Quotes About Urban

Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow.

By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.

Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.

You can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.

Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance.

Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, 'neighborhood' is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense.

Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.

frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighbouhood.

Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.

Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effect of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building.

In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.

More than a food, the pickle was a kind of drug for tenement children, who were still too young for whiskey.

For city people, time was fractured into finite segments like boxes on a conveyer belt. On the farm, time was continuous, like a string around a tree, one season flowing inevitably into the next. For

She remembered the old man in the bar in the Mission District telling her, 'We are the biggest tribe of all, us displaced ones, us urban Indians, us sidewalk redskins.

New York is a nice place." "If you like concrete, crowds, and that claustrophobic, closed-in feeling.

the fear of being trapped between cars.

For a lot of people a car means freedom and social status, but if a city provides you no choice but to drive, a car isn't freedom, it's dependence. If you have no choice but to drive for every trip, it's not your fault. Your city has failed.

Do you know what we call windows in Belgrade?' she asked. All our windows are broken and crisscrossed with scotch tape. 'Windows 99.

long commutes make you fat, stressed, and miserable. Even short commutes stab at your happiness.

Breathe in the smell of exhaust and body odor, breathe out your health and sanity.

long commutes make you fat, stressed, and miserable. Even short commutes stab at your happiness. According

Smart people in white coats have extensively studied commuting—this supposedly necessary part of our days—and the verdict is in: long commutes make you fat, stressed, and miserable. Even short commutes stab at your happiness.

The tracks of the L Train are the manly stubble on the ruggedly handsome face of Chicago.

Ever since this day I have dreamt sometimes... I, a street rat in my soul, dream even now... that if it were possible to life this littered, paved Manhattan from the earth... and all its torn and dripping pipes and conduits and tunnels and tracks and cables--all of it, like a scab from new skin underneath--how seedlings would sprout and freshets bubble up, and brush and grasses would grow over the rolling hills...