@John Clancy: There seems to be a lot more here than "dumb and lazy." With regard to the poles of urban and rural: I tell nearly everyone I speak to that polar thinking exacerbates many contemporary problems, so I agree that we have to be more attentive to (and critical of!) the middle ground. But Kunstler (and others) make a compelling case that suburbia compromises the numbers of urban population with the car-based transportation of rural areas in a way that is clearly not sustainable.
I think he also recognizes that drawing a line around urban cores and declaring "Thou shalt not pass!" is overly simplistic. Vast, uninterrupted swaths of extremely dense and, yes, bleak cityscape are obviously not what he has in mind. Consider a number of very small, townish, walkable, urbanized "nodes" connected by public transit and surrounded by patches of farmland growing food, as Kunstler says, closer to where people live. These would have the same density as a modern suburb, but be much more livable.
