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The cities of the future will be much smaller than they are today.

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
Smaller
Cities
Future
Today
Much

More quotes by James Howard Kunstler

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Under the current high energy / high entropy regime, sustainable development is a joke.
James Howard Kunstler
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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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Motion is a great tranquilizer.
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We have to grow our food differently because industrial farming will soon end. That means growing more food locally on smaller farms with more human attention.
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Two decades from now, I doubt that the home building industry, so called, will even exist as we have known it.
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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.
James Howard Kunstler
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Suburbia is the insidious cartoon of the country house in a cartoon of the country.
James Howard Kunstler
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The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.
James Howard Kunstler
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Government at all levels in the USA right now is engaged in a quixotic campaign to sustain the unsustainable. We're determined to run WalMart, Disney World, the Interstate Highways, suburbia, and an imperial military by other means than oil. We'll squander a lot of dwindling resources in the process.
James Howard Kunstler
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A land full of places that are not worth caring about may soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.
James Howard Kunstler
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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).
James Howard Kunstler
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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.
James Howard Kunstler
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The salient fact about the decades ahead is that we are entering a permanent global energy crisis and it will change everything about how we live.
James Howard Kunstler
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Ridicule is the unfortunate destiny of the ridiculous.
James Howard Kunstler
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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.
James Howard Kunstler
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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.
James Howard Kunstler
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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.
James Howard Kunstler
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It pays to remember that societies get what they deserve, not what they expect.
James Howard Kunstler
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The economy of the 21st century will come to center on agriculture. Life will be intensely and profoundly local in ways that we can't conceive of today. Economic growth, as we have known it in a cheap energy industrial paradigm, will cease.
James Howard Kunstler
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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