Kunstler in Kelowna

I think Boddy is both missing the point and denying the reality of Canadian urban life when he says, “The New Urbanism has found little purchase in Canada, in part because the Greco-Roman nostalgia much evident in Mr. Kunstler’s slides does not jibe with our multi-cultural realities, but more importantly, because the densities and urban layouts it promotes have long been the norm in our nation.”
Apart from a few cities whose layouts precede automobile culture, and another few who have consciously attempted to create livable communties, Canada is very lacking in what Boddy considers to be “the norm” here. He also completely gets it wrong when it comes to Kunstler’s “Greco-Roman nostalgia” – which is not that at all, rather a love of places that don’t dehumanize or put the car first, no matter what their architecture may be. Cities all over the world (that Boddy has probably never seen?) certainly don’t have any Greco-Roman influence to them, yet they contain the same principles that Kunstler promotes incessantly: walkable, human scaled places, not yet destroyed by the prevalence of the automobile. The buildings themselves are nothing but icing on the cake.