Quotes About Cities

The sad part is that a place's popularity can actually destroy the elements that contribute to happiness. The more we flock to high-status cities for the good life—money, opportunity, novelty—the more crowded, expensive, polluted, and congested those places become. The result? Surveys show that rich, high-status states in the United States are among the least happy in the country.

Many North American cities are just waking up to the fact that they have been engaging in a massive urban Ponzi scheme, with new development creating short-term benefits in development fees and tax revenues but even bigger long-term costs that pile up faster than cities' ability to pay them off.

What followed was "a new kind of mass death," says urban historian Peter Norton, who charted the transformation in America's road culture during the 1920s. More than two hundred thousand people were killed in motor accidents in the United States that decade. Most were killed in cities. Most of the dead were pedestrians. Half were children and youths.

met in a harborside convention center in Vancouver to figure out how to save the world's exploding cities from disaster. The world had little inkling of the great recession slouching on the horizon, yet the prognosis was bleak. The problem? On the one hand, cities were pumping out most of the world's pollution and 80 percent

Meanwhile, dispersal starves the budgets of cities forced to spend sales tax dollars on roads, pipes, sewage, and services for the distant neighborhoods of sprawl, leaving little for the shared amenities that make central-city living attractive.

It is tempting to believe that the job of fixing cities is the untouchable terrain of distant authorities whom the state has deemed responsible. It is a terrible mistake to give in to this temptation.

With about half the world's population, cities are responsible for three-quarters of energy consumption and 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and the dispersed city is the most wasteful of them all.

Activity in human life is the greatest attraction in cities.

Trust is the bedrock on which cities grow and thrive. Modern metropolitan cities depend on our ability to think beyond the family and tribe and to trust the people who look, dress, and act nothing like us to treat us fairly, to honor commitments and contracts, to consider our well-being along with their own, and, most of all, to make sacrifices for the general good. Collective problems such as pollution and climate change demand collective responses. Civilization is a shared project.

My mother was a braid of black smoke. She bore me swaddled over the burning cities. The sky was a vast and windy place for a child to play. We met many others who were just like us. They were trying to put on their overcoats with arms made of smoke. The high heavens were full of little shrunken deaf ears instead of stars.

The state of New Jersey is really two places - terrible cities and wonderful suburbs. I live in the suburbs, the final battleground of the American dream, where people get married and have kids and try to scratch out a happy life for themselves. It's very romantic in that way, but a bit naive. I like to play with that in my work.

I have done this before. In other cities, other nights. So often I can repeat each gesture without owning any of them.

In every generation until mine, most of humanity lived with the night sky. As people began moving into cities and using more illumination, the sky gradually disappeared. There must be a corresponding loss of wonder without the stars to remind us where we stand in creation.

Cities are the huge central dynamos of all being. The power of a man can be measured today by the mile, the number of miles between him and the city; that is, between him and what the city stands for -- the centre of mass.

When we are victorious on a world scale I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world.

ALTHOUGH THE WATTS RIOT of 1965 was an extreme response, it appears in retrospect as an ominous omen of the future. One domestic crisis after another in the next few years, including even bloodier racial confrontations in the cities, shattered the optimism of social engineers and threw liberals back on the defensive. By late 1965 Johnson himself seemed close to despair.

General Lawton Collins, a top American adviser, said that the United States must put the squeeze on the French to get them off their fannies. Nothing of that sort happened, and the French, hanging on to major cities such as Hanoi and Saigon, foolishly decided in early 1954 to fight a decisive battle at Dienbienphu, a hard-to-defend redoubt deep in rebel-held territory near the border with Laos.49

Quick, name some towns in New Jersey

Sundown suburbs are the key reason why geographer Jeff Crump was able to maintain that cities in the United States are the most racially segregated urban areas in the world.

I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.

The desirability of segregating dwellings from work has been so dinned into us that it takes an effort to look at real life and observe that residential districts lacking mixture with work do not fare well in cities.

Privacy is precious in cities. It is indispensable. Perhaps it is precious and indispensable everywhere, but in most places you cannot get it. In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not—only those you choose to tell will know much about you.

Cities are not ordained; they are wholly existential. To say that a city grew "because" it was located at a good site for trading is, in view of what we can see in the real world, absurd. Few resources in this world are more common than good sites for trading but most of the settlements that form at these good sites do not become cities.

When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: A city cannot be a work of art.