So even though I'm officially on charrette for my fall semester studio project, I'm utterly preoccupied by my thesis paper. Although I had a fairly complete outline nearly three weeks ago, I've been restructuring the paper continually. Here's the basic format, shown with the quotes at the heart of the research for each point:

I. Life on the Edge of the City

On the fringe of mass Suburbia, even the advantages of the primary neighborhood group disappear. The cost of this detachment in space from other men is out of all proportion to its supposed benefits. The end product in an encapsulated life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before a television set. [...] Those who accept this existence might as well be encased in a rocket hurtling through space, so narrow are their choices, so limited and deficient their permitted responses. Here indeed we find ‘The Lonely Crowd.’
Lewis Mumford, The City in History

II. Publicity and Everyday Life

We do not, after all, experience the city blankly, and much of what we do absorb from daily life in the city (be it the long drag of the commute, the jostle of the subway crowds, the blandness of the shopping mall, the elegance or grandeur of certain forms of urban architecture, the panhandlers on the sidewalk, or the peace and beauty of an urban park) surely has some kind of influence on how we are situated in the world and how we think and act politely within it.
David Harvey, The Political Economy of Public Space

[...] these spaces are like everyday life: 'trivial, obvious but invisible, everywhere and nowhere.' For most Angelenos, such spaces constitute an everyday reality of infinitely recurring commuting routes and trips to the supermarket, dry cleaner, or video store. The sites for multiple social and economic transactions, these mundane places serve as primary intersections between the individual and the city. [...] This realm of public life lies outside the domain of electoral politics or professional design [...] Unlike normative public spaces, which produce the existing ideology, these spaces help to overturn the status quo.
Margaret Crawford, Blurring the Boundaries: Public Space and Private Life

III. Modernity and Mobility

La ville qui dispose de la vitesse dispose du succès.
Le Corbusier, Urbanisme

One could achieve speed not by concentrating but by fragmenting the urban, opening up the dense fabric to allow the automobile to run free, exploding the city in fragments over whole regions. With urban functions no longer confined within the dense environment of the central city, homes, factories, offices, and stores could spread out and merge with the landscape. Here potentially was a new synthesis of speed and space unknown to urban history.
Robert Fishman, Beyond Sprawl

IV. Density and Democracy

The tolerance, the room for great differences among neighbors–differences that often go far deeper than differences in color–which are possible and normal in intensely urban life, but which are so foreign to suburbs and pseudosuburbs, are possible and normal only when streets of great cities have built-in equipment allowing strangers to dwell in peace together on civilized but essentially dignified and reserved terms.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The only indispensible material factor in the generation of power is the living together of people. Only where men live so close together that the potentialities of action are always present can power remain with them, and the foundation of cities, which as city-states have remained paradigmatic for all Western political organization, is therefore indeed the most important material prerequisite for power.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

V. Toward Public Space as Resistance

It is here, perhaps, with the potential of physical space for sustaining face-to-face, confrontational discussion and debate, that the architect resurfaces as an agent who still has some marginal critical relevance in the late-modern world. How else, other than by providing a provocative public micro-realm, can the architectural profession significantly intervene in the universal megalopolis?
Kenneth Frampton, Land Settlement, Architecture, and the Eclipse of the Public Realm

I've got two weeks to pull this thing together.