Quotes About Urban

For me, the stars are the invisible people on the street that people don't really get a chance to know.

The jumbled brick and stone of the city's landscape is a medley of style in which centuries and decades rub shoulders in a disorder that denies the sequence of time.

When the city was described as pagan, it was partly because no one living among such urban suffering could have much faith in a god who allowed cities such as London to flourish.

purlieus of London

Although their populations ranged only from 20 to 200 people, we may see in them the beginnings of urban life in England. The author believes that London was once just such a hill fort, but the evidence for it is now buried beneath the megalopolis it has become.

From the look of things, in five minutes every building facing the square would be locked up tighter than a Romulan clam.

Beijing maps featured cloverleaf exchanges that could have been designed by M. C. Escher.

We might treat a rabbit as a pet or become emotionally attached to a goose, but we had come from cities and supermarkets, where flesh was hygienically distanced from any resemblance to living creatures. A shrink-wrapped pork chop has a sanitized, abstract appearance that has nothing whatever to do with the warm, mucky bulk of a pig. Out here in the country there was no avoiding the direct link between death and dinner.

This is capitalism's constant urban conundrum: what makes cities profitable is inherently at odds with the needs of the poor and middle classes (who are needed for a city to function), and centrally located land has inherent value if it can be made amenable to the rich. Gentrification may be a new expression of this conflict between land value and the needs of the poor, but it's a problem as old as capitalism itself.

When we think of gentrification as some mysterious process, we accept its consequences: the displacement of countless thousands of families, the destruction of cultures, the decreased affordability of life for everyone. I hope this book is a counterweight to hopelessness abut the future of urban America that enables readers to see cities are shaped by powerful interests, and that if we identify those interests, we can begin to reshape cities in our own design.

To fight gentrification is to fight American thinking.

It is not believed that a people capable of inventing the genre of oral painting could have spawned the viaduct killer, and in any case no ghetto resident is permitted access to any other area of the city. (A Short Guide To The City)

I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That's a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.

There seemed to be nothing that contributed more to squalor than a bunch of basalt-block structures designed to lift people out of squalor.

Nothing is so alien, so bleak and unfriendly, as the strip of gas stations—cut-rate gas stations—and motels on the rim of your own city. You fail to recognize it. And at the same time, you have to clasp it to your bosom. Not just for one night, but as long as you intend to live where you live.

Mr. Tagomi turned to a passer-by, a thin man in rumpled suit. "What is that?" he demanded, pointing. The man grinned. "Awful, ain't it? That's the Embarcadero Freeway. A lot of people think it stinks up the view.

lived on the Coast, in San Francisco. They have the skin thing there, too.

the uproar of radios, traffic noises, the signs and people lulled him. They blotted out his inner worries.

he picked up his desk vidphone and said to Miss Marsten, "Get me the Happy Dog Pet Shop on Sutter Street.

I speak to H. in a bar in downtown L.A. Over a schooner of beer he waits out the day

They recruited the most supple and athletic of the cops to train as mounted policemen, and a small kid could be mesmerized just watching one who'd been lazing majestically down the street stop to write a parking ticket and then lean way over in the saddle so as to place the ticket under the car's windshield wiper, a physical gesture, if ever there was one, of magnificent condescension to the machine age.

New York City today still preserves qualities which existed in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam—and Old Amsterdam

What is a city? What should it be? Why do we live in groups? What do we want from cities? And who decides?

Sorry to be so cynical, but this is New York