James Howard Kunstler

It's a place worth caring about.

It's well defined.

It is emphatically an outdoor public room.

It has something that is terribly important.

It has what's called an active and permeable membrane around the edge.

That's a fancy way of saying it's got shops, bars, bistros, destinations.

Things go in and out of it.

It's permeable.

The beer goes in and out, the waitresses go in and out, and that activates the center of this place and makes it a place that people want to hang out in.

In these places in other cultures, people just go there voluntarily because they like them.

We don't have to have a craft fair here to get people to come here.

You don't have to have a Kwanzaa festival.

People just go because it's pleasurable to be there.

But this is how we do it in the United States.

Probably the most significant public space failure in America designed by the leading architects of the day, Harry Cobb and I.M.

Pei, Boston City Hall Plaza.

A public place so dismal that the winos don't even want to go there.

And we can't fix it because I.M.

Pei's still alive.

And every year, Harvard and MIT have a joint committee to repair it.