(Excerpt from a speech delivered the National Association of Real Estate at Chicago) 

Two decades into this another century, I’m certain that we all wonder, perhaps with a little apprehension, what lies ahead. We live in a time when we are encouraged by our culture and all of its machinery to think only of our present particular moment. We are taught that only something new (architecture, technology, material goods, social and political thought) has any value. We are taught that it is our charge to always reinvent and remake and rethink and reimagine in order to find the perfectly new and perfectly fit. 

We are told to devalue the old and value the unknown and untried because that is where the seeds of the future are sown. We are told to innovate, to constantly remake the world in the hopes that something we do will be judged as progress, and genius. I would have thought that from our perspective, at the end of an extraordinarily nasty and brutal 20th Century, one that has seen so much that is new and supposedly innovative do so much destruction, we might begin to come to our senses. We might begin to question whether the new and innovative, and a misguided advocacy of progress through constant reinvention, can alone lead us to a land of peace and beauty and harmony and happiness, to honesty and justice and courage and patience.

But this has not happened. A rage for the new at the expense of more critical foundation ideas will not get it done. Deeper and more important questions come first:  What should be the ends to which our progress is directed? Can we overcome the idea that technology is autonomous and that any judgments about it must refer solely to its intrinsic qualities? 

Perhaps the largest and most visible impact of this is our cities. The world’s cities have not been well treated. We have abandoned them, torn them apart with highways and parking lots, destroyed their historic fabric, separated their populations by race and class, made their public realms banal or worse and their private realms predominate. 

I believe that our earlier cities when first made and peopled, were much more focused and widely understood the sense and purpose of a city. This is certainly not to say that these earlier times were untroubled by misery, greed or injustice. It is to say, however, that questions of purpose were asked, and answered, in a more coherent and widely understandable fabric. 

Institutions of common purpose, the places of worship, the places of governance, the points of learning, the public spaces, were positioned in the city and given their form and appearance as most significant. Public places were designed such that they related to the civic structures. The private matters of the city, homes and shops clustered to form neighborhoods, and here again these structures deferred to the public realm and the hierarchy of civic, public and private.

But over the last decades we have seen this order overcome, damaged. Private buildings are the focus of the hierarchy of our cities, and in so many cities and regions the public realm has been abandoned. Large segments of the populations of all nations have migrated to cities. This has resulted in huge, ugly and dangerous urban sprawls often spread across hundreds of square miles. 

In many cities across the world, there is an effort to rectify this. The results are definitely not assured, especially given some of the defective ways we think about cities. But progress is possible.

The question here is How shall we define progress? In contemporary culture, progress is seen as infinitely expanding technology, from which we can expect salvation. Progress is seen as an infinitely expanding economy, from which we can expect riches. Progress is infinite speed, infinite mobility, infinite resources, infinite cleverness and wit, infinite individuality and autonomy. The facts of our real history, our personal histories, even our real recent history, powerfully betray these common understandings of progress.

Progress should instead be defined as an increase in civility, and an increase in the common well being. Progress should begin with an acknowledgment of limits, the limits of resources and time and place that are real, limits that we continually try to ignore. Only a revised definition of progress can offer real hope and real optimism about our future into this millennium.

It is critical to understand that true progress is not about quantity: True progress is about quality. This is central to achieving what progress should represent. Quality of our homes, our work, our governance, our education, and our gathering together.

There is and will remain plenty to do. And there is good reason to be concerned about the future of technology that gives shape and form and formal order to the moral and social order of our culture. It is in a dangerous and difficult condition, caught between a recent past of questionable results and a future filled with the powerful temptation to forget what counts as we continue the unending building up of our technologies, and our cities.