W. L. George Quotes

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.

The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city.

When you clean up a city, you destroy it.

LA is such a crumbling mess of a city. Basically in all my years of travelling, I haven't found another city in the western world that interest me as much as Los Angeles - which might sound like heresy, but most cities, history has already happened and the people living there are sort of living on the bones of the thousand years of history that's already happened there. Whereas LA is always reinventing itself.

If you take a perfectly well-adjusted normal person of any age from anywhere in the country and stick them in L.A., within about a week I do believe that a lot of their values and morals will start to degrade.

I am crumbling in sync with old Hackney.

When there were fears about the future of this nation's older cities... when a few of the cities teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, all eyes were focused on Chicago for contrast.

You get to a certain age and you just want to prove that you can still rock - that you've still got it.

Things of this World are in so constant a Flux, that nothing remains long in the same State. Thus People, Riches, Trade, Power, change their Stations; flourishing mighty Cities come to ruine, and prove in time neglected desolate Corners, whilst other unfrequented places grow into populous Countries, fill'd with Wealth and Inhabitants.

I'm not really a late night guy. I used to be when I was younger.

The city of Rio de Janeiro is setting an example to the world of how to recover quality urban spaces through drastic intervention and the creation of cultural facilities such as the Museum of Tomorrow.

When I look at cities now, I don't see them in the present. This is the decaying infrastructure of our existing cities. Years from now, none of this is going to be here. New cities are going to rise.

Youth is a predominant factor. We are seeing a young King Arthur, and thereby a young-ish - as I'm into my 40s - Merlin. It was about how to tackle it, from that point view.

I classify Sao Paolo this way: The Governor's Palace is the living room. The mayor's office is the dining room and the city is the garden. And the favela is the back yard where they throw the garbage.

An age builds up cities: an hour destroys them.

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.

Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.

On my Instagram, I'm always keeping a record of things being pulled down in Soho and shutters being closed. Every city - and London more than anywhere - has got to be a vibrant mix of all different things. We can't allow it to become a monoculture.

There is no other city as vulgar and obscene as Osaka. We should celebrate the image and welcome the development of casinos and red-light districts to attract people.

Transformed people transform cities.

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.

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.

Detroit right now is virtually abandoned at its core to the degree that a lot of what had been slums thirty years ago are now wildflower meadows. The rebuilding of Detroit will occur a much smaller scale. It remains to be seen what will become of Detroit's vast suburbs.

Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.