TED Talks Daily
(#7) Elise’s Top Ten: The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs | James Howard Kunstler
20 Sep 2025
In James Howard Kunstler's view, public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life and the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead, he argues, what we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
Hey, everyone. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, the show where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. Welcome back to my top 10 TED Talks, our first ever podcast playlist where we share a curated list of talks from the archive on our feed all at once.
Whether you've been with us since the first talk I shared in this playlist or you're just jumping in right here, this is one of my favorites for many reasons. And one of the reasons is that you have to go way back to find it. Social critic James Koonsler's 2004 talk, The Ghastly Tragedy of the Suburbs and the Very Real Reasons Behind Why They're So Ugly.
The delivery of this talk really cracks me up, and I think it's worth watching on TED.com for his visual examples. But as a listen, it's also a good one. It's asking us to reflect on the way that the design of our neighborhoods can make us more or less human and connected.
The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible. We can't overestimate the amount of despair that we are generating with places like this. And mostly I want to persuade you that we have to do better. if we're gonna continue the project of civilization in America. There are a lot of ways you can describe this. I like to call it the national automobile slum.
You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. You can call it a technosis externality clusterfuck. And it's a tremendous problem for us. The outstanding, the salient problem about this for us is that these are places that are not worth caring about. We're going to talk about that some more
a sense of place. Your ability to create places that are meaningful and places of quality and character depends entirely on your ability to define space with buildings and to employ the vocabularies, grammars, syntaxes, rhythms, and patterns of architecture in order to inform us who we are. The public realm in America has two roles.
It is the dwelling place of our civilization and our civic life, and it is the physical manifestation of the common good. And when you degrade the public realm, you will automatically degrade the quality of your civic life and the character of all the enactments of your public life and communal life that take place there.
The public realm comes mostly in the form of the street in America because we don't have the thousand-year-old cathedral plazas in market squares of older cultures. Your ability to define space and to create places that are worth caring about all comes from a body of culture that we call the culture of civic design.
This is a body of knowledge, method, skill, and principle that we threw in the garbage after World War II and decided we don't need that anymore, we're not going to use it. And consequently, we can see the result all around us.
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