James Howard Kunstler Quotes

LA is such a crumbling mess of a city. Basically in all my years of travelling, I haven't found another city in the western world that interest me as much as Los Angeles - which might sound like heresy, but most cities, history has already happened and the people living there are sort of living on the bones of the thousand years of history that's already happened there. Whereas LA is always reinventing itself.

In housing in the fifties in Britain and the sixties, we pulled down the terraces - destroyed whole communities and replaced them with tower blocks and we built walkways that became rat-runs for muggers. That was the fashionable opinion. But it was wrong.

At that time [90th in Lagos], if you drove through the city, you drove through a foreground that always seemed to be incredibly dramatic and incredibly agonised - smoking, burning, incredible compression. In the first year we stayed on the ground and went everywhere. But then in order to discover whether this was the whole story, we rented a helicopter. And we began to understand that this is not chaos but a highly modern system that had been abandoned, then at some point went into reversal, then slowly came out of it.

When you clean up a city, you destroy it.

In Paris, there has to be a presence. History becomes the most interesting when it's compared to the present. I mean there's a whole group of people that want to build new buildings that look like old buildings.

I found that through my life, living in the city of Toronto, I look above the Pizza Pizza sign, and I look above the other signs and window dressing, and I see evidence of a city that no longer exists in the keystones and the decorations that line the tops of buildings. That presence of the old city has always moved me.

Before 2000, everything was about being contextual, and buildings were supposed to be good citizens.

When there were fears about the future of this nation's older cities... when a few of the cities teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, all eyes were focused on Chicago for contrast.

When they show the destruction of society on color TV, I want to be able to look out over Los Angeles and make sure they get it right.

It's a shame about California, and particularly about L.A., where they've demolished so many landmarks. It's a bit of a disease there, where if anything is over 30 years old, they sort of knock it down and replace it. It's a strange town, it's this sprawling suburb, and then there's a city, the old town.

Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.

When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

When urbanity decays, civilization suffers and decays with it.

I've never looked at a suburban building as being a minor building and an urban building as being a major building.

Downtown Detroit has more vacant buildings over 10 storeys than any city in the world.

One thing about Los Angeles is it feels like it's not new. It feels like it's already been built, and it's deteriorating, except for the places they're trying to make nicer. But in general, you drive all through the city, and the city feels like it was new a long time ago.

Most cities are eclectic. There's a bit of medieval, Georgian, some Victorian and some 20th century. That's fine. Bath is different because it was built within 100 years or less. It has a homogeneity.

Paris has long been a palimpsest of different cities, each new iteration grafted on top of the still visible last, spanning the extremes of human excellence and beauty and, just as crucially, filth and squalor.

If we're talking about the urban landscape as an advanced, forward-thinking art form, there must be some intellectual thinking involved.

The city of Rio de Janeiro is setting an example to the world of how to recover quality urban spaces through drastic intervention and the creation of cultural facilities such as the Museum of Tomorrow.

When I look at cities now, I don't see them in the present. This is the decaying infrastructure of our existing cities. Years from now, none of this is going to be here. New cities are going to rise.

In New York, you have thousands of buildings that have never been renovated, that have horrible designs, that are really cramped and terrible.

We are extraordinarily lucky in the U.K. to have inherited a diverse range of cities that bear the imprints of many centuries of human habitation.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Every city in the world can be improved in less than three years.