Colum McCann Quotes

In New York, the impact of these concentrated superskyscrapers on street scale and sunlight, on the city's aniquated support systems, circulation, and infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. ... Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.

Instead of looking at individual buildings, it makes more metaphorical sense to think of New York as one enormous chunk of masonry that has been cut up and carved away. It says, 'This is the ultimate polis, through which humans move like nematodes.'

All through my twenties, I lived in very walkable cities - Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York.

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

We identify New York with the great bridges and tunnels and roadways and subway system and so forth.

I don't know how many of you have been to New York, but if a building is two blocks away from anything, you can't see it.

If we're talking about transportation, the best thing a city can do is densify as quickly as it can. That needs to be said every time this issue comes up, because it's the only universal strategy that works.

I walk out my front door in New York and I'm out on the street and there are people everywhere. L.A. is so much more spread out, so it's really easy in L.A. to have a little more isolation and to just not see as many people.

Any urbanist has to appreciate New York City and the way it works. The public transit is astonishing.

New York seems to be thriving, which I'm grateful for. But I would hope that they would figure out how to negotiate the traffic and limit the pedicabs, because it seems to me that it's becoming a more chaotic city.

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

The bigger the city is, the less infrastructure you need per capita.

In New York you can actually run into people on the street, unlike in California where you're always in the car.

London is a vast, complex city designed by the same guy who created the Habitrail.

Everybody in New York City knows there's way more cars than parking spaces. You see cars driving in New York all hours of the night. Its like musical chairs except everybody sat down around 1964.

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.

There's something hypocritical about a city that keeps half of its population underground half of the time; you can start believing that there's much more space than there really is-to live, to work.

London always reminds me of a brain. It is similarly convoluted and circuitous. A lot of cities, especially American ones like New York and Chicago, are laid out in straight lines. Like the circuits on computer chips, there are a lot of right angles in cities like this. But London is a glorious mess. It evolved from a score or so of distinct villages, that merged and meshed as their boundaries enlarged. As a result, London is a labyrinth, full of turnings and twistings just like a brain.

An interesting thing about New York City is that the subways run through the sewers.

[Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.

What we do and think in our own lives, then, becomes of extreme importance as it effects everything we're connected to.

The practical answer is, no it would be totally impossible for young or foreign people to get access to roof of a building that stands in the heart of a giant city and to put a cable across.

Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.

That is the way to lay the city flat, To bring the roof to the foundation, And bury all, which yet distinctly ranges, In heaps and piles of ruin.