Leon Krier Quotes

Most people hugely underestimate the amount of 'empty space' we have in our country. Fly over the U.K., and you see that human settlement does not fill up the U.K. at all. It accounts for something of the order of 15 per cent of the landmass.

It was remarkable to see from space how predictable people are. Our homes and towns are almost all in places with moderate temperatures, and they generally have the same shape - a thinly occupied outer blob of suburb surrounding a densely populated core, all based around a ready source of water.

Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals.

Again and again, to be sure, on the way to America, and under many other circumstances, man has passed through the most adverse climates and has survived, but he has flourished and waxed strong only in certain zones.

The denser places get, the lower the amount of energy people use to get around it.

A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.

There are plenty of people on Earth. It's not like the human race is going to disappear if a few people don't come back. Exploration is dangerous.

Although mountains may guide migrations, the plains are the regions where people dwell in greatest numbers.

It seemed sensible to move to a market town where I could walk everywhere.

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!

… we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land

I don't know much about cities. When I go places, I usually stay in the country.

Only people who live outside cities realize the size of them. London turns out to be huge; there are great swaths, vast panoramas, a whole diaspora I'd never imagined. The place I live in tends to be manageably small, a few familiar journeys and destinations.

There are areas of the Earth that I would absolutely think no one lived in based on daytime observations. But then at night, lights pop up in those areas.

There are other places at which ... the laws have said there shall be towns; but Nature has said there shall not, and they remain unworthy of enumeration.

The first Care in building of Cities, is to make them airy and well perflated; infectious Distempers must necessarily be propagated amongst Mankind living close together.

We see buildings in Britain mostly as freestanding objects. They are not meant to have a dialogue with anything around them, or with history, or with ideas of any kind beyond the self-referential. What we call 'regeneration' is largely an excuse for building for maximum profit with a bit of sculptural design thrown in to catch the eye of the media.

In our entrancement with the motorcar, we have forgotten how much more efficient and how much more flexible the footwalker is.

As such, I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.

People must understand the Clean Ganga program, as an economic activity also. The Gangetic plains account for 40% of our population. They have over one hundred towns, and thousands of villages.

I have a new theory of history, which is certain things happen because they seem like a good idea at the time. And suburbia seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was a special time and place in history, with special dynamics. And now, we're going to have to live with the consequences of that. And the consequences will be tragic.

Population growth and the proliferation of mega-cities around the world redefines the entire global security agenda.

Flowers are as common in the country as people are in London.

We will certainly have to rethink the way in which we design and protect places where large numbers of Australians and indeed this will happen around the world.

The suburban cycle which began a hundred years ago is nearly over. We are in for a period of contraction and economic hardship.