Most of suburbia will end up in three ways: ruins, slums, salvage yards for materials.

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.

My beef with the alt-fuel people is not the renewable or alt-fuel ideas themselves. Sooner or later, there's no question we're going to have to rely on them. For me, it's an issue of scale.

Americans threw away their communities in order to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping to reflect on what they were destroying.

Community is not something you have, like pizza. Now is it something you can buy. It's a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.

The skyscraper - any building over seven stories really - will come to be seen as an experimental building type that doesn't work well in an energy-starved economy.

Anyone who studies the energy predicament understands its connection with the operations of capital - and by this I do not mean capitalism as an ideology, I mean the behavior of acquired wealth and its deployment for productive purpose. (A lot of educated idiots don't understand this, and we waste a lot of time blathering about capitalism.)