John Cooper Clarke Quotes

The world's major metropolitan cities are more or less the same.

Asia is still dominated by skyscrapers. I hope that, in European cities, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary.

I don't want to compare my city to Zurich; thank God we're not that boring. Rio is advancing fast, but we're at a different phase in our civilization.

Cities are the crucible of civilization.

Brussels is sort of a mini London in the sense that if you think about putting a football pitch in London, people laugh at you. There is just no space.

Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic division of labor.

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

Cities are 2% of the earth's crust, but they are 50% of the world's population.

A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.

In 2007, the majority of the world’s population – over 3 billion of us – will live in urban areas for the first time in history.

In Manchester, you don't have proper tall buildings. Or in Munich.

I think there's a big difference between New York and Chicago.

From the moment a New Yorker is confronted with almost any large city of Europe, it is impossible for him to pretend to himself that his own city is anything other than an unscrupulous real-estate speculation

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

You know, London is so sprawling, and you can sometimes forget that anybody else is on a stage anywhere else.

Cities are the greatest creations of humanity.

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

Fifty years ago people were talking about Sydney's sprawl, but nobody does anything about it.

Cities perform most functions in a very Industrial Age model.

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.

Traffic is only one of the side effects of growth.

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.

When you look at a city, you know, it looks so unique. You feel this kind of uniqueness, you know, and especially if you go from a big city to a small city or if you go from one country to another. Cities look very different, often. They even feel very different. You know, and they are, of course. They certainly are.

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.

New York City has always had more in common with Paris or London than with Cincinnati.