Charles Bukowski Quotes

Look what we have built ... low-income projects that became worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.

LA is such a crumbling mess of a city. Basically in all my years of travelling, I haven't found another city in the western world that interest me as much as Los Angeles - which might sound like heresy, but most cities, history has already happened and the people living there are sort of living on the bones of the thousand years of history that's already happened there. Whereas LA is always reinventing itself.

I really love Miami, but I don't think the architecture matches the city. It's a bit too commercial.

I found that through my life, living in the city of Toronto, I look above the Pizza Pizza sign, and I look above the other signs and window dressing, and I see evidence of a city that no longer exists in the keystones and the decorations that line the tops of buildings. That presence of the old city has always moved me.

The artistic element of Manhattan has kind of moved to Brooklyn. Has it changed it? Yeah. Has it ruined it? I would say no. It is what it is. I say better that than an urban war zone.

I think there are some very evil things about gentrification.

New York has always been a city of change and a city about change, and it is a back-leading development. Nobody's going to want to come to New York if it looks like another strip mall.

In housing in the fifties in Britain and the sixties, we pulled down the terraces - destroyed whole communities and replaced them with tower blocks and we built walkways that became rat-runs for muggers. That was the fashionable opinion. But it was wrong.

Liberals want to live downtown. All over America - in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Georgetown - there are crowds of liberals living in the gritty, ugly, dirty neighborhoods sensible people are trying to flee.

One thing about Los Angeles is it feels like it's not new. It feels like it's already been built, and it's deteriorating, except for the places they're trying to make nicer. But in general, you drive all through the city, and the city feels like it was new a long time ago.

Like all things, cities must change - even a city as enamoured of the past and memory as D.C.

This is supposed to be the Big Apple, with neighborhoods where the houses are all good-looking and the skyscrapers and everything. But to me, New York is kind of shoddy and uncomfortable.

When I look at cities now, I don't see them in the present. This is the decaying infrastructure of our existing cities. Years from now, none of this is going to be here. New cities are going to rise.

That's the beauty of Mumbai. While some parts have grown rapidly, there are places like Churchgate that have retained their character.

One of the best things I found out about Detroit is that bears have started returning to the city. When bears are gentrifying your neighborhood and opening Thai restaurants, that's a poor neighborhood.

At that time [90th in Lagos], if you drove through the city, you drove through a foreground that always seemed to be incredibly dramatic and incredibly agonised - smoking, burning, incredible compression. In the first year we stayed on the ground and went everywhere. But then in order to discover whether this was the whole story, we rented a helicopter. And we began to understand that this is not chaos but a highly modern system that had been abandoned, then at some point went into reversal, then slowly came out of it.

Detroit right now is virtually abandoned at its core to the degree that a lot of what had been slums thirty years ago are now wildflower meadows. The rebuilding of Detroit will occur a much smaller scale. It remains to be seen what will become of Detroit's vast suburbs.

Most cities are eclectic. There's a bit of medieval, Georgian, some Victorian and some 20th century. That's fine. Bath is different because it was built within 100 years or less. It has a homogeneity.

The refurbishing and rebuilding of Fenway Park since 2001 has created a new urban neighborhood in Boston.

Certain parts are bad in every city, but Chicago is beautiful.

Westminster is a piece of this city's energy, something the contemporary world has forgotten.

This thing is such a ripple, the way lives are affected by gentrification. On one hand, yes, you're cleaning up this area, you're making it more livable for people. But you're not saying anything about the people that live there.

Compton is this amazing place with a rich history. I see it as a new Brooklyn.

The city of Rio de Janeiro is setting an example to the world of how to recover quality urban spaces through drastic intervention and the creation of cultural facilities such as the Museum of Tomorrow.

I used to walk in the burnt up Harlem of the '80s, and I'd look at brownstones that were dilapidated or apartment buildings, thinking 'Whoever designed this and built this did not want it to look like this.' So, I used to visualize one day being able to contribute and build in Harlem.