James Howard Kunstler

That's not good enough.

We have to do good buildings.

The street trees have really four jobs to do, and that's it.

To spatially denote the pedestrian realm, to protect the pedestrians from the vehicles in the carriageway, to filter the sunlight onto the sidewalk, and to soften the hardscape of the buildings, and to create a ceiling, a vaulted ceiling over the street at its best.

And that's it.

Those are the four jobs of the street trees.

They're not supposed to be a cartoon of the Northwoods.

They're not supposed to be a set for the last of the Mohicans.

One of the problems with the fiasco of suburbia is that it destroyed our understanding of the distinction between the country and the town, between the urban and the rural.

They're not the same thing.

And we're not going to cure the problems of the urban

by dragging the country into the city, which is what a lot of us are trying to do all the time.

A lot of this comes from the fact that the industrial city in America was such a trauma that we developed this tremendous aversion for the whole idea of the city, city life, and everything connected with it.

And so what you see fairly early in the mid-19th century is this idea that we now have to have an antidote to the industrial city, which is going to be life in the country for everybody.

And that starts to be delivered in the form of the railroad suburb, the country villa along the railroad line, which allows people to enjoy the amenity of the city, but to return to the countryside every night.

And believe me, there were no Walmarts or convenience stores out there then.

So it really was a form of country living.

But what happens is, of course, it mutates over the next 80 years, and it turns into something rather insidious.

It becomes a cartoon of a country house in a cartoon of the country.

And that's the great non-articulated agony of suburbia and one of the reasons that it lends itself to ridicule, because it hasn't delivered what it's been promising for half a century now.