The twentieth century was about getting around. The twenty-first century will be about staying in a place worth staying in.

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

Cities like Detroit exist because they occupy important sites. In the case of Detroit, it sits on a river between two great lakes - very important and strategic.

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.

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

I'm serenely convinced that we are heading into what will amount to a time out from technological progress as we know it.

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