[sociate] Kunstler and Postrel
- From: "Jerry Michalski" <jerry@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Sociate News" <sociate@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2003 17:07:39 -0400
Postrel over Kunstler
The speaker paired with Kunstler was Virginia Postrel, describing some of
what's in her latest book, The Substance of Style, and a weird thing
happened... or failed to happen.
The pairing had great potential. Kunstler says our cities have ended up
lifeless and unwelcoming as a result of terrible design, poor urban
planning, making the world safe for automobiles and other reasons. Postrel
says we're entering the Age of Aesthetics, where design is King, where no
company can ignore design as it develops its products and where people are
increasingly using designed artifacts to sculpt their identities. The
interaction of the two speakers should have been awesome, and in fact I
thought I could see Kunstler restless with the desire to jump in. He's mad,
motivated, inspired.
Instead, all the audience questions went to Postrel, whose message,
intentional or otherwise, was that the resurgence of design is an overall
good thing that is making the world a better place.
Having published pretty ambitious works before, Postrel has the
perspective -- maybe even the responsibility -- to address larger issues,
and it felt like her most recent thinking was comparatively thin and
narrowly focused. PopTech attendees missed a nice opportunity to have the
two points of view whacked together. I tend to think the crisis is larger
and more pervasive, as Kunstler does.
posted by Jerry Michalski at 12:34 PM
Genius speaker: James Howard Kunstler
With a serious and side-splitting speech that eviscerated the epoch of
American urban design that turned our inner cities into lifeless landscapes
of human-hostile buildings and unlovable streets, Kunstler left us wanting
more.
Among the memorable bits: calling a school that looks like a bunker the
"Hannibal Lecter Middle School" and describing street-level shrubs that
planners plant to make urban scenes more hospitable as "nature bandaids."
All with deadpan delivery.
Kunstler is the author of The Geography of Nowhere and The City in Mind. His
undesigned Website is here.
posted by Jerry Michalski at 8:37 AM
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