Urban Sustainability Quotes

Fifty percent of the world's population lives in cities. In a couple of decades, 70 percent of the world's population will be living in cities. Cities are where the problem is. Cities are where the solution is, where creativity exists to address the challenges and where they have most impact. This is why, in 2005, the C40 was founded, an organization of cities that address climate change. It started with 18 cities; now it's 91. Cities simply are the key to saving the planet.

To save energy, New York City is now dimming the lights of the skyscrapers and the skyline at night. There's a bad side to this. If you need Batman, you have to text him.

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.

Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.

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.

Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health. It is a reminder that our most celebrated technological achievements-the automobile, the jet plane, the power plant, industry in general, and indeed the modern city itself-are, in the environment, failures.

When the forest and the city are functionally indistinguishable, then we know we have reached sustainability.

Within one generation, Los Angeles will be uninhabitable if people don’t do something about it. The world is going to get smaller and be uninhabitable and impossible to live in.

Population growth and the proliferation of mega-cities around the world redefines the entire global security agenda.

Any city has to give some thought to its ambition and brand in order to set sustainability goals.

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.

What if cities embraced a culture of sharing? I see a future of shared cities that bring us community and connection instead of isolation and separation.

Jane Jacobs work wouldnt have been complete if it hadn't inspired others to carry it on, and evolve Jane's groundbreaking accomplishments so that the essential kernel of thought remains relevant for future generations. The essayists in What We See have built on those essential footholds that people who have never heard of Jane Jacobs will benefit from for decades.

We didn't make the mistakes that many other cities did.

We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.

We write with the souls of thousands of lives saved, the lives of millions of jobs created, liberating multitudes of drivers from the shackles of servitude to iniquitous taxi cartels of corrupt cabals that choked cities with their pollution of air and morals.

In my home city of Vancouver, most people put out their recycling boxes. The organic grocery and cafe on Fourth Avenue is flourishing. Bikes are popular, and there are a few gas-electric hybrid cars gliding around. But as this new century begins, my twentysomething generation is becoming increasingly disconnected from the natural world.

Our world is evolving without consideration, and the result is a loss of biodiversity, energy issues, congestion in cities. But geography, if used correctly, can be used to redesign sustainable and more livable cities.

One time, I threw a candy wrapper on the street. I was with a friend who said to me, You just littered on the street! Don't you care about the environment? And I thought about it, and I said, You know what? This isn't the environment. This is New York City. New York City is not the environment. New York City is a giant piece of litter. Next to Mexico City, it's the shittiest piece of litter in the world. Just a pussy, runny, smokin', stinkin' piece of litter.

Climate action in cities is the key that unlocks a low emissions and resilient future.

Cities offer us powerful leverage on our most stubborn, wasteful practices. Long commutes in our cars, big power bills from our energy-hogging buildings, shopping trips to buy stuff that'll spend a few short months in our homes and long centuries in our landfills.

Two-thirds of all growth takes place in cities because, by simple fact of population density, our urban spaces are perfect innovation labs. The modern metropolis is jam-packed. People are living atop one another; their ideas are as well.

I've worked on the urban agenda all my life. All. My. Life.

Building sustainable cities - and a sustainable future - will need open dialogue among all branches of national, regional and local government. And it will need the engagement of all stakeholders - including the private sector and civil society, and especially the poor and marginalized.

Cities can be the engine of social equity and economic opportunity. They can help us reduce our carbon footprint and protect the global environment. That is why it is so important that we work together to build the capacity of mayors and all those concerned in planning and running sustainable cities.