80 Quotes by James Howard Kunstler

The two elements of the suburban pattern that cause the greatest problems are the extreme separation of uses and the vast distances between things.

No amount or combination of alternative fuels is going to allow us to continue running what we’re running, the way we’re running it.

Tradition evolves with time and place while holding strongly to certain formal, cultural, and personal principles. Nostalgia seeks the security of past forms without the inherent principles.

The car, is the other connection to the outside world, but to be precise it connects the inhabitants to the inside of the car, not to the outside world per se. The outside world is only an element for moving through, as submarines move through water.

My beef with the alt-fuel people is not the renewable or alt-fuel ideas themselves. Sooner or later, there’s no question we’re going to have to rely on them. For me, it’s an issue of scale.

Community is not something you have, like pizza. Now is it something you can buy. It’s a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.

There is no shortage of apologists for the ubiquitous highway crud.

I think water transport will see a revival. However, we're not going to replay the 20th century. The industrial city of that era will not be revived. Our cities are going to contract. Many of them will contract as a whole but densify at their core.

I'm very optimistic about the future. I'm just not optimistic about the skyscraper as a building typology that is suited for the future.