Karl Iagnemma Quotes

Bridges and stations are very strongly related to the development of a city.

The modern city consists of...dark, narrow streets full of gasoline fumes, coal dust, and toxic gasses, torn by the noise.

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.

The City is, in terms of its basic functioning, a far-off country of which we know little.

It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible.

Go walk the streets of Beijing. It's pretty hard to argue it isn't a modern city. Now, if you go outside [of Beijing], in the rural areas, that's true. But rural America, you can say the same thing, in Appalachia there's an awful lot of poverty and lack of education.

They should've built a city on rock and roll.

A city is in many respects a great business corporation, but in other respects it is enlarged housekeeping. ... may we not say that city housekeeping has failed partly because women, the traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted as to its multiform activities?

We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.

It turns out - this is a metaphor out of [Charles] Dickens - that the raw sewage emptied into the Anacostia comes from the Federal Triangle. I have a sewer map, and on it you can see the pipe from which congressional wastes empty into the river that then flows through the black neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. It is very expensive to do anything about the river, but somebody's working on it.

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.

Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.

A protected bicycle lane in the city in a developing country is a powerful symbol, showing that a citizen on the $30 bicycle is as important as one in a $30,000 car

[Urbanization] is the inevitable outcome of the processes of growth and the processes of modernization.

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design.

I hate the traffic over there. Why don't they start to build moving pathways to replace all the streets? I see New York in a very futuristic way, but they must do something new.

Give form to the passing World. Freeways are a drama.

Urban development initiatives must match the aspirations of the middle class and the neo middle class.

…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.

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

At that time [90th in Lagos], if you drove through the city, you drove through a foreground that always seemed to be incredibly dramatic and incredibly agonised - smoking, burning, incredible compression. In the first year we stayed on the ground and went everywhere. But then in order to discover whether this was the whole story, we rented a helicopter. And we began to understand that this is not chaos but a highly modern system that had been abandoned, then at some point went into reversal, then slowly came out of it.

What kind of city we wish to build should reflect our personal wishes and needs.

It's nice to get president candidates' attention to infrastructure need which is really a ticking time bomb in America. But as important as the dollar amounts are, we need to know that this money is gonna go directly to cities. So we're gonna be able to put it to use. In previous administrations and in previous efforts on infrastructure, the money has gone through states and it never seems to find its way to the nation's cities.

What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man?