Patrick Geddes Quotes

I think the city is the strongest social memory organ of humanity.

I see the city as an organism, shaped through time by the little humans having habits and doing millions of stuff in and out of it.

Every city is always changing, on its own trajectory.

Life in cities is not a spring but a river, or rather, a water main. It progresses like a novel, artificially.

In the beginning, New York and I had kind of a love-hate relationship. It seemed so abrasive compared to Europe. But the transformation here in recent years is really something. I don't think I would have seen as much change if I'd lived in any other city in the world.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Cities are immortal.

Cities are not static objects to be feared or admired, but are instead a living process that residents are changing all the time.

New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center.

This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth.

Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn't successful - isn't even a city, really - unless it can lay claim to being 'vibrant.'

When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

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.

Cities are obvious metaphors for life. We call roads 'arteries' and so forth.

New York is hard, cynical, ruthless, even beyond other cities. From their early repression its children emerge sophisticated, both stunted and overdeveloped, perverted, premature, forced by the artificiality of their environment.

Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.

The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.

All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it, an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.

You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit.

The form a city assumes as it evolves over time owes more to large-scale works of civil engineering - what we now call infrastructure - than almost any other factor save topography.

The city is like a great house, and the house in its turn a small city.

The city is as large as Seville or Cordova; its streets, I speak of the principal ones, are very wide and straight; some of these, and all the inferior ones, are half land and half water, and are navigated by canoes.