A city should be built to give its inhabitants security and happiness
All Middlesex is ugly, notwithstanding the millions upon millionswhichit iscontinuallysucking up fromtherestof the kingdom.
City planning finds its validation in the intuitive recognition that a burgeoning market society can not be trusted to produce spontaneously a habitable, sanitary, or even efficient city, much less a beautiful one.
I'd rather we were rebuilding Philadelphia, as opposed to Kabul...There are American cities with serious infrastructure problems and we're not addressing them.
Yet we didn't fix anything. Our roads are bad, our bridges are bad, our tunnels are bad, our schools are bad, our hospitals are bad.
It's nice to get president candidates' attention to infrastructure need which is really a ticking time bomb in America. But as important as the dollar amounts are, we need to know that this money is gonna go directly to cities. So we're gonna be able to put it to use. In previous administrations and in previous efforts on infrastructure, the money has gone through states and it never seems to find its way to the nation's cities.
Many, many large cities have old, crumbling infrastructure that have got to be dealt with in the nearest future, or they're going to be in serious trouble. They'll be unlivable if they don't do something.
Moscow has changed. I was here in 1982, during the Brezhnev twilight, and things are better now. For instance, they've got litter. In 1982 there was nothing to litter with.
This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.
In America, we have an infrastructure that's so bad, our roads, our highways, our schools, our tunnels, our bridges. Look at our bridges. Half of them have reports that they are in serious danger.
Of course, I had a paradigm of a certain city in my head when I wrote these stories, a city that inspired my imagination, but it was only inspiration.
I've worked on the urban agenda all my life. All. My. Life.
Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem
When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: a city cannot be a work of art.
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.
There are few jobs in the world that are more fun than being the head of Urban Development for a great and thriving city.
I classify Sao Paolo this way: The Governor's Palace is the living room. The mayor's office is the dining room and the city is the garden. And the favela is the back yard where they throw the garbage.
People generally have more feeling for canals and roads than education. However, I hope we can advance them with equal pace.
