 It's important to realize that sometimes whole cultures make tragic choices, you know, just as individuals do in their lives. And we kind of made a tragic choice in America to pursue this suburban project the way we did it. You know, we decided that we were going to become a drive-in society at a certain point, you know, really after the Second World War was over. And we pursued it just with the most maniacal intensity, and it got out of hand. The built environment really is the human habitat, and it used to come really in two basic divisions, the urban and the rural. This all changed with the suburbs, and what we got was this new mishmash of things that were not really rural and not really urban. In some respects they had all of the drawbacks of each, and few of the advantages. Suburbia had all the congestion of the city without having any of the real connection between things. Historically you can understand why we did it, why we made the choice. The American city was never really a very nice place after a certain point. You know, they mostly were organisms that rose up with the industrial process. And they were expressions of industrialism, and they attained a scale and a kind of programming that made them pretty unpleasant places to live after a certain point. Cities as large as New York around the year 1900 had never been seen before in history, except maybe London contemporaneously. And the noise, the smoke of industry, the smells, just the unpleasantness of it all. The enormous tenement neighborhoods where the factory workers had to live. The scale of this had never been seen. New York City had a density that exceeded Calcutta today around the turn of the century in New York. At the turn of the century there was a movement called the City Beautiful Movement. And the idea was that we had become a great new powerful nation in the theater of nations, and that we had to have cities now that were worthy of our new status in the world. So a great effort was made among the architects and the municipal officials. There was a real consensus that was established at the highest levels and most broad levels of American culture that we had to make our cities better. So at that point you got the great urban places that we still revere. The great civic centers of San Francisco and Cleveland, the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These wonderful civic places and the great monumental buildings that went with them. But after the First World War the City Beautiful Movement really ends. And it was really remarkably brief. And you get this new project of now devoting all of this investment and effort into suburban development and to retrofitting the city for automobiles. And the boom of the 1920s was largely about that. And of course it all came to grief in the stock market crash of 1929. And the construction industry was among the hardest hit industries in America during the Great Depression. And that went on basically through most of the 1930s. And by then we're segueing into World War II already. So after World War II, you know, we're kind of exhausted from all this. Moreover, our cities have not been cared for very well for the last 15, 20 years really since the stock market crash. You know, they've been neglected. There hasn't been a whole lot of investment because there wasn't much money around. And you get to the late, you get to the early 1950s and there's one image of city life for most of America. And that's Ralph Cramden's apartment in the Honeymooners. You know, this dreary cell-like tenement apartment with a view of the air shaft. And the American war veterans come back from World War II and they, you know, they don't want to live in Ralph Cramden's apartment. You know, they want space and air and light. And, you know, there are other things going on. We are right now in 1945, let's say, you know, when the war is over, we're the last man standing in the industrial world. We seem to have all the oil that we could ever possibly use and more. And so we could make anything we wanted and sell it to anybody else in the world and now lend them the money to buy it from us. And this is what goes on through the 1950s and 60s. And, you know, this is accompanied by a resumption of the suburban project that sort of stopped dead in the water in 1929. And we resume the suburban project with a vengeance. And, you know, the rest is history. It continues up through the whole end of the 20th century, probably accelerates even, you know, more madly in the 1990s and early 21st century and culminates in this fiasco of the housing bubble and the banking fiasco that went with it. And now, you know, we're beginning to live in the aftermath of that and everything has changed. Only the American public doesn't really know it yet. One of the consequences of it is that a huge amount of capital has left the system in the form of debt that will never be repaid or will be welshed on in one way or another, or defaulted. And that money was the money we hoped we would rebuild, you know, the new post-industrial, post-oil economy with. And that money's not going to be there. Nor is that money going to be there for continued suburban expansion or for building any of the accessories and furnishings of suburbia that we're familiar with, like the strip malls, the power centers as they're called, where the big box stores live. You know, we're done with that. We're done. The project is over and we don't get it yet. And all over the USA there are realtors and production home builders and other people who deliver suburbia to you, you know, have kicked back and they're waiting for the bottom to come in on the housing implosion and then they expect a resumption of the boom. And they're waiting in vain. They're done. The production home builders are going down and they're not coming back. You know, we've got just an immense inventory of unsold houses, much of it in places where it shouldn't have been built in the first place, where it's going to be hemorrhaging value both in terms of just its sheer monetary value and its usefulness. Suburbia probably has several destinies. Part of it will be slums. Part of it will be salvage because we're going to, you know, a lot of the material that went into building it has value and it took a lot of energy to make the cinder blocks in the strip malls and to make the aluminum trusses in the big box store and the steel that went in all that stuff. You know, we're going to retrieve a lot of that stuff. We'll disassemble some of it. Some of these places won't be. Some of these places will be just ruins. Some of them will be salvage, but some of them will be ruins and some of them will be slums. And some of them may be just scraped off, you know, at some point. That's maybe the least likely outcome because it will take more money to scrape them off than it will to systematically disassemble them and you can do that by hand, you know. But the relationship of this, what will be a return to real urban habitats that will be smaller, more compact, dense, probably lower, you know, they won't be 50 stories high, they'll be 10 stories or 7 stories or less. You know, that's really our future if we're lucky. You know, if we can get through this bottleneck of problems and continue to remain civilized. These trends and converging problems which I've bundled into this idea of the long emergency are really going to mandate a new way of behaving and it's going to involve a reconnection with history, a way of designing and assembling traditional habitats, towns, villages, walkable neighborhoods, walkable cities, cities that are scaled more intelligently to the energy realities of the future and the economic realities of the future. And these are going to have to exist, by the way, in a meaningful relationship with productive agriculture because another one of the forces that is going to be bearing down on us is going to be the failure of industrial agriculture of essentially turning oil into corn and, you know, and turning oil into food. We're done doing that. We don't know it yet, but it's going to change everything. And by the way, these are the ideas that have been promoted pretty much by the new urbanists, a group that I've been associated with for about 15 years. And, you know, the new urbanists were known for the projects like Seaside, Florida, and Kentlands in Washington, the new towns, the traditional neighborhood developments. They were in a way, they were really kind of a transitional form and they were done really in conjunction with the production home builders. And they're not the great achievement of the new urbanists. Their achievement, and what they'll be remembered for, is for diving into the dumpster of history and retrieving all that information and principle and all those skill sets and methodologies that are needed to design and assemble a meaningful human habitat that has a future and that is worth caring about. And, you know, those of us who have been involved with this understand that the new urbanism is not really new. It's just urbanism that was forgotten. And what they've done now is provide, once again, continuity between what we've done historically and emulating the success of 5,000 years of urban tradition and putting it back into really into everyday use. They've been in an ongoing fierce battle with the suburban developers and the municipal officials and the existing codes and zoning ordinances. You know, they've been battling this for a generation now. And, you know, they've had a lot of victories there, but the tremendous inertia of the last gasp of the, you know, the final fiesta of the cheap energy blowout really overcame everything in the last 20 years. And so, you know, 99.9% of everything that got built in the last 20 years has been, you know, conventional stuff or stunt architecture by the star architects. I think we have reached a dead end with, you know, what I would call narcissistic stunt architecture for a lot of reasons. You know, one is that this long emergency that I've written about, this set of converging crises of ecology and economy and resources is going to compel us to change the way we live and the way we behave, really whether we like it or not. It's going to be a crisis of the human habitat as well. Our cities are probably going to have to contract. They're going to get smaller. And the process is probably going to be disorderly. We're going to have to rethink the scale and the size and the height of the city. My own conviction is that the skyscraper is going to prove to be a very problematical type of building in the years ahead. And that, in fact, we'll discover that it was really a manifestation of cheap energy and is not possible without it. I'm fond of referring to suburbia as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. But this also applies to, you know, putting up 60-story apartment buildings, especially if they prove to be buildings with a very limited design life that are never going to be fixed. I saw a preview of coming attractions of this in Johannesburg, South Africa about six months ago when I was there. They have a downtown of skyscrapers about the size of Denver with about the same number of glass towers. You know, in this case, all built in about the 70s and 80s. And when the apartheid government came to an end in 1993, corporate white South Africa abandoned the glass towers of downtown and moved to an alternative universe of office parks in the northern suburbs. And the office towers of downtown Johannesburg were brought up by slumlords and turned into apartments for people to live in, but not really converted very well. In some cases, you know, people just living in offices now. You know, what awaits them is either ruinhood or disassembly, maybe, if they're lucky. And, you know, I think we're going to see quite a bit of that in the USA, too. The ground rules for being an architect and for just building stuff in the future are going to be changing pretty severely. And I think what you'll see is you'll need to know how to use materials found in nature and materials that can be fabricated regionally at least with perhaps less energy than we're used to using now. And, you know, what that largely means is, you know, masonry, brick, wood, I think we're going to see a lot more of that. I think we're going to see a return to that. It will probably benefit young people to learn how to build in masonry if they possibly can, because we're going to need a lot of that in the future. They'll have to understand tectonics more because building at a materials found in nature or building in brick, you have to really be able to make stuff stand up. Well, I think that the architecture profession is going to contract a lot. For one thing, we're not going to be building so massively. We're not going to be building at the giant increment anymore. We're not going to need so many experts in HVAC and, you know, hyper-specialization within the discipline. I also think that you're going to see a strange and interesting thing happen in the university scene. You know, I've taken the position sort of that in this long emergency period we're entering that anything that operates at the giant scale is going to get into trouble, whether it's a government or an enormous, you know, national or global corporation or a big university. I think the universities are going to get in a huge amount of trouble and are going to contract. You know, the capital is not going to be there for them. School is not going to be a consumer activity anymore. You know, I don't think we can be sure it's even going to continue to exist in anything like the form that we've known it. If anything, I think it's liable to return to being an extremely elite activity that is college, you know, an elite activity that may provoke a lot of resentment and grievance from people who have lost incomes and been downsized and lost their vocations and are not making it and there's going to be a lot of them. The former middle class is going to expand quite a bit in the years ahead. So we're looking, I think, at a smaller profession that is going to be, you know, they're going to be, the schools are going to shrink, they're going to be pumping fewer of them out and there's going to be less work of the kind that they've been used to for a while.