Christian de Duve Quotes

I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man.

Bangkok is a toilet without a flush.

The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the town lets wither a time and die.

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

The model of the human habitat dictated by zoning is a formless, soul-less, centerless, demoralizing mess. It bankrupts families and townships. It disables whole classes of decent, normal citizens. It ruins the air we breathe. It corrupts and deadens our spirit.

Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation.

I have a lot of land. I bought it because I had a very strong feeling. I was in my early twenties, and I had grown up in Los Angeles and had seen that city slide off into the sea from the city I knew as a little kid. It lost its identity - suddenly there was cement everywhere and the green was gone and the air was bad - and I wanted out.

Money and prices and markets don't give us exact information about how much our suburbs, freeways, and spandex cost. Instead, everything else is giving us accurate information: our beleaguered air and watersheds, our overworked soils, our decimated inner cities. All of these provide information our prices should be giving us but do not.

Cities all over the world are getting bigger as more and more people move from rural to urban sites, but that has created enormous problems with respect to environmental pollution and the general quality of life.

I would never want to move to L.A.

A great American city is fighting for its life.

The brutal reality is that newer, more sprawling suburbs - and especially the cheap boom-years exburbs - aren't just a bit unsustainable, they're ruinously unsustainable in almost every way, and nothing we know of will likely stop their decline, much less fix them easily.

In most slums and cities in developing states, population growth is outpacing the ability of the growth in pollution and sewage. Such unmet expectations in over-crowded cities can be the catalyst for civil conflict.

London is the greatest city in the world, but we're at a crossroads. Ordinary Londoners have been priced out of our city because of the housing crises. We're a city that's growing in population, but the infrastructure can't cope with the growth.

Park City is developing itself, almost to death.

Newark faces real challenges.

Our metropolises are blighted by two problems: a lack of public transport and a lack of public loos.

I don't wish for anybody to go out of business, but I think there are far too many things in New York that really shouldn't be here.

American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.

Most of suburbia will end up in three ways: ruins, slums, salvage yards for materials.

Mumbai is becoming more and more of a nightmare.

Southwest Detroit has been through hell (excuse my directness) with Matty Moroun, his Bridge Company, and all his fancy-named subsidiaries. From blighted homes that my boys have to walk by to allowing his trucks to rumble down our residential streets, passing our parks, schools, and homes - we have had it.

See, New York is over the hill. It's swallowed up in its own garbage. And the people - I can't stand the people.

Cities are drivers of growth and wealth, and at the same time, cities are becoming increasingly violent.

Sao Paulo is a dump. That's a known fact.