Quotes from Ben Wilson

Dickens became one of the greatest interpreters of urban life because he was a prodigious walker; his visceral encounters with the physical and human cityscape run through all his work. Urban literature is bound up with walking, because walking takes you away from the familiar, down "long perplexing lanes untrod before," as John Gay put it in his 1716 poem "Trivia; or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London.

All adolescents want to escape from home into the world, not vice versa as adults do. The suburbs naturally mark a front line of conflict between teenagers and parents, a clash of values and aspirations.

The light in which the city is cast by writers, poets and artists helps determine the kind of cities we get.

According to the architect Jon Jerde, commissioned to rethink the mall in the 1980s: "Urban and suburban Americans seldom stroll aimlessly, as Europeans do, to parade and rub shoulders in a crowd. We need a destination, a sense of arrival at a definite location.

Tenements were a screenwriter's dream—lively, interesting places that lent themselves to narrative.

By 1980 8.2% of American suburbanites (7.4 million people) lived below the poverty line; over the next two decades the figure doubled, meaning that impoverished suburbanites outnumbered poor people in the inner city. Murders fell in American cities by 16.7% but rose by 16.9% in the suburbs.

by 2025, 440 cities with a collective population of 600 million (7% of all people) will account for half of worldwide gross domestic product.

In examining the history of cities, I looked for material in markets, souks and bazaars; in swimming pools, stadiums and parks; in street-food stalls, coffee houses and cafés; in shops, malls and department stores. I interrogated paintings, novels, films and songs as much as official records in search of the lived experience of cities and the intensity of their daily life.

press-ganged', 'taking the wind out of your sails', 'shot across the bows', 'loose cannon', 'shipshape', 'batten down the hatches' belong more obviously to the sea. Others such as 'close quarters', 'cut and run', 'fathoming' something, 'broad in the beam' and the 'cut of your jib' take a moment

The late twentieth century saw the creation of "boomburbs" in America—vast suburbs of over 100,000 people that had long-term population-growth figures in double digits. Their population increase and economic vitality outpaced cities. Mesa, a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, for example, has a population of over half a million, making it bigger than the cities of Miami, St. Louis and Minneapolis.

what looks like chaos is often self-organised in an intricate and invisible way.

Most importantly, studies have shown that easy access to green space significantly improves mental and physical health. It reduces stress to boot and improves cognitive development in children.

If you refuse to go to the market, how would you know of the existence of others? How would you know of your own existence?

It is a memorable and counterintuitive fact that the invention of the city came long before the invention of the wheel.

What perhaps began as a consensual, communal undertaking evolved into a highly centralised, highly unequal society. There was probably no sudden change or power grab: each generation built on the work of the last, and strides in efficiency were paid for with small sacrifices of freedom and equality. Rewarding labour with grants of food from the benevolent temple became, in time, a way of compelling hard work through the control of rations.

Cities create entirely new taboos and restrictions even as they liberate.

Songdo in South Korea was built from scratch along these specifications on land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea at a cost of $35 billion. Labelled the twenty-first century's "high-tech utopia," it is a living city, touted as

Electricity gave rise to elevators, light bulbs, telegraphs and telephones, recent inventions that made working in a tower possible, along with heating and ventilation systems. The skyscraper was a machine as much as it was a building, the culmination of nineteenth-century technology.

A city is one of the miracles of human existence. What prevents the human ant heap from degenerating into violence is civility, the spoken and unspoken codes that govern day-to-day interactions between people.