Suburbia is not going to run on biodiesel. The easy-motoring tourist industry is not going to run on biodiesel, wind power and solar fuel.

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.

On top of the insult of destroying the geographic places we call home, the chain stores also destroyed people's place in the order of daily life, including the duties, responsibilities, obligations, and ceremonies that prompt citizens to care for each other.

I am a sur le motif painter, always in-the-field, with a French easel that folds up into a box, with backpack straps on it. Many of the sites I haunt are desolately beautiful. Few other people go there. I am gloriously alone, unmolested, and absorbed in attempting to see what I am looking at.

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

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.

My own opinion is that the suburban project is over. We are done. We don't know it yet. For about five years or so the people who deliver all that crap - developers, realtors, various money people - have kicked back waiting for the system to get going again, to resume all their accustomed behavior. They wait in vain. They just haven't figured out that we face a new disposition of things.