Rick Famuyiwa Quotes

To me, Los Angeles was the invention of the suburb. They figured it out and perfected it and created a city that was dependent on the automobile.

I have always thought that L.A. is a motor city that developed linear downtowns.

Most cities have a centre surrounded by suburbs, but London has numerous centres: it's the model of a twenty-first century metropolis.

I don't like L.A. It's just not fun. I don't know why, but I just don't get it. You have to drive to get everywhere, and when it rains everybody freaks out.

The thing that overwhelms me when I go out now is the sprawlation of America.

San Francisco is a city; L.A. is a collection of suburbs that have very little in common with one another.

L.A. is not a place where people walk.

I grew up in L.A., and it's one of those cities designed around cars instead of the people that live there. I spent hours every day stuck in traffic, having the experience of looking around and seeing one person in every car.

Why is everything so far apart in Los Angeles?

I've never really liked L.A., because of its sprawl.

A lot of times, L.A. is desaturated, and cement and freeways, and downtown.

Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.

In L.A., I don't really want to go out because traffic sucks so bad. I'm sorry, I'm not going to spend five hours a day in my car, so you have to choose where you live very carefully.

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.

People drive everywhere in L.A., so you get very little human interaction... but N.Y. and Chicago are like London... L.A. lacks the social interaction.

I was attracted to the concept of Hollywood and the lifestyle here. But I've grown to mistrust it because it has changed. I didn't bargain for digital access parking in some concrete structure. Real heaven for me was to drive somewhere and park right in front. Now the city is going vertical.

The city of London, within the walls, occupies a space of only 370 acres, and is but the hundred and fortieth part of the extent covered by the whole metropolis.

In an urbanizing world there is an inherent conflict between the automobile and the city. After a point, as their numbers multiply, automobiles provide not mobility but immobility.

Urban and suburban sprawl is somewhat like pornography. Most people have great difficulty defining it, but they think they know it when they see it. Sprawl has been with us since the dawn of history.

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.

In 1970, Los Angeles became the first place where the total acreage used for roads and parking exceeded the amount of space given over to habitation.

San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.

All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization.... Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitantsdo not live in their city; they merely inhabit it.

Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States.

I say we don't need art in nature, because it's so perfect without us. We need it in the cities. But the cities have absolutely lost their own center. They think having ten cars and a big bridge is the way to happiness. It's not.