Dan Gilbert Quotes

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.

The city is as large as Seville or Cordova; its streets, I speak of the principal ones, are very wide and straight; some of these, and all the inferior ones, are half land and half water, and are navigated by canoes.

A city grows like an organism. It is a structure of living and working together a mix of functions.

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

When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Planners are guided by principles derived from the behaviour and appearance of suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs and imaginary dream cities - from anything but cities themselves.

I say we don't need art in nature, because it's so perfect without us. We need it in the cities. But the cities have absolutely lost their own center. They think having ten cars and a big bridge is the way to happiness. It's not.

Every city is always changing, on its own trajectory.

In city planning, there is no limit to be fixed.

You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

Urban design as a discipline barely exists in most American and Canadian cities. In Singapore, there are innovative transportation strategies at work.

Planning cities is a necessary but risky business.

Two-thirds of all growth takes place in cities because, by simple fact of population density, our urban spaces are perfect innovation labs. The modern metropolis is jam-packed. People are living atop one another; their ideas are as well.

But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.

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.

The freeways of America are like giant veins twisting and turning, rushing life from one zone to the next. The landscape is a giant body just lying there feeling the rumble.

Urban planning should be done with the mindset that we are determining the city's fabric for 100 years to come.

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem

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

…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.

It is still the arena of those who dream of the City of Man and those who envision a City of Things. The battle appears to be forever joined. The armies, ignorant and enlightened, clash by day as well as night. Chicago is America's dream, writ large. And flamboyantly.

The object of this edict is to enlighten the present and future citizens of Chandigarh about the basic concepts of planning of the city so that they become its guardians and save it from whims of individuals.

Cities are natural, that's why they're everywhere. It's not like there's only one city, and everybody's like 'What the f**k is this?' No, cities are all over the place. They're natural. You know what's not natural? You, in the middle of the mountains, in the middle of the winter.

I've worked on the urban agenda all my life. All. My. Life.

We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create from - from a physicist's viewpoint, entropy, meaning all of those bad things that we feel are engulfing us.