Urban Density Quotes

The more you densify a city, the more congestion will increase, however technology changes... cities so packed that they will no longer function... vertical sprawl.

I know that New York City remains the highest density urban area in the country and by far dedicates more of its own funds to fighting terrorism than any other municipality.

When I'm in L.A., I see Teslas like they're Hondas.

New York City is as much on the perpendicular as on the horizontal plane …. Americans have practically added a new dimension to space. When they find themselves a little crowded, they simply tilt a street on end and call it a skyscraper …. Aerial suburbs …. Mansions in the sky.

Manhattan, one of the most moneyed spots on the planet, also has one of the greatest concentrations of people in its skyscrapers. It's also, of course, the place where every architect wants to build his tower.

The bigger the city is, the less infrastructure you need per capita.

Because there are a lot of big cities in the world, people who live in cities have become more isolated than ever.

The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects.

I would still rather be in Silicon Alley. I like the West Coast also, but it's sort of fragmented. You have companies in downtown San Francisco, companies in Mountain View, and people are driving between them all. It's kind of nice in New York to just jump in a cab and reach another company so easily.

In Toronto, I grew up taking a subway, I grew up taking a bus. I spent my formative adult years in New York City, walking the streets, taking the subway. You're connected to the larger whole. L.A. is so spread out, and you're so incubated inside those cars and it's so exhausting to deal with the traffic, without really having the human contact.

In New York, the impact of these concentrated superskyscrapers on street scale and sunlight, on the city's aniquated support systems, circulation, and infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. ... Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.

Mixed use is what cities are all about. If you don't have mixed use, you don't have cities.

I think New York City most represents what it is that America in general aspires to. It's big; it's dense. I've known this city from all of its social arcs. The best that's in America is yet to come. The worst that's in America is yet to come.

You can’t bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I’m hardly speaking in metaphor. It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that?

From the strictest humanitarian viewpoint, any attempt to stop the processes by which over crowded cities purge themselves is not a kindness.

All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization.... Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitantsdo not live in their city; they merely inhabit it.

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

[Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.

For carbon-neutral cities, there are things worth talking about in how our consumption patterns can change - sharing goods, etc. - but those are a fraction of the impacts of transportation and building energy use. If we need to choose priority actions, the most important things are to densify, provide transit, and green the buildings.

Denser cities are smarter and more productive

When 125,000 people are gathered together on 10 square miles of land they must of necessity give up certain of their liberties. It is a sacrifice they must make for the sake of the advantages of city life.

the search for the ultimate skyscraper goes on. ... At worst, overbuilding will make urban life unbearable. At best, we will go out in a blaze of style.

The population of Seoul is decreasing but a large population is not a key element of an advanced city.

The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.

London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.