Karan Mahajan Quotes

I think, probably, socially, in some ways New York may be the least American city. It represents too many things that Americans really don't entirely want in their lives.

I actually think Johannesburg represents the future. My version of what I think the world is going to become looks like Johannesburg.

The world's major metropolitan cities are more or less the same.

In the past Berlin was much more radical and extreme and now it's becoming much more of a conventional European city.

But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.

New York City has always had more in common with Paris or London than with Cincinnati.

Civic rationality and modern capitalism triumphed in the medieval northern European cities – but not in Chinese, Indian or Muslim cities

I think the city is the strongest social memory organ of humanity.

It was at the department store where people got away from provincialism.

If you read the poets of the 19th century in Latin America, you would see that Havana or Mexico City or Buenos Aires are incredibly modern and global cities that they were not. And eventually they became real, and they became real because people read these books and tried to live in a better world.

If New York has just become a mall for the world, then what's the difference between being here and somewhere else?

My grandfather and his wife came to America at the end of the 19th century from Hungary. Everyone started out on the Lower East Side. They became embourgeoise and would move to the Upper West Side. Then, if they'd make money, they'd move to Park Avenue. Their kids would become artists and move down to the Lower East Side and the Village.

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.

[Urbanization] is the inevitable outcome of the processes of growth and the processes of modernization.

Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.

From the moment a New Yorker is confronted with almost any large city of Europe, it is impossible for him to pretend to himself that his own city is anything other than an unscrupulous real-estate speculation

Let Toronto become Milan. Montreal will always be Rome.

He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.

I think people's minds are going to have to assimilate in the sense that all the world is international now. The whole world has gone global. I think cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles are the models of our future.

London has changed enormously and so have the English in the past decade. They're more like Americans and more like Europeans, too. They're always eating out, and when they're at home they don't cook the way they did ten years ago. They're all sitting around in cafés, like the Continentals, drinking coffee and chattering and watching the world go by.

The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers' hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness.

What has happened in the last generation is that Tijuana has become a new Third World capital - much to the chagrin of Mexico City, which is more and more aware of how little it controls Tijuana politically and culturally. In addition to whorehouses and discos, Tijuana now has Korean factories and Japanese industrialists and Central American refugees, and a new Mexican bourgeoisie that takes its lessons from cable television.

There are a lot of directors who make big money and do big things and then move out of the 'hood

As cities grow and technology takes over the world, belief and imagination fade away, and so do we.

If you were smart in 1807 you moved to London, if you were smart in 1907 you moved to New York City, and if you are smart in 2007 you move to Asia.