This so-called city

     As you know, not everyone appreciates the City of Irvine’s intense Irvineness.
     Yesterday, NavelGazing’s Matt Coker quoted an assessment of this “planned” city by James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere:

     This so-called "city" was once a ranch comprising hundreds of thousands of acres consolidated out of old Spanish land grants by one James Irvine…. The so-called city named after Mr. Irvine—and still largely controlled by a private real estate development company he founded—prides itself on being rationally planned. By this they mean that all the angles have been figured out for producing massive volumes of exquisitely-tuned suburban sprawl at a nice profit.

     One thing this demonstrates is that rational planning is not the same thing as intelligence because the end result on-the-ground is a nightmare of the most extreme car dependency in the nation, arguably even worse than Los Angeles. That it is also a nightmare of crushing uniformity, disconnection, boredom, and ennui probably matters less because the essence of the place's character is that it has no future. There is absolutely no way that the American people can continue their Happy Motoring frolic for another generation, yet the Irvine Company is still busy slapping together new monocultures of housing pods, strip malls, and all the other usual furnishings with the kind of stupid confidence of people intoxicated on Rotary Club bullshit—which is to say zeal minus consciousness. It is the same frame-of-mind that produces the famous Orange County right wing politics.

     Golly.