Quotes About Urban

I'm a farm boy from Connecticut, and I adopted urban life.

I've worked on the urban agenda all my life. All. My. Life.

Life must be somewhere to be found, instead of # ConcreteJungle .

Cities don't make people poor; they attract poor people. The flow of less advantaged people into cities from Rio to Rotterdam demonstrates urban strength, not weakness.

Depot Town"—a dilapidated factory section of Ypsi near the abandoned Penn Central depot,

The tendency to think that a city can build itself out of decline is an example of the edifice error, the tendency to think that abundant new building leads to urban success. Successful cities typically do build, because economic vitality makes people willing to pay for space and builders are happy to accommodate. But building is the result, not the cause, of success. Overbuilding a declining city that already has more structures than it needs is nothing but folly.

The failures of urban renewal reflect a failure at all levels of government to realize that people, not structures, really determine a city's success.

Cities don't make people poor; they attract poor people.

Shiny new real estate may dress up a declining city, but it doesn't solve its underlying problems. The hallmark of declining cities is that they have too much housing and infrastructure relative to the strength of their economies. With all that supply of structure and so little demand, it makes no sense to use public money to build more supply. The folly of building-centric urban renewal reminds us that cities aren't structures; cities are people.

The folly of building-centric urban renewal reminds us that cities aren't structures; cities are people.

twentieth-century urban America didn't belong to the skyscraper; it belonged to the car.

Americans who live in metropolitan areas with more than a million residents are, on average, more than 50 percent more productive than Americans who live in smaller metropolitan areas. These relationships are the same even when we take into account the education, experience, and industry of workers. They're even the same if we take individual workers' IQs into account. The income gap between urban and rural areas is just as large in other rich countries, and even

Between 1950 and 2008, Detroit lost over a million people—58 percent of its population. Today one third of its citizens live in poverty. Detroit's median family income is $33,000, about half the U.S. average. In 2009, the city's unemployment rate was 25 percent, which was 9 percentage points more than any other large city and more than 2.5 times the national average. In

Outside, in the pungency of the worn air, he sighed with premonitory tiredness. He locked the door, went up the steps, and headed for the subway that would take him to the upper West Side of town. He walked lightly and his face showed no awareness of all the thousands of people around him because he traveled in an eggshell through which came only subdued light and muffled sound.

Chicago's success is no longer symbiotic with its rural neighbours. It comes at their expense.

In the US, the more liberal a city's politics, the higher the rate of inequality.

the Toil Index – the number of working hours it takes a median worker to pay the median rent in one of America's big cities. In 1950 it took forty-five hours per month. A generation later it had edged up to fifty-six hours. Today it takes 101 hours.

the murder rate has fallen by 16.7 per cent in the US cities since the turn of the century, while rising by 16.9 per cent in the suburbs – almost an exact mirror image.42

every single one of America's 493 wealthiest counties, almost all of them urban, voted for Hillary Clinton.43 The remaining 2623 counties, most of them suburban or small-town, went for Donald Trump.

Timothy Beatley in Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning (2011)

Is that so? He who lives in the mountains years for the city, and the city-dweller would rather live in the mountains," the Abbot chuckled, "and nothing is ever to one's liking...

Consuming alcohol in public is allowed in France, which means drinkers overflow onto the sidewalk, especially on the Montmartre stretch. But it rarely gets out of control.

He called him (it was always a man) a flâneur. "The crowd is his habitat, as air is for the bird or water for the fish," he wrote. "His passion and his profession is to wed the crowd. . . . To be away from home, but to feel oneself everywhere at home.

There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.