{"id":27333,"date":"2017-10-27T10:49:20","date_gmt":"2017-10-27T15:49:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=27333"},"modified":"2017-10-27T10:49:20","modified_gmt":"2017-10-27T15:49:20","slug":"the-infinite-suburb-is-an-academic-joke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=27333","title":{"rendered":"The Infinite Suburb Is an Academic Joke"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Infinite Suburb Is an Academic Joke<\/a><\/h3>\n
\"\"<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Jetsons\u201d (Warner Bros. publicity)<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

The elite graduate schools of urban planning have yet another new vision of the future. Lately, they see a new-and-improved suburbia\u2014based on self-driving electric cars, deliveries by \u201cdrones deliveries at your doorstep,\u201d and \u201cteardrop-shaped one-way roads\u201d (otherwise known as cul-de-sacs)\u2014as the coming sure thing. It sounds suspiciously like yesterday\u2019s tomorrow, the George Jetson utopia that has been the stock-in-trade of half-baked futurism for decades. It may be obvious that for some time now we have lived in a reality-optional culture, and it\u2019s vividly on display in the cavalcade of techno-narcissism that passes for thinking these days in academia.<\/p>\n

Exhibit A is an essay that appeared last month in The New York Times Magazine<\/i>titled \u201cThe Suburb of the Future is Almost Here<\/a>,\u201d by Alan M. Berger of the MIT urban design faculty and author of the book Infinite Suburbia<\/i>\u2014on the face of it a perfectly inane notion. The subtitle of his Times Magazine<\/i> piece argued that \u201cMillennials want a different kind of suburban development that is smart, efficient, and sustainable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Note the trio of clich\u00e9s at the end, borrowed from the lexicon of the advertising industry. \u201cSmart\u201d is a meaningless anodyne that replaces the worn out tropes \u201cdeluxe,\u201d \u201csuper,\u201d \u201climited edition,\u201d and so on. It\u2019s simply meant to tweak the reader\u2019s status consciousness. Who wants to be dumb?<\/p>\n

\u201cEfficient\u201d and \u201csustainable\u201d are actually at odds. The combo ought to ring an alarm bell for anyone tasked with designing human habitats. Do you know what \u201cefficient\u201d gets you in terms of ecology? Monocultures, such as GMO corn grown on sterile soil mediums jacked with petroleum-based fertilizers, herbicides, and fast-depleting fossil aquifer water. It\u2019s a method that is very efficient for producing corn flakes and Cheez Doodles, but has poor prospects for continuing further into this century\u2014as does conventional suburban sprawl, as we\u2019ve known it.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Infinite Suburb Is an Academic Joke \u201cThe Jetsons\u201d (Warner Bros. publicity) The elite graduate schools of urban planning have yet another new vision of the future. Lately, they see a new-and-improved suburbia\u2014based on self-driving electric cars, deliveries by \u201cdrones deliveries at your doorstep,\u201d and \u201cteardrop-shaped one-way roads\u201d (otherwise known as cul-de-sacs)\u2014as the coming sure […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[3313,16734,449,1921,14711,16733,16732],"class_list":["post-27333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-academia","tag-alan-m-berger","tag-james-howard-kunstler","tag-new-york-times","tag-suburbs","tag-techno-narcissism","tag-the-american-conservative"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27333"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27334,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27333\/revisions\/27334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}