James Howard Kunstler

We're going to need to get back this body of methodology and principle and skill in order to relearn how to compose meaningful places, places that are integral, that are living organisms in the sense that they contain all the organs of our civic life and our communal life deployed in an integral fashion.

so that the residences make sense deployed in relation to the places of business, of culture, and of governance.

We're going to have to relearn what the building blocks of these things are, the street, the block, how to compose public space that's both large and small, the courtyard, the civic square, and how to really make use of this property.

We can see some of the first ideas for retrofitting some of the catastrophic property that we have in America, the dead malls.

What are we going to do with them?

Well, in point of fact, most of them are not going to make it.

They're not going to be retrofitted.

They're going to be the salvage yards of the future.

Some of them we're going to fix, though.

We're going to fix them by imposing back on them street and block systems and returning to the building lot as the normal increment of development.

And if we're lucky, the result will be revivified town centers and neighborhood centers in our existing towns and cities.

And by the way, our towns and cities are where they are and grew where they were because they occupy all the important sites.

And most of them are still going to be there, though the scale of them is probably going to be diminished.

We've got a lot of work to do.

We're not going to be rescued by the hypercar.

We're not going to be rescued by alternative fuels.

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.

We're going to have to do everything very differently.

And America's not prepared.

We are sleepwalking into the future.