We have to make some things for ourselves because the conveyer belt from China is doomed (this process is known as import replacement). We have to do transportation differently, because mass motoring and even commercial aviation will soon be over. We have to inhabit the landscape differently because both suburbia and the metroplex mega-city will be obsolete, so we will have to return to a more traditional disposition of things in smaller urbanisms associated with productive agricultural hinterlands.

[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.

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.

The salient fact about the decades ahead is that we are entering a permanent global energy crisis and it will change everything about how we live.

The two elements of the suburban pattern that cause the greatest problems are the extreme separation of uses and the vast distances between things

I think the deeper truth is that the Kyoto Protocols will not be followed by anyone really and that, in effect, nothing will be done to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions.

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.