What is this trying to say?

There's not one simple answer, but I think the suggestions of the experts (Andres Duany, for instance, proposes retrofitting suburbs and promoting "smart growth") are where the conclusion lies. Kunstler hints at it too, but it doesn't play out in the film's "plot," but the idea is that suburbia is a giant waste of resources. Some planners and architects are gaining ground with new urbanist projects and ideas, but ultimately it's a paradigm shift - people have to realize that suburbia may not be what's best for themselves or the world. That has to happen before we see the end of suburbia.

Actually, there were many solutions given ... one of them even suggests that suburbs are a first stage urban palette: using abandoned shopping malls as city centers and the housing tracts getting converted to town houses as the burbs age.

Lots of people who have migrated from the dysfunction of the burbs to help create more livable towns and urban environments.

Bambi

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While they may not point out any clear solution or anything like that, I think a major reason they put this out there was to get people thinking. Thats always the first step to fixing any problem, is to make people aware of what things are like. Who knows, maybe someone who saw this will study the subject further and come up with a solution that works better than what has already been thought up.

Watch End of Suburbia, The 11th Hour, Crude Awakening, Surplus, The Corporation, and other documentaries. Escape From Suburbia (a sequel to End of Suburbia) will be on DVD in July 2008. The most simple thing you can do to change the world IMO is consume less. Stop driving as much. Get a car with better mileage. Turn off your lights and appliances when they are not being used. Get CFL or LED bulbs. Eat at home. Prepare your own meals, using fresh natural foods (pref. local) instead of processed/prepared foods shipped from hundreds of miles away. Buy less. Buy more used goods - books, clothes, CDs, games, movies, etc. Borrow from the library or share with friends. Simplify your life. Live beneath your means.

Suburbia is unhealthy for many reasons. One of them is the lifestyle of shopping 5-7 days a week and keeping up with the Joneses. Instead of investing in useless stuff that you don't need, invest in family, and your community. Save your money for the future, instead of squandering it on expensive new cars, big screen TVs, fancy clothes, restaurants, junk food, and other non-essentials. Suburbia is not just a place. It's a state of mind, built on alienation and greed. George Carlin was right in his comedy routine about &quot;Stuff.&quot; Most people see a house as a huge box to put stuff in. And when they run out of space, they get a bigger box (or rent storage space) to go on buying more stuff they don't need. Few ever consider they can do better selling or giving away or throwing away their stuff, and buying less stuff in the future. They can be happier with less stuff.

The primary point is that the corporate sponsored, car-dependent, sterile milieu (where even a calendar chock-full of activities can't quite assuage the existential dread/stultifying ennui of the suburban lifestyle) of the suburb attempts to emulate the vibrant (read: mixed use, ethnically diverse, pedestrian-enabled) neighborhoods of old but they can't. For all the economic and political resources devoted to building great "houses" suburbanites have been cut off from what makes a real community a great place to live.

The solution is offered piecemeal in the form of the expert, academic observations from the likes of James Howard Kunstler and a few others. Basically the suburb has to be retrofitted to contain some of the same amenities of inner-city neighborhoods via mass-transit, more self-contained, self-sufficient, mixed use communities replete with shopping, office space and a variety of living arrangements all within close proximity as opposed to cookie-cutter developments that cater primarily to single-families of a particular socioeconomic class.

Kunstler's recurring point (you'll want to read his book The Long Emergency) is that suburbia is the by-product of the industrial age, an era of readily extractable and thus cheap oil and surreal, historically unprecedented levels of abundance and he warns that our way of life isn't sustainable, i.e. the oil is running out and we're living on borrowed time. The suburban design we've spend so much money and time building will eventually become part of the detritus of late capitalist, industrial society unless we build communities that work for EVERYONE not just for oil barons, yuppies and wealthy retirees. Oh, and the twist at the end (that you'll probably, and are supposed to, hate) underscores the point: that our way of life is an artifice and eventually that fact will be apparent to everyone.