Robert Bruegmann Quotes (5 Quotes)

Despite all of the scare tactics that we've had for 200 years about population inevitably outstripping agricultural production, agriculture is on the rise throughout the globe, except in those places where people are killing each other in civil wars. In the U. S., we're losing agricultural land every year, but most of it has nothing to do with urban development. Most of it's just because you don't need the land. The amount of land we have for agriculture is so great that about 50 percent of the annual income of farmers in the U. S. is government subsidy, because we just don't need all of that food.

(In) the industrial cities of 100 years ago ... millions of urban dwellers ... were obliged to endure cramped and unsanitary tenements, traffic and pollution-choked streets and deadly factories. Today, by comparison, most residents of affluent metropolitan areas live in relatively low-density suburbs, areas that are much cleaner, greener and safer than the neighborhoods their great-grandparents inhabited.

Most people are so sure that strip malls and big-box retail are bad, but what we find ugly today, we may not in the future. Exactly the same criticism was made about fast food joints and service stations 50 years ago. Now, if you have a service station that's over 50 years old, or you have an intact McDonald's, it's so interesting, it's novel, it's quaint. You might not call it beautiful, but you're likely not to call it ugly anymore.

The problem isn't private transportation. The problem is that we have an old-fashioned 19th-century technology, the internal combustion engine using fossil fuels. Let's solve that problem -- maybe by creating small, fuel-efficient vehicles -- and stop talking about putting the city back into its 19th-century state to make mass transit work. Instead, let's see what people want to do, then see how the city can be built around them.

Dense central cities have some advantages, but they also have some tremendous disadvantages congestion, pollution, crime, all the things that central cities have been criticized for in the past 100 years. The same is true of sprawl -- it has all kinds of problems, but I don't know that they're any worse than any other part of the urban area.