of me. I don't have any eyes on the side of my head. I can't see.

So you have this one last facade of the house, the front, which is really a cartoon of a facade of a house. This is really, in fact, a television. broadcasting a show 24-7 called We're Normal. We're normal, we're normal, we're normal, we're normal, we're normal, we're normal. Please respect us, we're normal, we're normal, we're normal. But we know what's going on in these houses. You know, we know that little Skippy is loading his oozy down here. Getting ready for a homeroom.

We know that Heather, his sister Heather, 14 years old, is turning tricks up here to support her drug habit. Because these places, these habitats, are inducing. immense amounts of anxiety and depression in children, and they don't have a lot of experience with medication. So they take the first one that comes along often. These are not good enough for Americans. These are the schools we're sending them to. The Hannibal Lecter Central School.

Las Vegas, Nevada. It's a real school. But there's obviously a notion that if you let the inmates of this thing out, that they would snatch a motorist off the street and eat his liver. and eat his liver. So every effort is made to keep them within the building. Notice that nature is present. We're going to have to change this behavior whether we like it or not. We are entering an epical period of change in the world and certainly in America. The period that will be characterized by the end of the cheap oil era, it is going to change absolutely everything. There's not going to be a

hydrogen economy. Forget it. It's not going to happen. We're going to have to do something else instead. We're going to have to downscale, rescale, and resize virtually everything we do in this country, and we can't start soon enough to do it. We're going to have to live closer to where we work. We're going to have to live closer to each other. We're going to have to grow more food closer to where we live. The age of the 3,000 miles Caesar salad is coming to an end. We're we have a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of. We got to do better than that. And we should have started two days before yesterday. We are fortunate that the new urbanists were there for the last 10 years excavating all that information that was thrown in the garbage

by our parents' generation after World War II, because we're going to need it if we're going to learn how to reconstruct towns. We're going to need to get back this body of methodology and principle and skill in order to relearn how to compose meaningful places, places that are integral, that are living organisms in the sense that they contain all the organs of our civic life and our communal life deployed in an integral fashion. So that the residences make sense deployed in relation to the places of business, of culture, and of governance. We're going to have to relearn what the building blocks of these things are, the street, the block, how to compose public space that's both large and small, the courtyard, the civic square, and how to really

make use of this property. We can see some of the first ideas for retrofitting, some of the catastrophic property that we have in America, the dead malls. What are we going to do with them? Well, in point of fact, most of them are not going to make it. They're not going to be retrofitted. They're going to be the salvage yards of the future. Some of them we're going to fix, though. We're going to fix them by imposing back on them street and block systems and returning to the building lot as the normal increment of development. And if we're lucky, the result will be revivified town centers and neighborhood centers in our existing towns and cities. And by the way, our towns and cities are where they are and grew where they were because they occupy all the

important sites. And most of them are still going to be there, though the scale of them is probably going to be diminished. We got a lot of work to do. We're not going to be rescued by the hypercar. We're not going to be rescued by alternative fuels. No amount or combination of alternative fuels is going to allow us to continue running what we're running the way we're running it. We're going to have to do everything very differently. And America's not prepared. We are sleepwalking into the future. We're not ready for what's coming at us. So I urge you all to do what you can.

Life in the mid-21st century is going to be about living locally. Be prepared to be good neighbors. Be prepared to find vocations that make you useful to your neighbors and to your fellow citizens. One final thing. I've been very disturbed about this for years, but I think it's particularly important. for this audience. Please, please stop referring to yourselves as consumers. Okay? Consumers are different than citizens. Consumers do not have obligations, responsibilities, and duties to their fellow human beings. And as long as you're using that word consumer in the public

discussion, you will be degrading the quality of the discussion we're having, and we're going to continue being clueless going into this very difficult future that we face. So thank you very much. Please go out and do what you can to make this a land full of places that are worth caring about and a nation that will be worth defending. That was James Coonsler at TED-2004. Can you believe it? This is the seventh of Ten Talks from the TED Archives that we are reposting as part of our first TED Talks Daily podcast playlist of my Top Ten Talks.

And stick with us because we're going to go to a more modern talk coming up next. from Lori Gottlie. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos,

Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonica Sung Marnivong. This episode was mixed by Lucy Little. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballerazo. I'm Elise Hu. Thanks for listening. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important.

Can't take being on hold anymore? FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca.