Quotes About Urbanism

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.

Most people think they want Main Streets but won't make the small sacrifices in terms of time, cost, and footpower necessary to sustain them. The sad fact is that we have created a culture in which most people will happily-indeed, unthinkingly-drive an extra couple of miles to walk thirty less feet.

They have made me understand how the City can get under your skin, and never be sweated out. I mean, it's still aesthetically traumatic, but it's got spirit.

In 1989, SimCity introduced an entirely new brand of game play.

Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.

Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.

Margaret Crawford, "The World in a Shopping Mall," in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Noonday Press, 1992), p.

The New York that Frank Sinatra sang about, people will never know that place. The New Orleans that Louis Armstrong sang about is the New Orleans that's still there - it's preserved.

I don't feel American. I do feel like a New Yorker. I think there's a real distinction there. A city allows you to become a citizen even when you're not a national.

The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

How liberating to discover in the modern age that he, a city-dweller, an indoors man who lived by the keyboard and screen, could be tracked and ravaged and be an entire meal, a source of nourishment to others.

How do you walk from one place to another? What makes you want to walk someplace? Any place that you want to get out of your car and walk is a good place by definition.

It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class—in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding—but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does. Saeed

It's extremely difficult to kill a city! On

Buildings should be good neighbours.

People of this world, look upon this city and see that you should not and cannot abandon this city and this people.

What has happened to architecture since the second world war that the only passers-by who can contemplate it without pain are those equipped with a white stick and a dog?

Obviously I'm missing the city life.

I don't believe in morality in architecture.

The result in all these cities, from Berlin to Stalingrad, was the classic Soviet-era housing solution: mile upon mile of identical gray or brown cement blocks; cheap, poorly-constructed, with no distinguishing architectural features and lacking any aesthetic indulgence (or public facilities).

Mladí d?stojníci, s nimiž jsem byl v kontaktu, pocházeli pÃ…â"¢edevÅ¡ím z metropolí a mÄ›st, ne z kibuc?, a díky nim jsem pochopil, co jsem mÄ›l chápat už dávno: že sen o venkovském socialismu je právÄ› jen sen. T?žiÅ¡tÄ› židovského státu budou a musí pÃ…â"¢edstavovat mÄ›sta.

Nothing, of course, is ever quite as good as we remember. The social democratic consensus and the welfare institutions of the postwar decades coincided with some of the worst town planning and public housing of modern times. From Communist Poland through

I love their being as bound up in their history as they are, preserving their buildings instead of razing them to the ground to make way for another big beige building with lots of windows to throw yourself screaming from.

Vulgar of manner, overfed. Overdressed and underbred; Heartless, Godless, hell's delight, Rude by day and lewd by night; Bedwarfed the man, o'ergrown the brute, Ruled by boss and prostitute; Purple-robed and pauper-clad, Raving, rotting, money-mad; A squirming herd in Mammon's mesh, A wilderness of human flesh; Crazed with avarice, lust and rum, New York, thy name's Delirium.