Emergent Urbanism

Rediscovering Urban Complexity

James Howard Kunstler

Review of Radiant City

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Wed, 09/02/2009 - 16:14, last updated Mon, 04/09/2012 - 15:51

There is a scene early in the 2006 mockumentary Radiant City that provides the key explanation to the morphology of suburban sprawl. Our favorite writer James Howard Kunstler sits on a bench in a community bike trail that is enclosed in two rows of chain link fence in order to, I presume, secure it from the high-capacity arterial road that runs alongside it. The experience is vaguely what it must have been like to patrol the Berlin Wall, had it been encircled by an expressway.

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