James Howard Kunstler

The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America

is entropy made visible.

We can't overestimate the amount of despair that we are generating with places like this.

And mostly I want to persuade you that we have to do better.

if we're gonna continue the project of civilization in America.

There are a lot of ways you can describe this.

I like to call it the national automobile slum.

You can call it suburban sprawl.

I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

You can call it a technosis externality clusterfuck.

And it's a tremendous problem for us.

The outstanding, the salient problem about this for us is that these are places that are not worth caring about.

We're going to talk about that some more

a sense of place.

Your ability to create places that are meaningful and places of quality and character depends entirely on your ability to define space with buildings and to employ the vocabularies, grammars, syntaxes, rhythms, and patterns of architecture in order to inform us who we are.

The public realm in America

has two roles.

It is the dwelling place of our civilization and our civic life, and it is the physical manifestation of the common good.

And when you degrade the public realm, you will automatically degrade the quality of your civic life and the character of all the enactments of your public life and communal life that take place there.

The public realm comes mostly in the form of the street in America because we don't have the thousand-year-old cathedral plazas in market squares of older cultures.