In many ways, James Kunstler’s text, The Geography of Nowhere, functions to identify some of the same problematic social issues that are repeatedly highlighted in Mike Davis’ influential text, The City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles. Both texts delineate the evolution of building practices, and the means by which architectural practices have contributed to the decimation of public space. Davis and Kunstler provocatively demonstrate that architecture functions to arrange and orchestrate the means by which we interact or, more accurately, fail to interact with one another.
During his discussion of Los Angeles, Kunstler suggests that city planners and developers were/are more concerned with interiors than exteriors. Planners and developers continually fail to connect the interior of the building to the exterior environment. In effect, they ignore the importance of public space, and public interaction: “To design specialists these are, of course, merely “spaces”—that is, places where things can happen inside. The outside (that is, the public realm) means nothing” (210). This is a recurrent trope in Kunstler’s text. Repeatedly, Kunstler demonstrates the means by which public space and public interaction is sacrificed to individuation, modernist ideals, the freeway system, etc. Similarly, when Mike Davis discusses Frank Gehry’s architecture, inventive barriers existing between groups of people, and the interiority of megalomaniac structures, such as the Renaissance Center, he is arguing the problems that this creates for the public.
Although the two are equally distraught about the disappearance of spaces which allow for public interaction, Kunstler and Davis propose different reasons for the emphasis on the private over the public; the individual over the collective. Mike Davis references the devastating efforts of the corrupt LAPD which operates as space enforcer, the attempts of class elitists to exclude the poor, and the effects of bitter racism, as it contributed to the development of Home Owners Associations bent on excluding black and Chicano people. Although Kunstler acknowledges such forces, especially during intermittent discussion of fraudulent corporate practices, he posits the issue of poor planning as the main problem facing society. Throughout the text, Kunstler continually references the necessity for extensive community planning; for research and foresight. In proposing Portland as the ideal urban community, he suggests that community restrictions helped to maintain community spaces. These ordinances include limits on parking spaces (in an attempt to deter people from using automobiles), and building height restrictions. It becomes evident, for Kunstler, that thorough planning, with the future in mind, is most important for the preservation of a good living atmosphere.
