urban evolution Quotes

Los Angeles is the evolutionary edge.

But I can tell you that the New York that I see now is not the New York that we grew up in. It's not 1973.

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

I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement. Towns and cities, too, which always retain the ghost of their earlier incarnations beneath today's concrete and glass.

I don't want to compare my city to Zurich; thank God we're not that boring. Rio is advancing fast, but we're at a different phase in our civilization.

New York has never learnt the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs.

I don't mind being the voice of the New Oakland to maintain the integrity and edge of it. Old Oakland and New Oakland is one and the same. It's connected. I aspire to be the bridge between both.

The city keeps reinventing itself. And each generation thinks, as they enter it, that they've missed the best of it, and then they become the authors of the next "best." And so it goes on and on and on. And New York keeps redefining itself and reinventing itself, and then you look at it and it's pretty much the way it was back in the 1920's., or in the 1930's. Something stylistically different in some ways, but it's still got the same vitality.

NY is the city it is today in part because of the contributions from generations of artistic visionaries

I definitely think New York is a very, very vibrant, wonderful city, but I certainly, of course, can't help but miss a lot of the stuff that's no longer there.

I look at [Toronto] and think well, perhaps my grandchildren will someday look at this stuff with the sort of appreciation I once held for Art Deco. Although I've come to find Art Deco quite creepy too.

The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.

Every city began as a campsite - pg. 25

New York has changed a whole lot. For worse I think because back when I was growing up in New York we were always the trendsetters. I don't care if it was from clothes to hip-hop music, to whatever. Right now New York is a bunch of followers. A lot of them are. It's really not the same.

The suburbs of yesterday do not look at all like the suburbs of today.

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem

The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models.

Mexico City is very different now than when I grew up, but I was in the streets all the time - though I was born to a middle-class neighborhood where there weren't a lot of gangs and things. I was always comfortable.

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem-solving, problem-creating frenzy.

I think cities are the primordial forests of our time. We evolve faster as a species in cities. Cities are chaotic, liminal places where the many aspects of human potential, good and/or bad, are most readily magnified.

You feel sadness for time passing. New York is a city that keeps reinventing itself, and I love it so much.

London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.

I'm not dismissing prostitutes, but a lot has changed. This so-called gentrification, it can never be stopped.

My relationship to Brooklyn is probably the relationship that any 40-year-old man has to his hometown, which is that this is where I live, this what I know, yet it's different, it's changed. My fascination with the city has maybe subsided and now it's just where I'm from, where I live.