Quotes About Urban

Hyde Park Corner is what happens when a bunch of urban planners take one look at the grinding circle of gridlock that surrounds the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and think—that's what we want for our town.

He threw a fireball at me. I threw a chimney stack at him - that's the London way.

In the 1960s the planning department of the London County Council, whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started, decided that what London really needed was a series of orbital motorways driven through its heart.

Urban Outfitters, eh," said Beverley. "That explains the Dr Denim shirt." "My mum bought me that," I said. "And you think that's less embarrassing?

As a typical Londoner, Gurcan had a high tolerance for random thoughtlessness; after all, if you live in the big city there's no point complaining that it's a big city, but even that tolerance has its limit and the name of that limit is 'taking the piss'.

Landscaping is the great cardinal sin of modern architecture. It's not your garden, it's not a park - it's a formless patch of grass, shrubbery and the occasional tree that exists purely to stop the original developer's plans from looking like a howling concrete wilderness.

culminating in one of those formless red brick shopping centres which artfully combines a complete lack of aesthetic quality with a total disregard for the utilitarian function for which it is built.

One Hyde Park squatted next to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel like a stack of office furniture, and with all the elegance and charm of the inside of a photocopier. Albeit a brand new photocopier that doubled as a fax and document scanner.

Nobody knows why some systems—rivers, forests, possibly the London Underground but we're not sure—acquire a genius loci. Not even the genii locorum themselves know the why and the how of it—they only know it happens.

Before London swallowed it whole, Camden Town was the fork in the road best known for a coaching inn called the Mother Red Cap. It served as a last-chance stop for beer, highway robbery and gonorrhoea before heading north into the wilds of Middlesex.

Street towards Covent Garden. There was

Ben Aaronovitch

Also a Friday night, which meant crowds of young people being horribly drunk and loud in two dozen languages.

Archway is where the post-war dream of the urban motorway died in the teeth of local opposition and the inability of the designers to answer basic traffic management questions.

A society sufficiently sophisticated to produce the internal combustion engine has not had the sophistication to develop cheap and efficient public transport?' 'Yes, boss... it's true. There's hardly any buses, the trains are hopelessly underfunded, and hence the entire population is stuck in traffic

New York will always seem more real than anything Britain has to offer. It is strange that, although the majority of British people have never seen a skate-boarding body-popper, an exploding fire-hydrant, or anybody dunk a doughnut, these things seem infinitely more immediate and happening images than that jar of Horlicks which has stood in the cupboard for 40 years

carefully combed and scented vulture waiting to swoop down from the side lines." Evening after evening between 6 o'clock and midnight he drifts in and out of the lobby, up and down Randolph Street and takes up his position at various points of vantage where crowds pass, where women pass. I've watched him. No one ever talks to him. There are no salutations. He is unknown and worse. For the women, the rouged and ornamental ones, know him a bit too well. They

I don't think any other city in the world... the sun doesn't shine the same way anywhere as it does in New York. And then I guess everyone's very good at hanging out. Not in a crazy way, but you're just constantly interacting and learning.

My parents did not care whether I saw an opera or understood a statue; all that could be considered in time, in the future, for operas and statues belonged to urban culture, and my kinfolks said any person with any kind of background could acquire a city civilization, but that few city people could ever learn the culture of a rural country.

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.

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.

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.

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