Why Place Matters Quotes

“In a way unprecedented in human history, modernity has sharply divided public life from private life.”
― Wilfred M. McClay, Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America

“And as a kind of coda to this analysis come these words from American farmer and man of letters Wendell Berry: If you are dependent on people who do not know you, who control the value of your necessities, you are not free, and you are not safe.”
― Wilfred M. McClay, Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America

“So what do I mean by modernity? The modern world derives its distinctive characteristics from the transformation of traditional societies initiated by the rise of modern industrial capitalism in mid-eighteenth-century Protestant Europe and America, which was itself preceded by some 250 to 300 years of witting and unwitting cultural spadework in religion, art, science, commerce, and colonization. One consequence of the rise of industrial capitalism—epitomized by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Max Weber, and today de rigueur—has been an acute and increasingly sophisticated attention to economic behavior, indeed to economic interest seen as not only a determinant of human action but in many modern theories as the determinant of human action.”
― Wilfred M. McClay, Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America

“How can this hypothesis possibly be true, when the contemporary culture of building, when modern culture itself, when so many prominent institutions and so many aspects of our own lives as individuals, all seem to deny it? When the way we live so often emphasizes motion rather than calm, mobility rather than place, the disposable over the durable, the temporal over the eternal, novelty over beauty? Consider dynamic fields of modern achievement for the pre-modern practices of which few of us do or should long: medicine, sanitation engineering, aeronautics, communication media, and information technology. All these fields are apparently modern in a way that traditional building and traditional urbanism apparently are not. Is this an intellectual and existential contradiction?”
― Wilfred M. McClay, Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America

“Can we design or construct places that are better suited to deeper human needs and purposes?” Rybczynski asks. And then he answers his question with another. “We certainly can build such places, but will people want to live in them?” In other words, successful place-making must begin not with abstractions, but with the people that we already are, and the places we already inhabit. Places are made, but the best place-making is not done from scratch, since “adaptation,” Rybczynski insists, “is always better than invention.”
― Wilfred M. McClay, Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America

“Another common adult misunderstanding is this: Parents and teachers think that the child should be taught the local geography first. From there they introduce her to ever larger units by graduated steps. The child is not, however, naturally disposed to learn by graduated steps. Her mind tends to leap from one spatial-temporal scale to another, such that, at seven or eight, she may well take a more lively interest in America than in Dane County, Wisconsin, in the dinosaur than in the dairy cow, in the Great Wall of China than in her hometown’s water tower. Socially and morally, too, she is more drawn to issues of good and evil, fairness and unfairness, categories that affect her life, than to adult priorities of class, ethnicity, and nationality.14 Unfortunately, adults have power, which they all too often use to steer the child to their own narrower concerns.”
― Wilfred M. McClay, Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America

“Similarly, American citizens like to think of their identity as fluid, capable of changing as they move from one geographical location to another, or as they climb up the socioeconomic ladder. The closest thing Americans have to an identity card is their driver’s license—a card that gives them license to drive into the blue yonder and there discover who they are and can be.”
― Wilfred M. McClay, Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America