Quotes About Urban

Activity in human life is the greatest attraction in cities.

The city is a means to a way of life. It can be a reflection of all our best selves. It can be whatever we want it to be. It can change, and change dramatically.

A study of Los Angeles revealed that people who live in areas with more parks are more helpful and trusting than people who don't, regardless of their income or race. Nature is not merely

You cannot separate the social life of urban spaces from the velocity of the activities happening there.

Researchers for Hewlett-Packard convinced volunteers in England to wear electrode caps during their commutes and found that whether they were driving or taking the train, peak-hour travelers suffered worse stress than fighter pilots or riot police facing mobs of angry protesters.*

Peñalosa's argument was that too many rich societies have used their wealth in ways that exacerbate urban problems rather than solve them. Could this help explain the happiness paradox?

I like the streets of New York City, where I was born,better than these streets of palms.No doubt, my father liked his village in Ukrainiabetter than the streets of New York City;and my grandfather the city and its synagogue,where he once read aloud the holy books,better than the villagein which he dickered in the market-place.

Downtown may be gritty and dark and full of evil but on some level an unspoken belief, a faith that we live in a manageable world with its own episodic rules and conventions: Life takes place one hour at a time. Clues present themselves in order, one at a time. Two investigators, properly paired, can solve any mystery.

Tonight, I feel small. An entire night in the city seems to be too much for me, too immense for me to get lost in. By now it's past one, the after-hours city is in full swing, and morning is a long way off.

Seuls deux types de personnes vivent dans la métropole : les super-héros ratés et les vieux messieurs qui vivent dans l'appartement du dessus.

Open a window in the SRO on a summer night and you can hear at least five dialects being spoken, the voices bouncing up and down the central interior courtyard, the courtyard in reality just a vertical column of interior-facing windows,

Her own bedroom, her own bed. Her own yard. Without a restaurant downstairs, or sirens or cops or dead bodies. No fishy garbage fumes, or flumes of mildewing vegetation, no cacophony of five dialects being smashed together, a solid block of sensory overload rising up the dank central corridor of INT. CHINATOWN SRO.

The only difference between Detroit and the Third World in terms of corruption is Detroit don't have no goats in the streets.

The people in Detroit are poor, but most of them are good. There are things going on here beyond an ordinary person's control. These people are hungry and they have no job. No possibility of a job. They're stuck here.

Children are dying in this city because they're too fucking poor to keep warm. Put that in your fucking notebook. I put it in my fucking notebook.

I was shown mold, leaking pipes, exposed asbestos insulation, broken toilets, cracked floors, malfunctioning heating units, feces bubbling up from the sewer pipes in the basements. I had seen better government buildings in the slums of Tijuana. Neven and the boys from 23 told me it was bad but what I was seeing was worse than the Baghdad fire department, which actually got more than one hundred fifty million dollars from the United States government, while Detroit got zero.

The city belongs to the black man. The white man was a convenient target until there were no white men left in Detroit. What used to be black and white is now gray. Whites got the suburbs and everything else. The black machine's got the city and the black machine's at war with itself. The spoils go to the one who understands that.

Somehow, the city of promise had become a scrap yard of dreams.

He called himself her pimp, except for the fact, he said, that he didn't like standing in the night air.

New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American

I have my own production company called Urban Dreams.

I gave three quiet cheers for Minnesota. In Seattle a dusty inch of anything white and chilly means the city lapses into full-on panic mode, as if each falling flake crashes to earth with its own individual baggie of used hypodermic needles. It's ridiculous.

At no point, anywhere in Seattle, is there a clear and obvious route to an interstate. And, if you find yourself magically right beside an interstate on-ramp, you can safely assume that it's leading the wrong direction. You might say to yourself, "Self, if I've found the on-ramp going this direction, surely the on-ramp going the other direction must be right nearby!" But you'd be wrong. This place was designed by crack addicts, I'm convinced of it.

If you've never been to Atlanta, then let me save you a bit of grief. If someone tells you something's on "Peachtree," you must demand that they get more specific. There are probably a dozen incarnations of Peachtree, going in at least that many directions through every part of town.