Kunstler On Architecture, Planning And Oil

Interviewer Robert Looby, asks Kunstler if successful cities were planned or if they grew.

Kunstler replies: "For the most part 'successful' cities grow 'organically' in a self-organizing process that might be characterized as the process called 'emergence'. But parts of cities definitely are planned in an overt and conscious process. The neighbourhood squares of London and their accompanying row houses fall into that category, as do the great avenues of Paris dating from Louis-Napoleon's time (1848-1870), or earlier pieces such as the Place de Vosges, which was a royal palace occupying an entire block with a square in the centre. The industrial era induced a kind of hyper-growth on cities that was sometimes planned and sometimes arbitrary. Of course, one has to make a distinction between grand schemes of urban design carried out as projects (e.g. Washington DC) as opposed to sets of standards and norms of excellence (e.g. the City Beautiful movement in the US (1890 - 1930)) which was more a matter of a consensus among architects about the best practices in design. The 20th century has been mostly unfortunate for all cities, insofar as virtually all growth has been hypertrophy, or pathological hyper-growth. The suburban tendency in America has been a fiasco, and somewhat less catastrophic in Europe, where the value of city life per se was retained."

Thanks to The Practice of New Urbanism