James Howard Kunstler
No one better articulates the tragedy of suburban sprawl & the abandonment of traditional notions civic design and architecture than author James Howard Kunstler.
If you enjoy any of his talk below I can't recomend enough his books Geography of Nowhere and Home From Nowhere. His weekly Kunstler Casts are hilarous, rage inducing, and depressing all at once.
Kunstler is a big fan of the small city and believes they will be best positioned to thrive in an economy where the end of cheap oil will drastically shift the way we live and society functions.
Stamford would do well to consider his ideas on "creating a sense of place" as it seeks to reinvent itself.
2 comments :
After watching his lecture, I think that a lot of his points can easily be applied to Stamford, especially the ones about places no one wants to be. The ones that come to mind first are Atlantic Street and Veterans Park. When they dropped Landmark Square onto the city like a giant ugly Lego piece, they obliterated that communal civic space known figuratively and literally as Main Street.
That said, I understand that the city was all but dead at the time and the leaders had to do something. I just hope that with this new consciousness, we can reverse or at least try to ameliorate some of the mistakes of the past.
On another note, how come none of us in the Stamford blogosphere were invited to the "Reinventing Stamford" forum? I'd love to be a part of it, both as a citizen and as part of the local media.
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