Pete Buttigieg Quotes

I'm sure Putnam is right that there's been a decline in certain kinds of organizations like bowling leagues. But people participate in communities in other ways.

All architecture has a public nature, I believe, so I would like to make a public space.

You can’t throw a park down and think everybody is going to mix and be happy and share picnic tables and sing songs together.

Physically robust infrastructure is not enough if it fails to foster a healthy community; ultimately, all infrastructure is social.

We're producing spaces that accommodate human activity. And what I'm interested in is not the styling of that, but the relationship of that as it enhances that activity. And that directly connects to ideas of city-making.

One great building does not make a great city.

I would like to use architecture to create bonds between people who live in cities, and even use it to recover the communities that used to exist in every single city.

Not houses finely roofed or the stones of walls well builded, nay nor canals and dockyards make the city, but men able to use their opportunity.

I believe that architecture is fundamentally a public space where people can gather and communicate, think about the history, think about the lives of human beings, or the world.

There is this absurd assumption that the revitalisation of the public sphere is always a good thing. I think people tend to confuse 'civic' and 'civil,' and they believe that everything that is done by citizens is necessarily a good thing because you build a network, an association.

As architects we are often involved in the concrete-steel-and-glass aspect of it, but cities are social structures, and to be involved in imagining the future of cities and the type of relationships and the types of places that we're making is something that intrigues me very much.

The cities are the principal home and seat of the human group. They are the coral colony for Man, the collective being.

Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals.

Not stones, nor wood, nor the art of artisans make a state; but where men are who know how to take care of themselves, these are cities and walls.

It is the men who makes a city.

Given the fragility of contemporary civil and urban life … our problem is to solve the puzzle of how to live together in healthy, diverse communities.

When Barcelona came out of the Franco dictatorship in 1975, the first thing city officials did was to make 200 public squares where people could meet and talk to each other as a sign that democracy had returned.

The times in my life I've felt the most alive is when I'm having a connection with people. We need to hack cities in a way to bring back that community culture.

The Huashan project is a clear example of how an urban element, key to the successful growth of the city, can at the same time improve the quality of life for its citizens, thanks to an integration of all three bridges and the creation of boulevards on the banks of the canal.

Most of the job on DDP was already done by the time I became mayor. So was Gwanghwamun Square, described by many architects as the city's worst architectural creation, and the new city hall. I did not think that redoing them would be the right approach as that would only create new problems.

Our policies should be to help develop civil society and increase contacts with people.

'Palaces for the People' reads more like a succession of case studies than a comprehensive account of what social infrastructure is, so those looking for a theoretical framework may be disappointed.

People make a city, it's not the other way round.

We can never get a re-creation of community and heal our society without giving our citizens a sense of belonging.

People don't talk to each other. You're alone with your television set or internet. But you can't have a functioning democracy without what sociologists call "secondary organizations," places where people can get together, plan, talk and develop ideas. You don't do it alone.