Public Space Quotes

If you believe in democracy, you accept, by definition, the existence and triumph of opposing ideas. The people who believe deeply in the Internet's force as a commons operate on that kind of premise.

The exercise of democracy begins as exercise, as walking around, becoming familiar with the streets, comfortable with strangers, able to imagine your own body as powerful and expressive rather than a pawn.

The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.

Most of the job on DDP was already done by the time I became mayor. So was Gwanghwamun Square, described by many architects as the city's worst architectural creation, and the new city hall. I did not think that redoing them would be the right approach as that would only create new problems.

Can a woman not walk with her possessions down the street of a city?

I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels

In the public realm, secularism should not concede a single inch to religious intrusions. To argue otherwise is to violate the meaning of secularism.

We felt it was very important for an entity like CCTV to make its presence felt... To generate a space and to define a space, that is the main thing.

Secular societies establish tolerance by being equally non-accommodating toward all religious demands within the public sphere.

O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you, you express me better than I can express myself.

I want people to feel the heat while they walk down the street and they're just kickin' it.

If City Hall started projecting swastikas, no one would say 'You know what? Free speech.' People would say that is wrong.

The idea is to bring art to people who might never really interact with it. It's for all citizens, and it's about making the city more interesting and more visually significant.

Public libraries are the last vestige of public free space.

A museum should not just be a place for fancy paintings but should be a place where we can communicate our lives through our everyday objects.

... every man on the planet Has just as much right as yourself to the road.

The public library is the most dangerous place in town

As a longtime former resident of 15 years in Washington, I wish that everybody would stay off the Mall with their political cause so that we can get out there, you know, and play flag football or Frisbee, or walk the dog or something - you know, which is, you know, what the National Mall should be for, in my personal opinion.

This palace belongs no longer to the Shadows of Allah on Earth, but to the nation, which is a fact and not a shadow, and I am happy to be here as an individual member of the nation, as a guest.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat.

I am a public library

You can be as exclusive as you want to in your house, but once you walk outside your house, you have to realize that it's not your world anymore: it's all of our world.

If you ever go to Temple Square in Salt Lake City, if you stay there long enough, you'll see a homeless person standing in the middle of their nice, beautiful square, holding out a cup for change. And the Mormons don't ever ask him to leave.

When shopping was still connected to the street it was also an intensification and articulation of the street. Now it has become utterly independent - contained, controlled, surveyed.