Latest James Howard Kunstler Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Please, please, stop referring to yourselves as "consumers." OK? Consumers are different than citizens. Consumers do not have obligations, responsibilities and duties to their fellow human beings. And as long as you're using that word "consumer" in the public discussion, you will be degrading the quality of the discussion we're having. And we're going to continue being clueless going into this very difficult future that we face

  James Howard Kunstler

  Clueless, Responsibility, Long

  Source: www.slate.com

• I urge people not to think in terms of "solutions," but in terms of intelligent responses to the quandaries and predicaments that we face. And there are intelligent responses that we can bring forth. But when I hear the word "solution," I always suspect that there's a hidden agenda there. And the hidden agenda is: "Please, can you please tell us how we can keep on living exactly the way we're living now, without having to really change our behavior very much?" And that's sort of what's going on in this country. And it's not going to work.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Country, Intelligent, Thinking

  Source: www.slate.com

• We're living in a culture that doesn't believe in decorating buildings, or proportioning them properly. And they don't know how to do it anymore because they haven't been doing it for, you know, the better part of the century.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Believe, Culture, Building

  Source: www.slate.com

• Building places that are worth living in and worth caring about require a certain attention to detail, and of a particular kind of detail that we have forgotten how to design and assemble. And that involves the relationship of the buildings to each other, the relationship of the buildings to the public space, which in America, comes mostly in the form of the street. Because it's only the exceptional places in America that have the village square or the New England green. You know. The street is mostly the public realm of America. And we have to design these things so that they reward us.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Caring, Design, Attention

  Source: www.slate.com

• I have a new theory of history, which is certain things happen because they seem like a good idea at the time. And suburbia seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was a special time and place in history, with special dynamics. And now, we're going to have to live with the consequences of that. And the consequences will be tragic.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Special, Tragic, Suburbia

  Source: www.slate.com

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

  James Howard Kunstler

  Cities, Today

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• It is worth remembering that our cities occupy important sites, and therefore some kind of settlement is liable to be there.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Cities, Important, Kind

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• Forget [Le Corbusier ]. Forget Modernism. Forget yesterdays' tomorrow.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Yesterday, Tomorrow, Forget

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• 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

  Agriculture, Growth, Way

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• The ideas of [ Le Corbusier ] that actually found their way into practice were deeply destructive - for instance, the tower-in-a-park, which mutated into the vertical slums of the late 20th century.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Ideas, Practice, Way

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• In the decades to come, the successful places will tend to be the smaller traditional towns and cities with viable farming hinterlands.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Successful, Cities, Towns

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• Under the current high energy / high entropy regime, sustainable development is a joke.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Energy, Development, Regimes

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• The industrial age is over. What follows will be life lived on a much smaller and finer scale.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Age, Scales

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• 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

  Thinking, Views, Poor

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• 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

  Ruins, Boards, Vinyl

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• We are in for a fiesta of default, repossession, and distress selling of suburban property, much of which will lose its presumed usefulness and monetary value in an energy-scarce economy.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Energy, Fiesta, Economy

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• [Suburbia] represents, after all, the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. We built it during our most affluent period of history, and in the decades to come we will be comparatively destitute collectively. In short, we will not have the resources to retrofit most of suburbia.

  James Howard Kunstler

  World, Affluent, Resources

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• I believe most of suburbia is unreformable and will not be fixed.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Believe, I Believe, Fixed

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• I abhor the word "consumer." Consumers, unlike citizens, have no implicit duties, obligations, or responsibilities to the common good. It's a degrading term. The use of it degrades the public discussion.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Responsibility, Citizens, Use

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• The increment of new development will be the single building lot, if we are lucky, and most of the codes that are now enforced will be ignored because the redundancies they mandate will not be affordable.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Lucky, Development, Ignored

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• Two decades from now, I doubt that the home building industry, so called, will even exist as we have known it.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Home, Two, Doubt

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• We will have to make new arrangements, or revive bygone ones. We may, for another example, see the return of the boarding house.

  James Howard Kunstler

  House, Example, May

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• 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

  Stupid, Past, Practice

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• In many places, the zoning prohibits the mixing of retail and residential. This stupidity has been accompanied by stupidities in municipal policy, such as disallowing accessory apartments - under the theory that renters are incapable of behaving decently.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Stupidity, Mixing, Retail

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

• I think we'll see a leveling off and then a contraction of population, not a continued upward trend.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Thinking, Population, Trends

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org