Ai Weiwei Quotes

As a rule, our largest cities are the worst governed.

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.

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

There are few jobs in the world that are more fun than being the head of Urban Development for a great and thriving city.

Annexation is probably the most valuable tool a city has to ensure orderly growth and development.

New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.

Preparing our city to achieve its destiny will require strong leadership.

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

Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn't successful - isn't even a city, really - unless it can lay claim to being 'vibrant.'

Planning cities is a necessary but risky business.

You guys in New York City can’t even get a hole in the ground fixed. And its been 5 years. Let’s be fair.

If, instead of hiring half-baked revolutionary planners to fill our college undergraduates with ingenious schemes to disperse populations, split up big cities into little ones, go underground or into distant places to escape bombs and congestion, abandon large urban areas in favor of roadside villages, we were to publish reliable, simply written, common-sense information to control the building boom, what a country this would be!

I think Bill de Blasio is doing interesting housing stuff in New York, Rahm Emanuel is doing interesting stuff with the infrastructure bank in Chicago. I want to go to America to meet with and engage with American mayors.

Through geospatial technologies, you can plan a whole city sitting in your room.

It's all about connectivity - not just technical connectivity but geographic connectivity. That's what makes a city go.

City planning finds its validation in the intuitive recognition that a burgeoning market society can not be trusted to produce spontaneously a habitable, sanitary, or even efficient city, much less a beautiful one.

I don't think of the New Urbanism as an economic or political train wreck. I think of it as one of these great generational upheavals that's coming.

A city is in many respects a great business corporation, but in other respects it is enlarged housekeeping. ... may we not say that city housekeeping has failed partly because women, the traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted as to its multiform activities?

It is hereby earnestly proposed that the USA would be much better off if that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities, the City of Los Angeles, could be declared incompetent and placed in charge of a guardian like any individual mental defective.

…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.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everything in the past is great and everything modern is terrible. But I do think cities should be a mix of old things and new things.

Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.

I live in the Village right near NYU, which is taking over most of the Village. I've lived there for most of my time in New York. One of the things I like about the Village is, it's considered the kind of area where you can't have skyscrapers or, actually, many tall buildings. So you can see the sky which, I think, is a benefit.

I love going to the river not only to enjoy nature, but to think about the Los Angeles River's place in our city's history and to envision its great place in our future.

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.