Reading through James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere, which chronicles the sorry state of (North) American urban planning and architecture, which seems to create spaces as forgettable and disposable as the fast food wrappers sold in these places.

Setting aside the many downsides of suburban life, I myself have sometimes wrestled with notion that so many suburban places are just plain ugly. I’ve wondered whether the aesthetics really matter. They almost seem secondary to the argument.

Kunstler’s passage on this issue, which he describes as charm, summed things up for me nicely:

Americans wonder why their houses lack charm. The word charm may seem fussy, trivial, vague. I use the term to mean explicitly that which makes our physical surroundings worth caring about. It is not a trivial matter, for we are presently suffering on a massive scale the social consequences of living in places that are not worth caring about. Charm is dependent on connectedness, on continuities, on the relation of one thing to another, often expressed as tension, like the tension between private and public space, or the sacred and the workaday, or the interplay of space that is easily comprehensible, such as a street, with the mystery of openings that beckon, such as a doorway set deeply into a building.

For more, I suggest Kunstler’s pithy and sarcastic podcast.