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Our building practices for the past century have been plain stupid - especially the glorification of the single-family house in a subdivision, at the expense of all other typologies and arrangements.

James Howard Kunstler

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James Howard Kunstler
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: October 19
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Past
Especially
Typology
Building
Subdivision
Single
Glorification
Stupid
Expense
Century
Practices
Practice
Arrangements
Family
Expenses
House
Plain

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Under the current high energy / high entropy regime, sustainable development is a joke.
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It is worth remembering that our cities occupy important sites, and therefore some kind of settlement is liable to be there.
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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.
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I'm serenely convinced that we are heading into what will amount to a time out from technological progress as we know it.
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Once energy problems gain traction, there will be a large new class of economic losers, and consequently a lot of social turbulence.
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In my view, suburbia in general has very poor prospects. I think it will only become devalued and probably more dangerous. It's chief characteristic was that it represented a living arrangement with no future - and that future is now here.
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The suburban cycle which began a hundred years ago is nearly over. We are in for a period of contraction and economic hardship.
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We have to do commerce differently because the WalMart system of big box chain retail will soon die. This means rebuilding local main street economies (networks of local economic interdependency).
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Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, Wal-Mart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola.
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America does not want change, except from the cash register at Wal-Mart.
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The cities of the future will be much smaller than they are today.
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The Long Emergency will be chiefly characterized as a time out from technology. It could plunge us into a dark age of superstition. My guess is that we will lose a lot of knowledge and skill. But I also believe the human race desperately needs this time out.
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It pays to remember that societies get what they deserve, not what they expect.
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Of course, the toxic bullshit of incessant advertising and show biz for nearly a century has stripped us of cognitive abilities for dealing with reality that used to be part of the normal equipment of adulthood - for instance, knowing the difference between wishing for stuff and making stuff happen. We bamboozled ourselves with too much magic.
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When a society is stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard to understand, you get a lot of delusional thinking.
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In our current frame of mind, or paradigm, or whatever you want to call it, we like to think that marshalling government policy is the way to get things done.
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People don't like railroad tracks near them? We'll see how they feel when the percentage of U.S. citizens who can afford to drive a car goes way down, as it will.
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I think a lot of things will be self-correcting, even in America. After all, human societies are essentially self-organizing emergent systems. The catch is, how much disorder will we have to endure while this re-self-organizing process occurs.
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Consider how badly-built suburbia is. Many business buildings are not designed to outlast their tax depreciation periods, and the McHouses are made of particle board, vinyl siding, and stapled-on trim. A lot of suburbia will simply become the slums of the future. Most of the rest will be salvage or ruins.
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The industrial age is over. What follows will be life lived on a much smaller and finer scale.
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