We all need the living green or we'll shrivel up inside. To make the modern city livable is the task of our times. — Jens Jensen
The city is not a concrete jungle. It is a human zoo. — Desmond Morris
A city is a large community where people are lonesome together. — Herbert V. Prochnow
A city is a large community where people are lonesome together. — Herbert Prochnow
The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo. — Desmond Morris
The materials of city planning are: sky, space, trees, steel and cement; in that order and that hierarchy. — Le Corbusier
As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means. — Albert Camus
Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design. — Jane Jacobs
City life is millions of people being lonesome together. — Henry David Thoreau
American life, in large cities, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves; it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it. — Joseph McCarthy
Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs. — Jane Jacobs
...frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighbouhood. — Jane Jacobs
Urban Landscape Quotes
The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque. — Susan Sontag
I don't think of myself as a rebellious artist, a lot of people have said that about me because I came from Cornwall and choose to paint people in what they considered to be an urban style instead of Cornish landscapes. I've never agreed with them. It's bullshit. — Danny Fox
What I wanted to try and figure out was, okay, in contemporary 21st century life the alienation between the self and the land around you or the self and even the urban landscape. You name it. — DJ Spooky
To truly make good public space, you have to erase the distinctions between architecture, urbanism, landscape, [and] media design. — Liz Diller
I enjoy places that have mystery and atmosphere, perhaps a patina of age, a suggestion rather than a description, a question or two. I look for memories, traces, evidence of the human interaction with the landscape. Sometimes I photograph pure nature, sometimes urban structures. — Michael Kenna
So he [Sigmund Freud] called this "the uncanny" and he also referred to cities as well, like the idea of walking through the city and the way the urban landscape could lead you to a sense of disorientation and to a kind of, you know, sense of repetition. And the way a city can unfold as you walk. — DJ Spooky
The mind left to itself creates monstrosities, and not only in art galleries. Look at our urban landscapes and industrial wastelands. No civilization has ever produced so much ugliness. — Eckhart Tolle
Walkman was the precursor to the cell phone, in terms of your strategy for getting through the urban landscape and the modern experience. Insulate yourself from it with your own soundscape. — Douglas Rushkoff
Ultimately we need to recognize that while humans continue to build urban landscapes, we share these spaces with others species. — David Suzuki
Urban Life Quotes
I live a very quiet life, although I'm very urban and a diehard New Yorker — Armand Assante
Gang violence in America is not a sudden problem. It has been a part of urban life for years, offering an aggressive definition and identity to those seeking a place to belong in the chaos of large metropolitan areas. — Dave Reichert
I am a person that believes in different emotions with music. Music can bring about different vibes on the field, off the field, urban life, going to church, leaving church. Everything the world may bring, there's a song for it to put you in the right frame of mind. — Cam Newton
The key words of violent economics are urbanization, industrialization, centralization, efficiency, quantity, speed. . . . The problem of evolving a nonviolent way of economic life [in the West] and that of developing the underdeveloped countries may well turn out to be largely identical. — E. F. Schumacher
A land full of places that are not worth caring about may soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending. — James Howard Kunstler
Europe is a very different place from my native country of Colombia and my children are growing up in a very urban setting which is nothing like when I was growing up and would be able to play barefoot in the street. But we have a very good life. — Shakira
Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door. — Charles Lamb
I probably lead a very spoiled life, because I travel from people interested in permaculture to people interested in permaculture. Some of them are tribal, and some of them are urban, and so on. — Bill Mollison
Strengthening local airports in Iowa is important for economic development and improving the quality of life our rural areas and urban communities — Chuck Grassley
Cities all over the world are getting bigger as more and more people move from rural to urban sites, but that has created enormous problems with respect to environmental pollution and the general quality of life. — Alan Dundes
Urban Design Quotes
It is difficult to design a space that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished. — William H. Whyte
London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design. — Renzo Piano
The fundamental failure of most graphic, product, architectural and even urban design is its insistence on serving the God of Looking-Good rather than the God of Being-Good. — Richard Saul Wurman
The design of the building addresses the public nature of both the urban context and the internal program. In order to reinforce the building's associative or mimetic qualities, the facades are organized in a classical three-part division of base, middle or body, and attic or head. — Michael Graves
Preventing global warming from becoming a planetary catastrophe may take something even more drastic than renewable energy, superefficient urban design, and global carbon taxes. — Jamais Cascio
When people condemn me for designing iconic buildings in cities and not having an idea what a city is, they haven't done their homework. I started in urban design and city planning. It's just that when I got out of school there wasn't much of a market for that. There still isn't. — Frank Gehry
Any town that doesn't have sidewalks doesn't love its children. — Margaret Mead
I'm completely taken and impressed by the planning authority of Singapore and its Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). It's the most cutting-edge agency in the world. They have very effective guidelines for development, and they review design as it evolves. — Moshe Safdie
Urban design as a discipline barely exists in most American and Canadian cities. In Singapore, there are innovative transportation strategies at work. — Moshe Safdie
Urban Areas Quotes
Urbanization is not about simply increasing the number of urban residents or expanding the area of cities. More importantly, it's about a complete change from rural to urban style in terms of industry structure, employment, living environment and social security. — Li Keqiang
If the Chinese population were to be given a free vote, the unity of the Han might begin to crack, or, more likely, the countryside and urban areas would come into conflict. — Tim Marshall
Urban legend has it that Area 51 is connected by underground tunnels and trains to other secret facilities around the country. — Annie Jacobsen
Meth is a major problem not only in our urban areas, but in most of the rural areas of Colorado. No region has been immune from this scourge and it is getting larger. — Ken Salazar
Strengthen the rural areas and you will find less people migrating to urban areas. You give them opportunity, self respect & self confidence, they will never go to an urban slum. — Bunker Roy
However, don't let these statistics mislead you, gang violence is not limited to California and or big urban areas - that might have been true a while ago but it is no longer the case today. — Bob Filner
The premature migration of very large numbers of people from rural areas to urban areas can give rise to a lot of strains to the urban infrastructure, which can also create problems of crime - law-and-order problems. — Manmohan Singh
Because they [Americans] want to be thought of as a rich nation, they are very ashamed of this place [Appalachia] that has come to represent poverty, even though poverty exists all over the country, and exists as much in urban areas as it does in rural, if not more. — Silas House
Blade Runner appears regularly, two or three times a year in various shapes and forms of science fiction. It set the pace for what is essentially urban science fiction, urban future and it's why I've never re-visited that area because I feel I've done it. — Ridley Scott
I don't write police stories, per se, but I usually write about areas that are very panoramic, like Harlem, or the Lower East Side, or a small urban city like Jersey City. — Richard Price
Built Environment Quotes
The good building is not one that hurts the landscape, but one which makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before the building was built. — Frank Lloyd Wright
There are forces in nature called Love and Hate. The force of Love causes elements to be attracted to each other and to be built up into some particular form or person, and the force of Hate causes the decomposition of things. — Empedocles
The room is there for the human being - not the human being for the room. — El Lissitzky
Humans are not disabled. A person can never be broken. Our built environment, our technologies, are broken and disabled. We the people need not accept our limitations, but can transcend disability through technological innovation. — Hugh Herr
Build your architecture from what is beneath your feet. — Hassan Fathy
A stage setting is not a background; it is an environment. — Robert Edmond Jones
We need a grassroots movement and government policies and programs to change the food landscape and the built environment to give our children a chance to have happy, healthy successful lives. — Mark Hyman, M.D.
We are built to conquer environment, solve problems, achieve goals, and we find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve. — Maxwell Maltz
The ecologist has a much more comprehensive and holistic view of the world. We're looking at the natural environment as well as the human built environment and the connectivity between the two - how do the natural environment and the human-built environment interact and interface with each other. — Ken Yeang
Show me a healthy community with a healthy economy and I will show you a community that has its green infrastructure in order and understands the relationship between the built and the unbuilt environment. — Will Rogers
Urban Quotes
Particular attention should be given to the opportunities which the environment presents or precludes for involvement of children with persons both older and younger than themselves. — Urie Bronfenbrenner
History shows that male homosexuality, which like prostitution flourishes with urbanization and soon becomes predictably ritualized, always tends toward decadence. — Camille Paglia
Do not try to make circumstances fit your plans. Make plans that fit the circumstances. — George S. Patton
The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. — David Harvey
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. — Aldous Huxley
I find it striking that the quality of the urban habitat of homo sapieans is so weakly researched compared to the habitats of gorillas, elephants, and Bengal tigers and panda bears in China…you hardly see anything on the habitat of man in the urban environment. — Jan Gehl
San Francisco lags behind other communities in providing a vital, vibrant and ecologically sustainable urban canopy, as well as open space in the city. — Gavin Newsom
People who live in SoHo want to be close to the energy, culture, and eccentricities of New York's most charming neighborhoods. — Jared Kushner
Human civilization has been changing the Earths environment for millennia, often to our detriment. Dams, deforestation and urbanization can alter water cycles and wind patterns, occasionally triggering droughts or even creating deserts. — Jamais Cascio
The real problems are cultural. The problems of the people who take drugs as a cultural trap - I think there's a real problem there, the crack stuff, the hopelessness of the junkie. The urban angst. — Jerry Garcia
Urban Planning Quotes
Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of men since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money. — John Prebble
A plan that everyone dislikes for different reasons is a success. A plan everyone dislikes for the same reason is a failure. A plan that everyone likes for the same reason is an act of God! — Richard Carson
Poor planning or poor execution of plans is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality. — Robert McNamara
As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense. — Jane Jacobs
Nothing's dangerous if you know what you're doing. — Johnny Unitas
By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities. — Socrates
A thousand policemen directing traffic cannot tell you why you come or where you go. — T. S. Eliot
The outcome of the city will depend on the race between the automobile and the elevator, and anyone who bets on the elevator is crazy. — Frank Lloyd Wright
Those who plan do better than those who do not plan, even should they rarely stick to their plan. — Winston Churchill
If a policeman must know the Constitution, then why not a planner? — William J. Brennan
Urban Development Quotes
As Spengler observed, all urbanized societies seem to develop a subconscious death wish, making individuals indifferent to the survival of their families and their race. — Revilo P. Oliver
His [Donald Trump] urban policy is stop and frisk, law and order. And we need investment and development. — Jesse Jackson
The idea of the chickens with the multiple breasts and thighs came from an urban legend that some fast-food places had developed chickens with four thighs. It wasn't true, but it is a suggestive rumor. — Margaret Atwood
Unlike the urban development that I see taking over and swallowing up our precious soil, when we interact with our environment in a way that allows for regeneration and natural spaces, the outcome can be beautiful. — Cory Trepanier
I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning. — Kenzo Tange
In North America, hip-hop and urban music are much more developed than it could be in Europe, except for a couple of markets like France, for example, or Germany, they're a little bit more aware. — K-Maro
The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy. — Robert Smithson
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. — Rem Koolhaas
I think that there will always be a need for Housing and Urban Development. — Alphonso Jackson
In college, I was a fiercely committed Democrat - a meeting with Jack Kemp, then Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, challenged my blind partisanship. — Cory Booker
Urban Music Quotes
I think everybody don't know what color I am. It's like, "He's not black enough. He's not white enough. He's got a Latin last name but he doesn't have - he doesn't speak Spanish. Who are we selling this to? Are you making urban music? Are you making pop music? What kind of music are you making?" — Bruno Mars
I'm influenced by the music of the '60s. It's a mishmash of everything. To me, psychedelic can be all the way to a DJ. House music can be very psychedelic. 'Flying Lotus' is very psychedelic. Even though it's urban and technological, it's also mind-expanding, anything-can-go mishmash. — Anton Newcombe
Part of my affinity with urban music comes from being on 'Kids Incorporated,' 'cos we used to sit around and listen to Chaka Khan and Prince, and I got influenced by all that. Then gangsta rap got started, and I was infatuated with that - maybe that's why I'm fascinated by guns. — Fergie
So that I saw music as a way of documenting realities from the urban cities of Latin America. — Ruben Blades
I really didn't try to make an effort to make urban music, but I am a product of my inspirations. — Justin Timberlake
I'm a kid from New York, so urban life reflected into art and music was around me and accessible and tangible. — Zoe Saldana
What I did was go into the studio and make music that I love. Make music that when you hear it, it feels good. Whether it was urban inspired, dance inspired, HipHop inspired or it just feels good period. — Kelly Rowland
Every place has its own challenges. In Canada, we have blessings like grants, but we also have curses in the sense that when you start to do more urban classified music, we no longer have a single urban radio station left. — Kreesha Turner
When I first put out music, people didn't know what I looked like. They called it a new type of something, they couldn't put a genre on it - it was where indie and urban kind of meet in the middle. I thought that was quite exciting. — FKA twigs
In many ways I'm an experimental and new music composer that comes from a rural tradition rather than an urban one. — Sxip Shirey
Unlike a child in a totally urban environment, my friends and peer group were not only other children, but also wild and domesticated animals, plants of every sort, brooks and waterfalls, rocks and sand. — Freeman Patterson
There's an aesthetic theme, which is cities at two o'clock in the morning. Not cities packed with people going out to clubs and dancing but desolate, empty streets. It's off-putting but there's a strange comfort to it as well, that desolate urban environment. — Moby
I wanted to improve the suburban office building; to create a great urban space in a suburban environment with all that implies about interaction, collaboration and creativity. — Helmut Jahn
Although you should respect venomous snakes and approach them with caution, most snakes you encounter in an urban environment are harmless and beneficial because they eat insects, mice and other rodents. — Robert Pierce
The dining room is a building; the bathroom is a building. If we scatter this single-program architecture inside of a domestic environment, we can link an interior urbanism in a way similar to a village or a township of tiny houses. — Jimenez Lai
The jarring change going from an urban environment to an extremely remote natural environment is extremely inspiring. It's constantly stimulating, it's like a slap in the face. — Carter Burwell
The disadvantages of a decentralized, spread out urban area are tremendous, and the environmental damage of urban sprawl cannot be ignored. As a large city, Tokyo must be used more efficiently and the population density increased. — Minoru Mori
Will urban sprawl spread so far that most people lose all touch with nature? Will the day come when the only bird a typical American child ever sees is a canary in a pet shop window? When the only wild animal he knows is a rat-glimpsed on a night drive through some city slum? When the only tree he touches is the cleverly fabricated plastic evergreen that shades his gifts on Christmas morning? — Frank N. Ikard
Yeah, you got the family dog and the white picket fence, and you just think that's all there is. Some of us had to grow up in poverty-stricken urban neighborhoods, and we just had to adapt to our environment. I know that it's wrong. But people act like it's some crazy thing they never heard of. They don't know. — Michael Vick
You can't find an uglier urban environment than the centre of Hollywood, but then you go to Griffith Park, you go to the beach, you go to the mountains, and it's rural. I live up in the Hollywood Hills and I have frogs, owls, coyotes, mountain lions - but I'm ten minutes from the centre of the city. — Moby
I will say that growing up as a kid in an urban environment and having lived in cities all my life, the one achievement that everyone can look forward to is getting the perfect parking spot. — Saul Perlmutter
Noise pollution is basically defined as the presence of simple information that makes it impossible to hear all the other more delicate - and often more important - information. Noise pollution creates, if you will, dumb environments. Our industrial areas, many of our downtown urban areas, are dumb acoustic environments. Very simple, very loud, often unhealthy. — Gordon Hempton
"Acoustic ecologist" is basically a fancy name for someone who tries to become a better listener. Not just listening to those thoughts, ideas, and productions of human intention, but listening to places - whether it's an urban environment, residential, industrial, or even the farthest corner of the world, in one of our last great quiet places where we can listen to the pure sounds of nature without any human-caused noise intrusions. — Gordon Hempton
Walking is very good for writers. There's something fundamentally useful about not talking to anybody, not looking at a screen, and being in nature - even if that nature is an urban environment. — Mohsin Hamid
Every other word out of every other Chinese mouth is "development, development, development, development." And that's what they're talking about it - because they believe it, A, enables them, with development, to have the kind of status they want in the world, and B, it enables them to deal with their internal problems, having to do with poverty, urban-rural as well as the environment. — Charlie Rose
I think a current understanding about urban behavior tells us that it's important that people get out and be able to get away from the concrete jungles and the dense environment where they live for their own mental well-being. If they don't do this, the costs in human loss and human sickness will be far greater than what we would be expending for these kinds of releases and open spaces. — Barry Goldwater
The gradual depletion of the ozone layer and the related "greenhouse effect" has now reached crisis proportions as a consequence of industrial growth, massive urban concentrations and vastly increased energy needs. Industrial waste, the burning of fossil fuels, unrestricted deforestation, the use of certain types of herbicides, coolants and propellants: all of these are known to harm the atmosphere and environment. — Pope John Paul II
If you paint a building shocking pink, that has no scale, it is just a huge mistake, but it's not in the scale of the city to have things like that. You know. So, not only because it's not appropriate, not only because it's offensive to the environment, I mean but among them also because that quantity of that color in the urban scale, is out of scale. — Massimo Vignelli
Each of us-adult or child-must earn nature's gift by knowing nature directly, however difficult it may be to glean that knowledge in an urban environment. — Richard Louv
In an urban environment, a church building is a thing of the past. — Mark Batterson
In the planning and designing of new communities, housing projects, and urban renewal, the planners both private and public, need to give explicit consideration to the kind of world that is being created for the children who will be growing up in these settings. Particular attention should be given to the opportunities which the environment presents or precludes for involvement of children both older and younger than themselves. — Urie Bronfenbrenner
Once I have the finished sculpture, I’ll put it out on the street or in nature or somewhere where it interacts with the environment. Really it’s kind of the idea of turning the street into a stage and this sort of urban theater has a life of its own. If you have creative drive, and you need to manifest it, then you need some sort of medium to do that through. For me, it worked out with sculpture, and tape just is a means of doing sculpture. — Mark Jenkins
She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness. — Ruth Ozeki
In Conclusion
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