New Yorkers only cross water for visual culture if the water is an ocean. The East River throws us for a huge loop. If we started going to Queens and the Bronx for visual culture, many of our rent, space, and crowding problems would be over indefinitely.
The present age, for all its cosmopolitan hustle, is curiously suburban in spirit.
Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.
Knowledge and power in the city; peace and decency in the country.
The size of the city and the nature of how independent the neighborhoods are means that not only do people who live outside Chicago not know what is going on there, Chicagoans often don't know what is going on there.
I don't think the Internet has replaced cities in any significant way, nor really could it. Cities are dynamic - and deeply seductive for the people who flock there - because they broker all sorts of fantastic and useful connections, cultural and economic and social.
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.
Karachi captures all of those rifts between ancient and modern, communal and individual. You see them playing out in people's lives.
The metropolis reveals itself as one of those great historical formations in which opposing streams which enclose life unfold, as well as join one another with equal right.
In a city this size, every year, hundreds of husbands walk away. Kids leave home. Wives escape. People disappear.
Growing up in D.C. there are so many different types of educational and professional levels. They call D.C. 'Chocolate City' but just because we're all chocolate doesn't mean we're all the same. In D.C., everyone co-exists harmoniously but the lines are still drawn. And people don't really step over those lines.
A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
The anonymity of the city is one of its strengths as well as - carried too far - one of its weaknesses.
L.A. is such a real, active place. My mother was very into the core of the city. She worked in politics, and you have to know your territory. It's an active matrix; we're all parts of it, but people don't often stop to wonder what's going on.
But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.
In New York - not to say New York isn't a competitive place - but there's much more of a sense of, we're all here and some of us are up and some of us are down and some of us are in the middle, but we have a longer view of history and how it works, rather than just this week.
I always felt uncomfortable with real estate because buildings don't move, and neighborhoods change.
Places change all the time, and the type of people who live there change.
I feel 'The Street' is a really accurate comment on the relationships between people.
For a Bostonian... we live in the shadow of New York, and to be acknowledged by New Yorkers is really the greatest feeling.
I feel like Chicago it's so different, we have a different story to tell, we are seeing these things happen in this city every day, and whether you participate in them or not, you see it and get influenced by it.
As you withdraw energy from the city, you are also giving energy back. People are noticing you. You're doing something, you're there, the species around you absorb your presence into it, and you become part of this animate entity called the city.
I see a really good tag on a building, a man passed out in the middle of the street, a couple hugging, a cop arresting a panhandler. I'm interested in how all these things are happening in one block.
When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: a city cannot be a work of art.
In New York, the drummers rush for a reason - because there's so much energy crackling through everything in that city and so many collisions at a highly accelerated rate.
