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10/17/2005: "Spokane: Clusterfuck city"

James Howard Kunstler, author of "The Long Emergency" and rancour of Clusterfuck Nation, was in Spokane a couple years ago. I remember the conference (I didn't attend, but it was a "Big Deal").

Apparently he wasn't impressed by Spokane (or its people), either:

I need to state this broadly -- perhaps too broadly for some -- because it includes a number of views which all derive from the same notion: that human nature is something apart from the rest of nature. Paradoxically, this idea expresses something very similar to the mentality of single-use zoning which underlies the fiasco of suburbia in the first place -- that human nature and the rest of nature occupy separate and irreconcilable zones.

This was illustrated not long ago, when I was invited to an urban design conference in Spokane. Several guys from the city planning office met me at the airport and then proceeded to take me on a "tour of Spokane." Only we didn't get to the city. Instead, we went by car from one scenic view-point to another on the bluffs along the Spokane River. We'd motor along, then all get out of the van and the chief planner would say, with a great sweeping arm gesture, "Look at the magnificent view!" What I realized after a while was that to them all issues of urban design came down to one thing: scenery. Not streets and blocks, not building facades, sidewalks or planting strips. Just scenery. You could have imprisoned these clowns in any basement with a wall-sized photo of Mount Rainier, and they would have been just as delighted. And you could see the results of this mentality in their work: everything built after 1950 in the area was a single-use pod of one sort or another, including the ghastly hotel "complex" where I stayed.

It was shocking to realize how delusional they were, and how deeply it compromised their professional competence.