Jane Holtz Kay
"Last Chance Landscape: De-paving & Replanning Cities"
Wednesday, March 30, 2005, 11:30 AM
JANE HOLTZ KAY is an author, journalist and architecture critic for The
Nation. Holtz Kay has written widely on the built and natural environment.
Her highly acclaimed book, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over
America and How We Can Take It Back reshaped national debates on
transportation and land use. A magna cum laude graduate from Harvard, Kay is
currently working on a new book entitled Last Chance Landscape.A member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, she has written for mainstream and professional organizations from Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Preservation, and Planning to The New York Times, the Boston Globe, Tompaine.com, Orion, and Sierra.
LECTURE SUMMARY
Holtz Kay essentially recapitulated her book Asphalt Nation. For anyone who has read the book, there was nothing really new in the talk. Cars are evil, public transportation is good, etc, etc. But there are a couple of interesting thoughts that follow from Holtz Kay’s thesis. Cars provided people with the transportation flexibility and independence they desired (or were sold), acting as a fast horse and buggy, a personal bus or train, a water-proof bicycle. It helped that gasoline was cheap and essentially unlimited early on. The automobile was incredibly adaptable to existing transportation routes. Many of Boston’s main thoroughfares are old cowpaths. Many of Portland’s are old wagon roads. While being adaptable, the automobile also has been incredibly allelopathic to other forms of transportation; cities favor freeways to trains and buses, and offer few bike or footpaths…and until recent decades, few streetcars.
Many public transportation proponents are derided as social engineers. This is, of course, absurd. Civilization is social engineering. Private automobile and petroleum companies engaged in one of the most ambitious social engineering efforts in history, buying and shutting down mass transportation companies throughout the nation. This in turn made suburbia possible. And lets be clear, suburbanization as an unintended consequence of the automobile, was every bit as socially engineered as the collapse of public transport and the rise of the car. All this for a transportation method -the single occupancy internal combustion engine vehicle- that will exist for scarcely a century in the history of humankind, and will have squandered up to a third of a high-quality, non-renewable energy source, oil. On the upside, it was fun while it lasted.
The follow-up to Holtz Kay’s work on Lost Boston and Asphalt Nation? The long-term consequences of our century-long love affair with the gasoline engine: green-house induced sea-level rise in coastal cities like Boston, New York, Maimi, San Diego, and on and on, where a large percentage of our population now lives. Holtz Kay met with various groups in Portland from green-roof pioneers to sustainable energy experts as she gathered material for this new book, Last Chance Landscape.
Read online articles by Jane Holtz Kay
"Shore Losers." Grist Magazine, www.grist.org, June 15, 2005.