2,405 Quotes About Cities

Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in the end.

All through organized history, if you wanted prosperity you had to have cities. Cities are places that attract new people with new ideas.

This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.

This is something everyone knows: A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe.

The first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other. This is a lesson no one learns by being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties of kinship or close friendship or formal responsibility to you take a modicum of responsibility for you.

Lowly, unpurposeful, and random as they appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life must grow.

The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.

Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.