Quotes About Urban

Civilized man ... is in danger of losing all contact with the world of instinct- a danger that is still further increased by his living an urban existence in what seems to be a purely man-made environment. This loss of instinct is largely responsible for the pathological condition of contemporary culture.

from Brooklyn,

Bridge; candles were being lit in the four-storey houses

Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air. By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was scribbled with obscenities and hearts.

Sobrevivo a cada manhã quando, cruzando as portas e corredores que me conduzem às ruas intermináveis, imagino sempre que sou invisível para cada um dos que passam.

but it was one of those all-too-common moments in New York when one is faced with a damnable set of options.

Si los hombres del campo tuviéramos las tragaderas de los de las poblaciones, los presidios estarían deshabitados como islas.

Women, particularly in big cities, live with a constant wariness. Their lives are literally on the line in ways men just don't experience. Ask some man you know, "When is the last time you were concerned or afraid that another person would harm you?" Many men cannot recall an incident within years. Ask a woman the same question and most will give you a recent example or say, "Last night," "Today," or even "Every day." Still

Whether or not men can relate to it or believe it or accept it, that is the way it is. Women, particularly in big cities, live with a constant wariness. Their lives are literally on the line in ways men just don't experience.

In the middle of L.A.'s sunny non-winter, I need to sit in a dark closet to feel right.

What makes you think I'm scared?" "City dicks always are." "How do you know I 'm a city dick?" "Well, we're in a city. And you're a dick, aren't you?

I learned that childhood rhyme or the dictum that demanded you scratch your head every time you heard a siren, lest the next siren be for you. But I do know when I started doing it, and now it's become second nature. Still, in a place like Manhattan, where the sirens are always blaring, it can become exhausting to keep up.

It feels like the city is telling secrets down here, privy only to those who think to listen.

The problems will be mostly resolved once everyone understands how cities and farms are parts of a whole, not divisible one from another. When we all realize that, as we munch our good, fresh food, it will not only mean a better environment for all, but the end to this silly political anger that colors everything blue or red instead of a lovely productive green. Another

The Germans dropped tens of thousands of tons of bombs on Stalingrad but most explosions contributed little more than reconfiguration of existing rubble.

The two dominant components that constitute a city, its physical infrastructure and its socioeconomic activity, can both be conceptualized as approximately self-similar fractal-like network structures.

The integration of these two kinds of networks, namely, the requirement that socioeconomic interaction represented by space-filling fractal-like social networks must be anchored to the physicality of a city as represented by space-filling fractal-like infrastructural networks, determines the number of interactions an average urban dweller can sustain in a city.

TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CITIES

We can devolve to develop smaller, or even rural, communities that are just as plugged in as living in the heart of a great metropolis.

The proportionality constant is 21.6, meaning that there is approximately one establishment for about every 22 people in a city, regardless of the city size.

Under certain circumstances, one nowhere feels as lonely and lost as in the metropolitan crowd.

The only city people are those born so.

God bless… Chocolate City… and its vanilla suburbs.

My old love for slums revived, and I found out and haunted the worst in London. They were very good slums, but they were not the slums of Paris—they manage these things better in France.