Chris Hadfield Quotes

Do you know how much land is under ice, rock and snow? Do you know why 90 percent of us live within 100 kilometres of the U.S. border? We have this idea we're a vast country. But the reality is that a lot of it, a huge amount, is uninhabitable.

In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.

Although mountains may guide migrations, the plains are the regions where people dwell in greatest numbers.

We have to get smarter about our cities. Especially when it comes to the most basic of public services - water supply.

I like to call it 'the national automobile slum.' You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water.

Our world is evolving without consideration, and the result is a loss of biodiversity, energy issues, congestion in cities. But geography, if used correctly, can be used to redesign sustainable and more livable cities.

Tiredness sets a natural limit to what a human being is prepared to walk daily, and this limit has taught man all through history the size of rural or urban communities.

I'm very stodgy. I'm always looking at old photos of California and Los Angeles, knowing that what I'm looking at is now full of houses. There used to be vacant lots in Los Angeles, now all taken up by three-storey boxes - it's all getting infilled.

The form a city assumes as it evolves over time owes more to large-scale works of civil engineering - what we now call infrastructure - than almost any other factor save topography.

We have 45,000 square miles of geography in Ohio.

Why should we build very large spaces when they are not necessary? We can design halls spanning several kilometres and covering a whole city, but we have to ask, what does it really make? What does society really need?

Most people hugely underestimate the amount of 'empty space' we have in our country. Fly over the U.K., and you see that human settlement does not fill up the U.K. at all. It accounts for something of the order of 15 per cent of the landmass.

By 2050, the Australian population is expected to grow from 22 million to 36 million. That increase alone will put huge pressure on our towns and our cities. We will need more homes, more roads, more rail lines, more hospitals, more schools, just to accommodate so many Australians.

But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.

The city of London, within the walls, occupies a space of only 370 acres, and is but the hundred and fortieth part of the extent covered by the whole metropolis.

I sincerely believe that there's room for cutting down trees for forestry and grazing, so as we all get to eat. Everyone has to compromise.

The thing that overwhelms me when I go out now is the sprawlation of America.

In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives.

Human settlements are like living organisms. They must grow, and they will change. But we can decide on the nature of that growth - on the quality and the character of it - and where it ought to go. We don't have to scatter the building blocks of our civic life all over the countryside, destroying our towns and ruining farmland.

By 2050, seven out of ten people will live in cities, which will account for six billion people living in urban areas. That phenomenon is central to all the challenges humanity faces. If there is an issue to be addressed, then it is certainly happening in cities and therefore must be considered on an urban scale.

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

My provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious, scientific theory of cities and scientific theory means quantifiable, relying on underlying generic principles that can be made in a - put into a predictive framework. That's the quest.

Land use is becoming more and more a general national interest and should be as much a study in the cities as in the country. For with the proper use of land, many of our greatest troubles—dust storms, floods, over-production of this and that, would at least be measurably controlled.

… we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land