Italo Calvino Quotes

Every city is always changing, on its own trajectory.

In the beginning, New York and I had kind of a love-hate relationship. It seemed so abrasive compared to Europe. But the transformation here in recent years is really something. I don't think I would have seen as much change if I'd lived in any other city in the world.

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

Cities are not static objects to be feared or admired, but are instead a living process that residents are changing all the time.

The design of a city is like a strange archeology.

Elevated locations imply elevated purposes, even in American cities departing as radically as Los Angeles does from the traditional planning patterns of the Eastern Seaboard.

When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

Cities are immortal.

My father was into fame and leaving his mark. He was a city planner, sort of a genius in that world, the Robert Moses of Philadelphia. He was on the cover of 'Time' once, and I remember going to his office and seeing, like, two hundred copies, which he would hand out to people.

I have great memories of the old Times Square - wouldn't have missed being here to see that place for the world - but I can also deal with the new Times Square in the overall scheme of N.Y. City 2010.

I see the city as an organism, shaped through time by the little humans having habits and doing millions of stuff in and out of it.

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

Well the thing is that the New York of 1846 to 1862 was very different from downtown New York now. Really nothing from that period still exists in New York.

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

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.

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.

It's still possible to find pockets of old Dublin - but its becoming more and more rarified.

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center.

As a teenager, my father took me to the shows at the Architectural Association and to places like Milton Keynes back when it was first being built. But I couldn't find anything for me. There seemed to be despair at the possibility of the built environment possessing any imagination in the real world.

In the '60s when I was a student, there was this campaign to destroy 75 percent of the old buildings in Paris, replacing them with modern architecture. I realized this as a dangerous utopia. This modern vision did not understand the richness of the city. Thankfully, such destruction did not happen.

In other words, New York has gone all suburban and bourgeois on us.

Old San Francisco - the one so many nostalgics yearn for - had buildings that related well to each other.

I'm a native of L.A. I've seen the city change and develop over time, and I still believe there's no place like home.

Houston is undoubtedly my showcase city. I saved all my best buildings for Houston.

And then, build a bustling wonderful city of the 21st century, with a restoration of a spectacular skyline, which Manhattan, of course, needs. So, that is really the design as a whole.