virginity, guilt, and suburbia?

The virgin sidewalk – the physical embodiment of sprawl’s guilty conscience – reveals the true failure of suburbia, a landscape in which automobile use is a prerequisite to social viability.

Duany, Andres, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck.  Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream.  New York: North Point Press, 2000.

in defense of the humanities

In the larger view we know that attitudes and beliefs cannot be excluded even from the practical approach, for it is practical to recognize human passions in any environmental calculus; they cannot be excluded from the theoretical approach because man is, in fact, the ecological dominant and his behavior needs to be understood in depth, not merely mapped.

Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values.  Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974, p. 2.

inefficiency makes people grouchy

In sum, according to these visions, water should return to the height from which it falls, motive power or force should not be wasted, machine theories should address mechanical practice, workers should do as they are told, struggle should yield better-adapted forms of life, people should control themselves, and inhumane practices should be inefficient.

Alexander, Jennifer Karns.  The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control.  Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, p 164.

Expressways dismembered poor neighborhoods, destroying local communities; they also enabled both the dispossessed (and the wealthy who had also fled) to return to work in the inner city - to sustain, and to bleed it, respectively.

Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, New York: The New Press, 1997, p 202.

social space: modernism as circulation, postmodernism as atomization and rootedness

The central problem for [architect Leon] Krier is that modernist urban planning works mainly though mono-functional zoning.  As a result, circulation of people between zones by way of artificial arteries becomes the central preoccupation of the planner, generating an urban pattern that is, in Krier's judgement, 'anti-ecological' because it is wasteful of time, energy, and land [...]

Krier contrasts this situation with the 'good city' (by its nature ecological) in which 'the totality of urban functions' are provided within 'compatible and pleasant walking distances.'  Recognizing that such an urban form 'cannot grow by extension in width and height' but only 'through multiplication,' Krier seeks a city form made up of 'complete and finite urban communities,' each constituting an independent urban quarter within  a large family of urban quarters, that in turn make up 'cities within a city.'

From David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990, p. 67

The vagabond's wayward travels meant that he always had traces of elsewhere about him which disturbed those who had chosen a settled and rooted existence - the vagabond threatened to undo the comforts of place and transgressed the expectations of a sedentarist metaphysics.

Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction.  Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Even cars may fulfill the function of analogons [images, signs, and symbols], for they are at once extensions of the body and mobile homes, so to speak, fully equipped to receive these wandering bodies.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2009, p 98.

on phallocracy and wookies

The arrogant verticality of skyscrapers, and especially of public and state buildings, introduces a phallic or more precisely a phallocratic element into the visual realm; the purpose of this display, of this need to impress, is to convey an impression of authority to each spectator.  Verticality and great height have ever been the spatial expression of potentially violent power.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2009, p 98

We learn to ride a bicycle without a manual of physics; formal knowledge of the balance of forces may even be a handicap.

Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977, p 200.

There are illegibilities of the layered depths in a single place, of ruses in action and of historical accidents.  The writing of these evocations is sketched out, ironically and fleetingly, in graffiti, as if the bicycle painted on a wall, the insignia of a common transit, detached itself and made itself available for indeterminate tours.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, p 200