Joe Gebbia Quotes

In the post-war United States, you had this race to the suburbs. Cities shrank, the suburbs got bigger - and the notion of community changed drastically. You went from all being very close together to all being spaced apart and slightly suspicious of one another.

The model of the human habitat dictated by zoning is a formless, soul-less, centerless, demoralizing mess. It bankrupts families and townships. It disables whole classes of decent, normal citizens. It ruins the air we breathe. It corrupts and deadens our spirit.

I have always thought that L.A. is a motor city that developed linear downtowns.

A lot of times, L.A. is desaturated, and cement and freeways, and downtown.

Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes because man needs more space in which to be than the modern city allows.

Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.

With everything that you can imagine at our fingertips, many of the social interactions that help tie people together in a community have faded away. Are communities traditionally built on relationships, trust and familiarity a thing of the past?

What Republicans have done in my view is that they are systematically dismantling a sense of community in America.

People drive everywhere in L.A., so you get very little human interaction... but N.Y. and Chicago are like London... L.A. lacks the social interaction.

Because there are a lot of big cities in the world, people who live in cities have become more isolated than ever.

Discount air fares, a car in every parking space and the interstate highway system have made every place accessible - and every place alike.

I was attracted to the concept of Hollywood and the lifestyle here. But I've grown to mistrust it because it has changed. I didn't bargain for digital access parking in some concrete structure. Real heaven for me was to drive somewhere and park right in front. Now the city is going vertical.

As far as loneliness, I feel Los Angeles and its layout, having to drive everywhere - it is a lonely place. It's an isolated city in that respect because you're driving to places alone listening to the radio.

In Toronto, I grew up taking a subway, I grew up taking a bus. I spent my formative adult years in New York City, walking the streets, taking the subway. You're connected to the larger whole. L.A. is so spread out, and you're so incubated inside those cars and it's so exhausting to deal with the traffic, without really having the human contact.

In many countries traditional bonds of civitas have been subject to a gradual erosion and their inhabitants become disinherited without realizing it.

L.A. is a town built upon segregated, individual fantasies.

From the late 1940s, into and through the '50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country.

The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed U.S. society enormously.

To me, Los Angeles was the invention of the suburb. They figured it out and perfected it and created a city that was dependent on the automobile.

I'm not the first person to talk about this, but L.A. is just sort of a weird city because it's just a bunch of little towns put together under the umbrella of L.A. So people feel disconnected from each other and far apart, and in a relationship, that can also be a thing.

We all think we are connected to the world now, but we are not talking to our neighbours any more.

The thing you gotta understand about L.A. is that everything is suburbia. Los Angeles isn't set up like San Francisco or New York.

The consumer culture in general has washed over our civilization. For the last 50 years, if you've had a credit card and some access to money, you don't really need neighbors around you. And as a result, they dwindled. The average American has half as many close friends as they did in 1950. Three quarters of Americans don't know their next-door neighbor. They may know their name, but they have no real relationship with them. That's an utterly new place for human beings to find themselves in - I mean, we're a socially evolved primate.

One would be in less danger From the wiles of the stranger If one's own kin and kith Were more fun to be with.