James Howard Kunstler

Your ability to define space and to create places that are worth caring about all comes from a body of culture that we call the culture of civic design.

This is a body of knowledge, method, skill, and principle that we threw in the garbage after World War II and decided we don't need that anymore, we're not going to use it.

And consequently, we can see the result all around us.

The public realm has to inform us not only where we are geographically, but it has to inform us where we are in our culture, where we've come from, what kind of people we are.

And by doing that, it needs to afford us a glimpse to where we're going in order to allow us to dwell in a hopeful present.

And if there is one great catastrophe about the places that we've built, the human environments we've made for ourselves in the last 50 years, it is that it has deprived us of the ability to live in a hopeful present.

The environments we are living in more typically are like these.

Now this happens to be the asteroid belt of architectural garbage two miles north of my town.

And remember, to create a place of character and quality, you have to be able to define space.

So how is that being accomplished here?

If you stand on the apron of the Walmart over here and try to look at the Target store over here, you can't see it because of the curvature of the earth.

That's nature's way of telling you that you're doing a poor job of defining space.

Consequently, these will be places that nobody wants to be in.

These will be places that are not worth caring about.

We have about 38,000 places that are not worth caring about in the United States today.

When we have enough of them, we're going to have a nation that's not worth defending.

And I want you to think about that when you think about those young men and women who are over in places like Iraq, spilling their blood in the sand, and ask yourself what is their last thought of home?

I hope it's not the curb cut between the Chuck E. Cheese and the Target store, because that's not good enough for Americans to be spilling their blood for.

We need better places in this country.

Public space.