Author to Lecture on Cities: What Works, What Doesn't?

Savannah, GA—James Howard Kunstler, author, urban planner, and social critic, will speak on concepts in modern thinking about cities; what works, and what doesn’t, at the Coastal Georgia Center on February 4. The talk will begin at 7:00 P.M. and is free and open to the public.

Kunstler is one of the most provocative, entertaining and informed thinkers on the urban planning and design concepts that Savannah wrestles with on a daily basis. He is an accomplished presenter and has spoken at numerous major universities around the country. He is the author of a number of critically acclaimed books, including: The Geaography of Nowhere, Home from Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition (Simon & Schuster)

Kunstler says he wrote The Geography of Nowhere because he believes "a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work."

Home from Nowhere is a continuation of that discussion with an emphasis on the remedies. A portion of it appeared as the cover story in the September 1996 Atlantic Monthly. His new book, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition is a look a wide-ranging look at cities here and abroad, and inquiry into what makes them great (or miserable), and in particular what America is going to do with it’s mutilated cities.

His next book, The Long Emergency, will be published by Grove-Atlantic in 2004. It will describe the changes that the American society faces in the 21st century.

Kunstler is also the author if eight novels, including The Halloween Ball and An Embarrassment of Riches. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times Sunday Magazine and Op-Ed page, where he has written on environmental and economic issues. His work has also appeared in Metropolis, the American Enterprise, and the Wall Street Journal.

Kunstler was born in New York City in 1948. He moved to the Long Island suburbs in 1954 and in 1957 returned to the city where he spent most of his childhood. He graduated from the State University of New York, worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis. He has no formal training in architecture or the related design fields.

He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, and many other colleges, and has appeared before many professional organizations such as the AIA, ASLA, the APA, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He lives in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York.

January 17, 2003