A Quote by Christopher Morley
All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.
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There are almost no beautiful cities in America, though there are many beautiful parts of cities, and some sections that are glorious without being beautiful, like downtown Chicago. Cities are too big and too rich for beauty; they have outgrown themselves too many times.
Nothing lasts forever. But—especially as it seems to me cities and humans are symbiotically and inextricably bound at this point—I hope cities have a good, long run. Plus, cities are beautiful creatures in their own right; and as with us, their vulnerability and ephemerality are part of that beauty.
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.
The way our big cities change sucks. The beauty of cities was that they were edgy, sometimes even a little dangerous. Artists, poets, and activists could come and unify and create different kinds of scenes. Not just fashion scenes, scenes that were politically active. Big cities are getting so high-end oriented, business corporate fashion, fashion not in an artistic sense but in a corporate sense. For me that edgy beauty of cities is lost, wherever you go.
Backward cities, or younger cities, or newly forming cities in supply regions, have to develop to a great extent on one another's shoulders. This is one of the terrible things about empires.
The Spirit of Cities presents a new approach to the study of cities in which the focus is placed on a city's defining ethos or values. The style of the book is attractively conversational and even autobiographical, and far from current social science positivism. For a lover of cities--and perhaps even for one who is not--The Spirit of Cities is consistently good reading.
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.
When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Planners are guided by principles derived from the behaviour and appearance of suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs and imaginary dream cities - from anything but cities themselves.
You have to take in the whole picture, and ask, "What is it you want? What kind of world do you want?" So, I have drawings of different cities. Those cities have an end goal; they're not just cities. The end goal of those cities is to make things relevant to people that they respond to. There's no other way.
For the most part, French cities are much better preserved and looked after than British cities, because the bourgeoisie, the people who run the cities, have always lived centrally, which has only recently begun to happen in big cities in England. Traditionally in England, people who had any money would live out in the suburbs. Now, increasingly, people with money live in the cities, but this has changed only in the last 20 or so years.
I am generally enthusiastic about cities. Here in the West there is a panic. Every time we have a debate about cities, we talk about the problems of cities.
Well, first of all the Dominion Bureau of Statistics made a survey in the spring of 1970, which showed that on balance the difference in the cost of living between Canadian cities and American cities was 5 % to the advantage, of course, to the Canadian cities.
In trading with each other cities can't be in too different stages of development, and they can't copy one another. Backward cities, or younger cities, or newly forming cities in supply regions, have to develop to a great extent on one another's shoulders. This is one of the terrible things about empires. Empires want them only to trade with the empire, which doesn't help them at all. It's just a way of exploiting them.
Cities produce love and yet feel none. A strange thing when you think about it, but perhaps fitting. Cities need that love more than most of us care to imagine. Cities, after all, for all their massiveness, all their there-ness, are acutely vulnerable.
When I look at cities now, I don't see them in the present. This is the decaying infrastructure of our existing cities. Years from now, none of this is going to be here. New cities are going to rise.
I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.
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