Geoffrey West Quotes

One great building does not make a great city.

In urbanization, you think big because you are thinking decades ahead.

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

As architects we are often involved in the concrete-steel-and-glass aspect of it, but cities are social structures, and to be involved in imagining the future of cities and the type of relationships and the types of places that we're making is something that intrigues me very much.

Roads are necessary, but the fact that we don't fully recognize that when you build a road you're doing more than building a road - you're building the future development of your city. And, that's what's never dawned on people. It still doesn't, in a way.

I don't want to bring a European city or an east-coast city to the West Coast.

I'm completely taken and impressed by the planning authority of Singapore and its Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). It's the most cutting-edge agency in the world. They have very effective guidelines for development, and they review design as it evolves.

I think it's evident that expensive neighborhoods in Seattle are surrounded by natural beauty. That elevates city life. So if we can make cities more attractive in the long run, we can be smarter about issues like development, zoning and economics.

Cities are created by and for traffic.

Cities are complex and contain just about any thing or concept ever invented by humans. How the city is built, its topography, and how close you live to your work and a grocery store affects your mobility.

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

Our engineering departments build freeways which destroy a city or a landscape, in the process.

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

Stockholm is surely an urban planner's dream. Everything works. Everything looks good.

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.

Cities are the greatest creations of humanity.

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 can only be reconstructed in the form of urban quarters. A large or a small city can only be reorganized as a large or a small number of urban quarters; as a federation of autonomous quarters. Each quarter must have its own center, periphery and limit. Each quarter must be a city within a city.

What kind of town do we want in the future, and how are we going to plan on that?

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.

I hope that any expansion of London will learn from the planning examples of some of its most desirable areas such as Chelsea, Notting Hill, Belgravia and Mayfair. All are characterised by high density and a generosity of green spaces.

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.