Quotes About Urban

I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice, I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused, flowing, sounds of the city, sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night.

El éxtasis del habitante metropolitano no consiste tanto en un romance a primera vista como en uno a "última vista", por así decirlo; se trata de un adiós definitivo, coincidente en los versos con el momento encantador.

the images of my metropolitan childhood perhaps are capable, at their core, of preforming later historical experience' .

So I got up, went down to the number 1 train, and rode in a car full to brimming over with commuters going from the jobs that they didn't want back to the lives they hadn't bargained for.

You could see New Jersey out of Mardi's window. From the seventy-second floor it looked like a scale model of Purgatory.

Gentrification had stopped dead several doors west of my spot overlooking Avenue B. You could actually see the line. That side of the line; Biafran cuisine, sparkling plastic secure window units, women called Imogen and Saffron, men called Josh and Morgan. My side of the line; crack whores, burned-out cars, bullets stuck in door frames, and men called Father-Eating Bastard. It's almost a point of honour to live near a crackhouse, like living in a pre-Rudy Zone, a piece of Old New York.

The City went to me in a LANDSLIDE, and you know why? Because all it wants is decent television, a bit of spare change for booze, and a blowjob every Saturday night.

People who live in monofunctional, car-dependent neighborhoods outside of urban centers are much less trusting of other people than people who live in walkable neighborhoods where housing is mixed with shops, services, and places to work.

There is no single answer to any problem in the city. The solution comes from a multiplicity of answers.'"*

Enrique Peñalosa with a big and simple idea: that urban design should be used to make people happier.

The conclusion: killer drivers are so common in sprawl that the carnage they create far exceeds the damage done by killers who use other weapons. In fact, someone who walks out her door on the edges of sprawl suburbia is much more likely to die at the hands of a stranger than someone moving through most American central cities or inner suburbs. The only difference is that most of suburbia's killers didn't mean it.

land zoning that excludes apartments and affordable housing from neighborhoods also constitutes a form of segregation.

six-story mixed-use building produced more than thirteen times the tax revenue and twelve times the jobs per acre of land than the Walmart on the edge of town.

The farther away the parking, the livelier the street.

Sometimes it takes an entire generation to see the life lost between freeway off-ramps.

In 2010 Miami, Florida, became the first major city to toss out its entire zoning book in favor of a homegrown form-based code.

the most important psychological effect of the city is the way in which it moderates our relationships with other people.

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.

Ample, easy parking is the hallmark of the dispersed city. It is also a killer of street life. A cruise through Los Angeles illustrates the dynamic. The city's downtown has been said to contain more parking spaces per acre than any other place on earth, and its streets are some of the most desolate.

the obvious solution to congestion—building more roads—simply produces more traffic, creating a hedonic treadmill of construction and frustration.

we all live in systems that shape our travel behavior. And most of us live in systems that give us almost no choice in how to live or get around. Americans have it worst.

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.

We're living an experiment," he finally yelled back at me as he pocketed his cell phone. "We might not be able to fix the economy. We might not be able to make everyone as rich as Americans. But we can design the city to give people dignity, to make them feel rich. The city can make them happier." There it was, the declaration I have seen bring tears to so many eyes with its promise of urban revolution and redemption.

First, as I will explore in this book, our preferences—the things we buy, the places we choose to live—do not always maximize our happiness in the long run. Second, sprawl, as an urban form, was laid out, massively subsidized, and legally mandated long before anyone actually decided to buy a house there. It is as much the result of zoning, legislation, and lobbying as a crowded city block. It did not occur naturally. It was designed.