James Howard Kunstler, an American writer on cities, may be the continent's leading suburbologist. With books like The Geography of Nowhere and last year's The Long Emergency, Mr. Kunstler has spent the past two decades building a sustained critique of the postwar suburb, and the energy-wasting, sedentary, under-stimulated lifestyle it promotes.
Those opinions brought him to Kelowna last week as a speaker to the annual gathering of British Columbia's urban planners.
Mr. Kunstler did not blanch from proffering opinions about the much a-building Okanagan city after a quick walk and driving tour with local urbanists.
"Why does downtown hardly have any buildings over two storeys?," was one of his first questions, quickly followed by "Why is the architecture so bad?"
Mission Hill Estate’s hilltop winery looked like a medieval French or Italian chateau when new. But five years later it has come to resemble a theme mall or religious school.
My answer to his first question was quite simple: Kelowna is a 20th-century city, shaped by the automobile and an orchard-based economy that decentralized jobs, residences and shopping, and never had much use for a downtown except as a place that Edwardians parked a few banks, cafes and doctor's offices. Because it is younger than Calgary or Vancouver, Kelowna has had an automotive strip almost as long as it has been a city, today stretching north to Vernon and beyond in an astonishing agglomeration of franchise businesses, shopping malls and low-slung office parks. In bluntly functional terms, the strip is more Kelowna's real heart than those few brick blocks near the floating bridge.
As for design, I am not sure if Kelowna's architecture really is worse than other cities in the Interior, and there are counters to Mr. Kunstler's sour initial impression of its new arts precinct, where a public library, art gallery and other civic structures belie the ambitions of British Columbia's fastest-growing city.
There is a downside to this rapid growth, however.
Kelowna recently passed both Calgary and Toronto for the dour distinction of having Canada's second-highest average housing prices, behind only Vancouver.
Mr. Kunstler is skeptical about the power of design panels — such as Vancouver's — to improve the visual quality of boom-time urban life: "Design review boards are dysfunctional, and design guidelines are uniformly lame," he says. "By designing-out chaos, they create sterile buildings."
The Okanagan urban policy that most impressed Mr. Kunstler is British Columbia's Agricultural Land Reserve. Building on the theme of The Long Emergency, he sees a not-so-distant future where energy is so expensive that high rise towers will be abandoned for want of electricity to run their elevators, and when food will of necessity only be local: "The ALR is very prescient for what it could do for food security."
Mr. Kunstler is right only to the degree that future diets will consist of grapes and wine. The orchards that made the Okanagan valley Canada's fruit basket are disappearing at a depressing rate, replaced solely with vineyards and backyards. The backyards come from a whittling-away of land from the ALR, and the massive housing estates now rising on reserve lands owned by the Westbank Band. These vast new subdivisions are not subject to the ALR or other outside land use controls, resulting in 9,000 of its current on-reserve population of 9,500 now being non-native.
Mission Hill Estate's hilltop winery, designed by Seattle architect Tom Kundig for proprietor Anthony von Mendl, is a Xanadu, looking when new like a medieval French or Italian chateau. But five years later it has come to resemble a theme mall or religious school, its visual presence dulled by being nearly surrounded by Westbank's pervasive sprawl.
Mr. Kunstler was less forthcoming with ideas on how places like Kelowna can stop sprawling and start shaping dense and lively neighbourhoods. His plenary talk was full of easy slams at the empty walls and banal functionality of modern architecture, and displayed a few too many nostalgic snaps of antique piazzas in Europe. 'Make it Siena' Mr. Kuntsler seems to be saying, or at very least, 'make it Saratoga Springs,' the 19th-century spa and racecourse town in upstate New York he calls home.
This revealing Europhilia and simplistic promotion of resorts as models for cities is rife among the New Urbanists, for whom Mr. Kunstler has been a prominent spokesman. The New Urbanism has found little purchase in Canada, in part because the Greco-Roman nostalgia much evident in Mr. Kunstler's slides does not jibe with our multi-cultural realities, but more importantly, because the densities and urban layouts it promotes have long been the norm in our nation.
The radical alternative down south is old hat here. This is both because Canada never let its downtowns depopulate or racially stratify and because we lack such public subsidies to sprawl as the American's tax deductibility of mortgage interest payments or the interstate highway system.
Some of Mr. Kunstler's most apt jeremiads are directed at the environmental movement and the use of landscaping to camouflage the banality of contemporary city-building. He chides the Sierra Club and their ilk for only seeing nature for its scenic and recreational possibilities: "If they really want the natural realm preserved, they should have spent the last four decades lobbying for smart urban growth." He also cautioned Kelowna against camouflaging architectural errors with shrubbery.
"The New Urbanism is a temporary correction," he says, one having an imminent expiry date, because much more radical efforts will soon have to be launched to deal with an energy-hungry future. No matter how addicted society has become to this urban version of fast food, "Suburban life is coming off the menu."
