Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.

Cities are not problems. They are solutions.

As the world's 'most dynamic' cities seek to manage their own urban growth, American state and local officials have much to offer. Our mayors can share their experiences in urban design, clean energy projects, Smart Grids, codes for energy efficient buildings, transportation safety, and innovative environmental solutions.

In my opinion, further consideration of those views will help us find a way out of the current impasse, and reveal to us the kinds of buildings and cities required by the informational society.

All it takes is an understanding that humans, not buildings come first when designing a city.

Cities are central to the shaping and delivery of national policy objectives, and in return, they are the places where social, environmental, and economic policies play out in practice.

Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

Detroit is really the most perfectly laid out city one could imagine, and such an enchanting park and lake, - infinitely better than any town I know in Europe. It ought to be a paradise in about fifty years when it has all matured.

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

The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan's builders to develop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid's two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.

The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.

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

Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.

Buffalo is one of America's great designed cities. The interweaving of great architecture, landscape architecture and important historic sites makes Buffalo a must see destination for preservationists, designers, history buffs, and anyone wishing to see an inspiring example of American design.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Science and Technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconscious with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives.

Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and the city.

By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.

The more I observed Washington, the more frequently I visited it, and the more people I interviewed there, the more I understood how prophetic L'Enfant was when he laid it out as a city that goes around in circles.

Chicago's such a great city because it's got so many different brilliantly architecturally looking buildings, and you can really modify that city.

As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.

Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves.

All through organized history, if you wanted prosperity you had to have cities. Cities are places that attract new people with new ideas.

In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship -- around participation in public life.