This book is a good read explaining why America has so many miserable cities.  

A review of James Kunstler's-"Geography of Nowhere"

The Uglification of America

Written: May 06 '06 (Updated May 07 '06)

Suburban Sprawl

As Industrialism created the most degraded urban environments ever seen, Americans, "with their Bible-drunk sense of history", simply abandoned their public spaces and went in search of Eden. They called that suburbia. The abandonment of communities led to the segregation by income that we know today, a quintessential US phenomenon.

Unfortunately, our suburbs were created without planning, without public spaces, without a decent sense of aesthetics: they were simply conduits for automobiles and achieved social isolation. Kunstler here examines the relationship between the poorly designed habitat we live in and the social problems (i.e the highest violent crime rate in the developed world) which afflict our society, and demonstrates a tight connection. 
 
Kunstler chronicles the manipulative influences of the auto industry in making sure public transportation never became viable in the US, and of the house building sector, which was allowed to destroy the environment with its disposable little ranches and a zoning law that chewed up public space at unprecedented rates. The growth of the building industry is still predicated on destroying local communities. Kunstler has plenty of detailed examples to illustrate these claims.

No Future for Suburbia

The American suburban habitat has no future. As rising costs of transportation and unmanageable traffic patterns are bringing our cherished suburbia into the grave, the question is what kind of physical setting we can design for our civilization. "Americans have been living car-centered lives for so long that the collective memory of what used to make a townscape humanly rewarding has nearly been erased.".
Sadly, Americans are not really planning the post-automobile age. Not much has changed, and we ought to look at " new home construction as a cancer patient must contemplate the spread of malignant cells through his healthy tissue." After tracing the architectural history of the American colonial home, Kunstler remarks how new homes have ceased to open up to the outside world (with ample porches, for examples) and have closed up, leaving the outside world as an abstraction. Barricaded in their basements, watching TV, Americans have become "spiritual cripples narcotized by fantasy".

America's Cities

It is hard to decide what the most dilapidated city in America may be, because there are hundreds. Kunstler chooses Detroit, as an example of how American economic trends have victimized our communities, not so much because of the ugliness, but because spaces have been so designed to cut off the possibility of sense of community. "At night, downtown Detroit looks like a set for some movie about the last hours of Planet Earth." There are many places in the US which just fit this bill.

A city that receives high marks is Portland, Oregon, home to a visionary mayor (Tom McCall) and to a bunch of bright, influential architects and city planners. Portland is still a community! Among the places I like in the Northeast, I would add Beacon Hill in Boston and Georgetown in Washington. There are a few other places, not many, I admit, that look like communities.
Finally, the obvious example of an unsustainable city is a non-city like Los Angeles. LA is the first example of a "community" that must go. It will be unrecognizable, says Kunstler, in a few decades. LA is simply a perversion of the idea of human habitat