James Kunstler: How bad architecture wrecked cities 

This talk should be mandatory for anyone approaching architecture school.

This is the most important Ted Talk I've seen in a long time. It just hits so close to home. It's no wonder Americans are by and large depressed and unhappy. Driving your car two hours a day between a cartoon house and a fluorescent lit cubicles is no life, it's a joke.

"notice that nature is present"

I love the irony of a BMW commercial, one set in lovely natural environments, purporting all-natural fuel use, following Kunstler's lecture. It's so fitting as to be tailor made.

Little shout out to all my @NotJustBikes people - always good to learn about and be aware of your surroundings! :)

15 years later, and this video ages like fine wine. All the predictions and warnings he made, were ignored and came true. Should have been youtubes most watched since 2007

"A despotic building that makes us feel like termites." This guy should be getting $100,000 a speech.

I want a refund from my four years of architecture school with interest and compensation for my time wasted being taught by pretentious professors with big egos who did little to address the cancerous state of architectural theory. They taught me jack and shit about how to think about the future of design. And Jack left town. Thank you Kunstler for articulating everything I hate about "American" architecture and consumerism. I wish you spent more time bashing the big oil companies for convincing America to adopt a petroleum based infrastructure in the fist place, but hey....

This would be one of the five best TED talks I've seen. And +1 calling citizens consumers is evil.

The place "not worth caring about" is not just the ugly isolated architecture, but the loss of a beautiful town square, of a sense of belonging to a community with multiple overlapping relationships. Walking the dog should occur in the central park town square surrounded by your neighbours who are having coffee, eating in the local diner, reading the paper, buying a book, collecting their dry cleaning, buying a few groceries, getting their hair done, grabbing a pizza, and all the other varied activities in the local neighbourhood. We've lost street life, a sense of place. The problem with suburbia is there's no there, there.

This guy is like the George Carlin of Architecture.

Architecture is such a joke nowadays. There is a total disregard to how people will feel in and around buildings. I hope that will change soon.

Not Just Bikes sent me here.

I'm viewing this talk 13 years after the fact, in the middle of a pretty severe crisis. Part of why the crisis is so bad is because all this time later we're still building inefficient, idiotic cities with diminishing returns in life value vs. increasing financial cost. As far as "uplifting" goes, the architecture of the decade is some of the most abysmal minimalist modernism seen since the 60s that will age just as badly. New Urbanism hasn't prevailed, sadly. James H. Kunstler is an interesting guy, I'd recommend reading "The Geography of Nowhere."

The picture Kunstler shows of a European city looks like a typical "PLEIN" (public square) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Shortly after post-WW2, the plan was to demolish the medieval city structure and turn it into a "modern" city no one wants to visit to accommodate the happy motoring lifestyle but that thankfully never materialized and now it's still a place tourists from all over the world come and visit.

"these habitats are inducing immense amoutn of anxiety and depression in children" -- so true

Wish I could give this talk more than just one thumbs up. As a European who relocated to this country the urban design in places like Los Angeles, Dallas or Miami has long been a pet peeve of mine. This is such a great country with so much to offer and it is ruined by strip malls and convenience stores as main architectural anchor points.

This guy is right beyond doubt. My parents were suffering from a lot of mental stress and anxiety living in big cities surrounded by concrete blocks and tall builds full of "consumers" and "workers". Moved with them to a small town where every neighbor knows each other and the architecture is better, they are now more healthy than ever.

I love this TED talk. I do not like modern city design or architecture. I'm glad someone is saying what most of us have been thinking for years!

The final note on the prevalence of the word "consumer" is so right on. "Consumer spending is down", etc. I get so tired of people being reduced to the word "consumer".

10 years have gone by and this keeps touching people as it did then

I am Bulgarian and I am ashamed of the US railroad system

I am from the year 2022. Nothing has changed.

I have been struggling for years to articulate everything I despise about modern suburbia and this talk nails it all perfectly. So glad I found this.

This talk is bigger than just architecture. It's about humanity and the greater good when you think about it. Incredible.

He's not saying nature is bad. He is saying that architecture should be beautiful enough that it doesn't need nature in order to make it bearable. I don't know if you've ever been to Rome, but there are many places that have no trees of flower beds whatsoever, but they feel great and look beautiful. You don't miss nature because the urbanism and architecture is so good. Watch the video again, he describes what nature should be used for.

I watched this video about 8-10 years ago and immediately agreed with what he said, but I didn’t understand the reason behind America’s bad urban design. Then I stumbled upon Not Just Bikes about a year ago and learned the problem: car centric design and car dependency. This video is a classic and really put planted the seeds for understanding the benefits of good urban design: cities need to be human scale with good public transit.

Isn't it a bit ironic that there's a car commercial within this video.

American city centers suffered after WW2 more from an abandonment and obsession of businesses moving to the suburbs than to bad architecture though this was of course a factor in their decline. In the U.K. for example the destruction of large areas of cities such as Birmingham (2nd largest after London) Manchester etc. was not because of a move to the suburbs but a pig headed attitude by planners and architects that the new must replace the out dated old (which of course was invariably of much higher quality). The result was the loss of many outstanding buildings replaced by cheap, ugly low quality junk much of which is now coming down because it's now universally despised. Post war architects did 10 times more damage than the German air force did during the war but many people are not aware of this fact.

Can't say I disagree. When I think of an America I would fight and die for, I don't think of Peoria. When I think of my childhood memories of visiting my extended family in Lansing, no part of the city I remember or care about was built after 1940. When I think of an overwhelming downtown that broadcasts America's power and wealth to the world, I don't think of Houston, Miami, or Richmond, I think of iconic skylines with architectural interest, like NYC, Detroit, Chicago, or even (and this is the only part of that non-city that's remotely appealing) "uptown" Charlotte. When I imagine a charming country house, I imagine a Victorian Sears kit or a plantation house, not a vinyl box covered in plastic columns. Then I walk outside, and I feel the need to obsessively garden and landscape in my front yard until there's no grass left, because there's nothing else manmade that's aesthetically appealing within 100 miles. But I still feel depressed and placeless when I leave that yard, and drive to Popeye's for dinner down the featureless, concrete, 6-lane "main street." So does everyone else. They distract themselves from how they really feel by being artificially, ridiculously nice, or becoming more and more religious, or maybe they distract themselves with white hot hatred of whoever their political idols tell them to hate today. But they all feel depressed, lonely, and displaced, and are incapable of acknowledging and dealing with it. That would mean they have to change, and people naturally resist change, even if it's necessary.

This is honestly one of the best Ted talks of all time. America is the single most tragic misallocation of resources in the history of the universe. 1 gallon of gasoline can exert the equivalent amount of work as a human can in an entire year. Yet you can sit in any empty brightly lit parking lot in America and watch thousands of automobiles whizz by, chunky SUV’s which have terrible aerodynamics compounded even worse by their speed over 70 miles an hour, squandering our species’ chance to defy the Fermi paradox, so they can commute to bullshit jobs that wouldn’t make sense outside our insane system of mindless consumerism and morally bankrupt capitalist self destruction.

We are sleep walking into the future...

This guy has summed up my exact thoughts on modern American architecture. I especially hate suburban sprawl and how almost everywhere has the EXACT same soulless design features. I've been pointing out things like this for a long time but people don't really seem to grasp or even care what I'm saying. I thought I was crazy.

Just when I was starting to lose faith in TED this came along. Great talk. :D

God I hate modern architecture!

"PLEASE STOP REFERRING TO YOURSELVES AS CONSUMERS. CONSUMERS ARE DIFFERENT THAN CITIZENS. CONSUMERS DO NOT HAVE OBLIGATIONS, RESPONSIBILITIES AND DUTIES TO THEIR FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS." If this quote does not resonate with you or you don't get it, it may help to read "The Corporation" by Joel Bakan or watch the movie

I was expecting the typical modernist, progressive Ted talk, but this actually very based. The European village/localism model is the way to go.

As an advocate for a great public space in Maine, I'll be sharing this TED Talk with my architect and planning colleagues. Well done Mr. Kunstler!

One of the best TED talks ever. I would laugh at Mr. Kunstler's wit, if I weren't so outraged. But I think that's the idea. A few years ago, when I first saw this, I moved close to work and changed my diet. Now I own a bike and no car...and I'm happier for it. What changes are you making in your life to prepare for what's coming?

I'm surprised he didn't say anything about the fact that the American economy is mainly what created our Architectural landscape in the first place. It's all about building the cheapest, fastest, biggest building, and that's what creates those big ugly blank facades, not necessarily bad Architects.

This is one of my favorite talks!

I love how he says we won't have a hydrogen economy, and at the end of this video there's an ad for a fancy hydrogen powered car.

This is easily the greatest TED talk I’ve ever seen!

Love this Ted talk. Let's stop putting up with postmodernists who defend brutalism as "sophisticated" and "boundary-pushing." This is nonsense. This architecture sucks out people's souls to be around. Think of how many government employees like the building they work in. Reinstate beauty in the world of architecture. "Beauty will save the world" - Dostoevsky

Him: *Talks about how cars have influenced and ruined urban planning* BMW: *sips tea nervously*

God bless this man and his work!!! I've followed him for years and his predictions, so far, have been "dead-on" accurate!!!

"A bad habitat is an awful thing to get into." - Steven Lloyd Wright

Politicians need to watch this

This is such a big problem. I want to go outside, I want to experience the world but I step out the house and it's just miles of the same exact thing. 50 feet wide roads, no sidewalks, etc, you get the idea Where can I live to combat this, in the US? Should I live in an older city? Maybe a satellite town to a much larger city to avoid the pains of the cities while keeping the town-iness and walkability still there? I'm genuinely asking, if anyone knows how to not live like you're in a prison

This guy is legendary. We need another one for this TED talks with him lecturing in Urban Sprawl.

This man was spot on about the way the world was heading. Away from dependence on cars and fuel. Towards walk-able cities, public transit expansion, and architecture that is inviting not sterile.

When visiting America in the early 1900s Oscar Wilde was asked why he thinks America is such a violent place. His response was; “have you seen the state of your wallpaper?” Wallpaper being a metaphor for for the architecture of the buildings.

"Please, please stop referring to yourselves as consumers. Consumers are different than citizens. Consumers do not have obligations, responsibilities and duties to their fellow human beings, and as long as you are using that word - consumer in the public discussion, you will be degrading the quality of the discussion we are having and we are gonna continue being clueless going into this very difficult future that we face." Great quote.

Everytime I go back and watch this video its amazing how true it is.

"Our architecture communicates who we are as a people" Yep, America just cares about its money. In Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream they go over how someone lived next to a Wal-Mart, but it was fenced high and have to drive a mile and they are basically forced to drive everywhere. Suburbia is wasteful, inefficient, and sucks balls. It was designed that way because big oil got with city planners to make it that way. City planning also used to be in the humanities, now it's just about the numbers and profit, just like America.

Best TED Talk of all time. Never have I seen someone distill the problems of poor architecture, civic life and our energy issues into such a short amount of time... with humour! Perfect 💯

The cities in the US are abysmal in general. I always miss European countries when I'm there, and I've been to about ten US states. I'm never going back to the US though.. Its just sad, the architecture, the feeling they give.

I first saw James Kunstler in the film "The End of Suburbia" I think he's got a great mind and he deserves to be noticed .

James Howard Kuntsler is spot on in his arguments about the need to re-establish harmonious community living space with architectural design that embraces and encourages the people living in it. I live in New Orleans's Garden District. I live close enough to walk to restaurants, bank, drug store, grocery, etc. The architecture is beautiful and timeless. It is also visually distinct. When I go elsewhere in much of the U.S., I have a hard time finding my way around.

I just now realized that this ted talk was sponsored by BMW, that is freaking hilarious. This is just a gem, I keep coming back. Kunstler just nails it.

A good example of when some humour can be usd when discussing a difficult subject or topic. 15 years on and this talk still rings true.

Boston City Hall really is a depressing place.

You can tell it's an old video because now they wouldn't have him on. They'd have on the very people arguing why ugly is beautiful.

That was absolutely refreshing. I wish most professors were like him.

This is one of Kunstler's greatest speeches.

The audience busts out laughing at the school shooting joke then goes "ooooohh" at the hannibal lecter joke. My how times have changed

Watching this again in 2020. This is still rock solid stuff. So sharp. Still as relevant and crucial as ever.

Everyone should see this talk, thank you Mr. Kunstler! As an architect from Europe, I agree and want to add that the issue is not limited to the US and not entirely the fault of architects as some comments suggest. Though I agree architects and city planners are the first to blame for the disaster he's describing, I would like to add that this is a wider cultural issue. It's impossible to make meaningful architecture in the culture where clients only see the building in terms of profit it can immediately generate, where pedestrians see the street as a mere connection from A to B and where the form of cities has become entirely predetermined by regulations written by some bureaucrats. Architecture is not a commodity! its literally our everyday environment. Its importance cannot be overemphasized and it should be everyone's concern! Architects should be some of the most knowledgeable people around. Urbanity is indeed one of the greatest human achievements. Important cultures of the past knew how to build great places and those places in return positively influenced generations that came after.

This is absolutely excellent! All of his points ring so true. And I've never laughed so much - or really at all- during a TED talk! I will remember this man's name!

What sickens me is that our soldiers are dying overseas for causes that really only thinly veiled excuses to ensure our access to oil - oil that's required to sustain the suburban model. America uses 21% of the world's oil per day; 42% of which is used by private transportation. How can we justify continuing to build environments that maximize our need to drive? What are the benefits of this model to our quality of life? We arn't #1 in health, education, median income, happiness, etc., in fact we're the second most depressed nation. As Kunstler said, what's worth defending? Is Target worth the lives of our children?

The architecture in my locale punishes my spirit and thew new buildings being erected (at break-neck speed) are ugly and utilitarian. It makes me feel dispirited. Thank you Mr. Kunstler, finally there is somebody in this country that tells like it is about the deplorable architecture that dominates this country.

It's funny how the original title "The tragedy of suburbia" was changed to "How bad architecture wrecked cities".

As someone from a post-socialist country, yes ugly architecture destroys your wellbeing.

Sadly, here in nyc I've been hearing this mantra, this philosophy for 50 years (usually from old school neighborhood activists) and it has been continually ignored. NYC continues to be a land of a growing ever increasing hideous glass and steel boxes. For the rich.

That BMW ad is the peak of irony, the cherry on the cake that is this video

My home town of Hooksett, New Hampshire has been struggling to find a center for over a decade. There was once a town center, but that was abandoned at some point and shifted closer to the nearby city. As a result, we have one busy, unwalkable, ugly street with struggling retail stores, car dealerships, gas stations, etc. What was once the town center is still quaint, but there's not much there, town hall even left. It's a dilemma that needs solving and it would improve quality of life.

"Please please stop referring to yourselves as consumers. Consumers are different then citizens. Consumers do not have obligations, responsibilities and duties to their fellow human beings. And as long as you're using that word, consumer, in the public discussion you will be degrading the quality of the discussion we're having and we're going to continue being clueless going into this very difficult future that we face." James Howard Kunstler

Man people really been talking about this stuff for over two decades and I just woke up to it ~4 years ago

one of the best TED lectures I have ever seen. The bite of his energy and enthusiasm is refreshing in the sea of academic neutrality that is often found in these discussion. A great historical record as well

The funniest thing about this is that after the speaker says "no alternative fuel can save us" there's a hydrogen car BMW advert at 20:34

He predicted the future, dead malls everywhere nowadays...

"The public realm has to inform us not only where we are geographically, but it has to inform us where we are in our culture. Where we have come from and what kind of people we are, and by doing that, it has to afford us a glimpse of where we are going, in order to allow us to dwell in a hopeful present. If there is one great catastrophe about the places we’ve built, the human environments we’ve made for ourselves in the last 50 years, it is that it has deprived us of the ability to live in a hopeful present."

Sad how little has changed since these words were spoken.

Now that I've lost my financial ability to lease a car a few months ago, having had my car REPOed over a year ago, now am relegated to getting around by walking or taking the Metro bus, I now understand just how 'nauseating' the layout of my suburb is. It takes me 6 minutes to walk from the bus stop at the intersection to get to the entrance of WinCo Foods. The ridiculous redundancy of everyone having their own vehicle. A dozen cars waiting at the drive-thru with engines running. Stupidity.

and right after that, they put an ad for a hydrogen car. lmao are you kidding me?

As an Australian, I realise we have the same problem in our cities. Perhaps not quite as bad as the U.S. thanks to all the Victorian era architecture remaining in some parts of our older cities, however I did not realise how bad it was until I traveled overseas. Go to places like St.Petersburg, Lisbon, Delhi, Buenos Aires, Cartagena and you realise the beauty that the westernised countries are losing.

Intelligent, rude, direct, amusing, humorous, enlightening... everything I expect from TED... thank you J.H Kunstler... you made my day.

I am glad that Kunstler has had the opportunity to engage in this discussion. My hope is that those of us who are like-minded can work together to improve transportation choices in our cities.

Heh, this was awesome. I love the way Kunstler adds stand-up comedy in this lecture!

I wish every city council had to watch this. I’m watching the ruination of our little town…I’m powerless, but it still hurts to see.

The water tower bit at the beginning ironically made my day better!

All architects need to see this video.

A complementary documental to this is "why beauty matters" . The same goes for art and music.

We as a nation have gotten really lazy. We used to design building that were looked at for their design, such as the Metropolitan Building in Minneapolis, and the entire Bunker Hill in Los Angeles.

I don't agree with every thing that Kunstler has said, but he has made some very good observations. He's very aware about lots of transportation policy problems.

The argument is still valid even a year later... I love modern architecture, Frank Lloyd wright is a hero of mine. Kunstler wants cities designed by professional architects not corporations. The argument is that urban sprawl is dangerous to drive around, it includes light pollution so you can't see stars at night. Air, noise, and visual pollution all can disconnect us from nature and create mental problems amongst people growing up, and it explains the prescription drug addiction.

I remember Mr. Kunstler being ridiculed for his prediction of high energy prices due to "peak oil" that "never happened". Well, it's been 15 years since this video is uploaded and history found its detours to prove Mr. Kunstler right.

James Howard kunstler sure knows how to deliver!

Long overdue subject that needs to be heard and implemented very, very soon. Great lecture.

Not Just Bikes directed me here! Great video! I love how he mentions the confusion between urban and rural among most Americans. There is nothing rural about an asphalt roadway with a stop sign; that is classified as urban!