Business Week just interviewed famous suburb-hater, James Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (which I’m currently reading and have to say is great!). In his interview he puts forth some pretty gloomy predictions for the U.S. If you’re of the point of view that we need to be investing more in transit, bikes and compact developments, you’ll like what he has to say. If you live in the suburbs and have to drive a car to get everywhere you need to go, then you probably won’t.

Author James Kunstler says the Automotive Age is almost history and deconstructs McMansion living

by Mara Der Hovanesian

The suburban landscape has been marred by foreclosures and half-built communities abandoned in the subprime aftermath. But James Howard Kunstler, author of a dozen books, including The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, thinks there’s a bigger threat to those far-flung neighborhoods: the scarcity of oil. As Kunstler sees it, oil wells are running dry and the era of cheap fuel is over. Given the supply constraints, he says the U.S. will have to rethink suburban sprawl, bringing an end to strip malls, big-box stores, and other trappings of the automotive era. Kunstler, 59, predicts a return to towns and cities centered around a retail hub—not unlike his hometown of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. But the shift to this new paradigm, he says, will be painful. (Kunstler could be off the mark; he predicted technological Armageddon after Y2K.) BusinessWeek writer Mara Der Hovanesian spoke with Kunstler about suburbia, which he calls “the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known.”

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