Richard Florida Quotes

Cities are not problems. They are solutions.

Mixed use is what cities are all about. If you don't have mixed use, you don't have cities.

If, instead of hiring half-baked revolutionary planners to fill our college undergraduates with ingenious schemes to disperse populations, split up big cities into little ones, go underground or into distant places to escape bombs and congestion, abandon large urban areas in favor of roadside villages, we were to publish reliable, simply written, common-sense information to control the building boom, what a country this would be!

We can’t be a great country unless we have great cities.

Our government has made infrastructure upgrade and the creation of smart cities major national priorities.

Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything--certainly not one with much downtown diversity.

The city is not the problem; the city is the solution.

Astana is a government city, not a tourist city, but all you do is tour it. You tour it in the cab from the airport, passing the gleaming new English-language Nazarbayev University and then the new soccer stadium, speed-skating track, and ten-thousand-seat velodrome.

India's sprawling subcontinent can never become a plus-size Singapore. But perhaps we can weave together an urban web that is the equivalent of a thousand Singapores.

Cities are central to the shaping and delivery of national policy objectives, and in return, they are the places where social, environmental, and economic policies play out in practice.

An article in the 'Moscow Times' described Trump as the city's first grand builder since Stalin.

Like all things, cities must change - even a city as enamoured of the past and memory as D.C.

Urban renewal always happens as a symphony of events, and part of the symphony is innovative, optimistic developers with the ability and willingness to transform historic properties.

Brussels is sort of a mini London in the sense that if you think about putting a football pitch in London, people laugh at you. There is just no space.

Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

When cities were first founded, an old Egyptian scribe tells us, the mission of the founder was to 'put gods in their shrines.' The task of the coming city is not essentially different: its mission is to put the highest concerns of man at the center of all his activities.

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem

All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization.... Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitantsdo not live in their city; they merely inhabit it.

From the strictest humanitarian viewpoint, any attempt to stop the processes by which over crowded cities purge themselves is not a kindness.

Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States.

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.

Having viewed slum clearance projects in most major cities of the world may I state that you have conceived and created in the Johannesburg townships what is probably the most impressive and adequate resettlement activity in existence.

Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.

Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and the city.