Cities

False Expectations

It’s funny to look at how people predicted the future in the past, especially when looking at typical American fantasy depictions of great cities from as early as 1925. We can definitely notice Americans’ predilections at the beginning of the 20th century. Modern civilizations wanted to test human limits by creating grandiose manmade worlds. In pictures from the first half of the 20th century imagining New York in the future, people always visualized enormous skyscrapers, lots of roads, cars, flying objects—a city with structures towering to the sky bearing a resemblance to the Tower of Babylon. In one depiction, people dreamed of a separation of traffic, with multiple stories above ground, and spiral escalators descending downward into an underground of basements and subbasements for slow car traffic, fast car traffic, and a “freight tube”. On top of buildings were airport landing strips.  Stacking various uses and hundreds of people on top of each other in sky scrapers seemed convenient at the time. More importantly, for all depictions of cities, the scale was always had to be huge. We saw the American vision of utopia in our paintings of our cities of the future, but the truth is, our utopias will not become possible as our planet changes.

cover photo for Orion Magazine's "Back to the Future" 

Currently, we know our large scale won’t work as we had previously imagined it to; this is obvious in our suburban lifestyle. Kunstler states quite bluntly that desert sprawl cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas will collapse because they gobble up energy (for mass motoring and air conditioning) and other important resources like water. Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Denver depend on the supply of the Colorado River which is unfortunately stopping its flow. These cities, we can tell ourselves, were simply not meant to be, largely in part for their lack of a strategic location, being places far from waterways, and of course, increased desertification and drought which will result from climate change. However, we tend to think little about our cities, which we believe to be so much more sustainable. Compact cities, are of course better than sprawl cities, but they too have become “products of the cheap energy era” (Kunstler 17). 

“Metroplex” cities were just as much a fantasy as “American Dream” suburbs advertised in Red Book, and therefore will run into just as much trouble. Kunstler claims the first half of the 21st century to be the era of reduced complexity, during which we will have to scale downward to energy realities. By having created such complicated urban networks, we have made ourselves more vulnerable because every little thing depends on how well the whole system functions. More connections can lead to more problems, especially in cities which “require far-flung supply chains dependent on complex transport systems” and which are “designed to run on endless supplies of cheap fossil fuels and the resources and byproducts made possible by them: steel, copper, cement, plastic, and asphalt” (Kunstler 17). Our skyscrapers which we to this day believe will grow in number and soon be able to touch the sky won’t be possible to construct because they require too many repairs and too many nonrenewable materials. Kunstler says this constant testing of limits and infatuation with magnificence has led to our dangerous situation, where even skyscrapers will become “liabilities, not assets” (Kunstler 19). 

Another problem is location. Most cities were always strategically located near convenient areas for trade and transport, near waterways, rivers, lakes. We’ve made the mistake of turning city waterfronts into entertainment and living quarters—“condo towers, festival marketplaces, concert stages, and bikeways…but this infrastructure must give way to trade areas—warehouses, docks, and ports” to name a few (Kunstler).

Kunstler claims the first half of the 21st century to be the era of reduced complexity, during which we will have to scale downward to energy realities. By having created such complicated urban networks, we have made ourselves more vulnerable because every little thing depends on how well the whole system functions. More connections can lead to more problems, especially in cities which “require far-flung supply chains dependent on complex transport systems” and which are “designed to run on endless supplies of cheap fossil fuels and the resources and byproducts made possible by them: steel, copper, cement, plastic, and asphalt” (Kunstler 17). Our skyscrapers which we to this day believe will grow in number and soon be able to touch the sky won’t be possible to construct because they require too many repairs and too many nonrenewable materials. Kunstler says this constant testing of limits and infatuation with magnificence has led to our dangerous situation, where even skyscrapers will become “liabilities, not assets” (Kunstler 19). Another problem is location. Most cities were always strategically located near convenient areas for trade and transport, near waterways, rivers, lakes. We’ve made the mistake of turning city waterfronts into entertainment and living quarters—“condo towers, festival marketplaces, concert stages, and bikeways…but this infrastructure must give way to trade areas—warehouses, docks, and ports” to name a few (Kunstler).