Suburbia: Running on Empty?

By James Howard Kunstler, Salgamundi. Posted December 14, 2006.

Robert Bruegmann argues in his new book that urban sprawl will continue because people like it, but reviewer James Howard Kunstler counters that the petro-dependent suburban era is just about finished.

Reviewed: Sprawl: A Compact History by Robert Bruegmann (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

There is a species of fatuous thinking these days in America which states, in so many words, that suburbia is fine and dandy because so many people like it. Variations on this theme range from the idea that suburbia is the highest expression of free markets, to the notion that it is the natural outcome of our democracy, to the belief that God has ordained it. This has been the reasoning of some public intellectuals such as New York Times columnist David Brooks, Joel Kotkin, of the New America Foundation, and the preposterous Peter Huber of Forbes Magazine and the Manhattan Institute. Now Robert Bruegmann, professor of art history, architecture, and urban planning at the University of Illinois, Chicago, weighs in from academia with essentially the same argument floated on barges of statistical analysis.