Eric Garcetti Quotes

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

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.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everything in the past is great and everything modern is terrible. But I do think cities should be a mix of old things and new things.

As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.

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

Whyte's work remains a living and usable handbook for improving our cities, our countryside, and our lives.

Somehow I think that if Toronto had been forced to wait a decade [from 80th], it would be a better looking city.

We should concentrate our work not only to a separated housing problem but housing involved in our daily work and all the other functions of the city.

As a planning board commissioner, I have to review the applications for development throughout the city, and the bulk of those applications have been for the waterfront. I think the progress the waterfront has made is amazing.

In city planning, there is no limit to be fixed.

In urbanization, you think big because you are thinking decades ahead.

The pursuit of the vibrant seems to be the universal job description of the nation's city planners nowadays. It is also part of the Obama administration's economic recovery strategy for the nation.

We saw hundreds of programs to redevelop the central city, the neighborhoods, in the past.

What kind of town do we want in the future, and how are we going to plan on that?

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.'

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

The city of magnificent intentions.

It is pretty well settled that the city is the Negro's great contribution to civilization, for it was in Africa where the first cities grew up.

Architecture is one of the art forms best able to improve and revitalise cities both artistically and functionally.

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.

City planning finds its validation in the intuitive recognition that a burgeoning market society can not be trusted to produce spontaneously a habitable, sanitary, or even efficient city, much less a beautiful one.

I don't think of the New Urbanism as an economic or political train wreck. I think of it as one of these great generational upheavals that's coming.

The city [ LA] is kind of going through an interesting transition; sort of renaissance time where there is so much going on here. I think it's really exciting to be here.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

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