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.
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.
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.
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.
As industries migrate toward the Far East, the future of many Western cities will no longer lie in manufacturing products but ideas and patents. Young, mobile elites can choose where they want to live, and they can easily move, which means that cities are involved in a heated competition for the best people. Only the most attractive cities can benefit from this development.
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.
The opportunities of the twenty-first century make those of us who care about cities feel like kids in a candy store: How will cities survive and lead the way in the transformation required to combat global warming? Resilient Cities gives us a road map for this epic journey upon which we are embarking.
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.
What people want now, they want jobs. They want great jobs with good pay. And I'll tell you, we're spending a lot of money on the inner cities - we are fixing the inner cities - we are doing far more than anybody has done with respect to the inner cities. It is a priority for me, and it's very important.
Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that are 'story cities'- New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco.
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.
We flee away from cities, but we bring The best of cities, these learned classifiers, Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts.
I would want us to start our quest to survive mass extinction by rethinking how we build cities. Cities should be commonplaces of production, rather than consumption - they should be producing food, and fuel.
I had a major bug for cities and for paintings and literature and all the things I thought went on in cities.
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.