Urban Infrastructure Quotes

One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.

I felt that there's an obligation when writing a piece about an urban expressway made in the 50s to acknowledge the context, and Robert Moses is sort of an iconic figure in New York, and he influenced the shape of the city more than anyone else before or after him. He was one of the most powerful and influential civic architects in the world, because of how much he transformed the city. He built multiple bridges and highways and parks and recreational spaces, beaches - in the course of a few decades, he completely changed the city

When I came to New York as a writer, I was taken with the idea that you're only getting in on bridges and ferries and through tunnels. The idea behind 'Takedown' is that it would be very hard to get out.

The freeways of America are like giant veins twisting and turning, rushing life from one zone to the next. The landscape is a giant body just lying there feeling the rumble.

Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.

We will primarily focus on affordable housing, water supply and transport infrastructure, as these are critical for Mumbai. Infrastructure deficit is an issue in all urban areas.

By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.

An interesting thing about New York City is that the subways run through the sewers.

The city is as large as Seville or Cordova; its streets, I speak of the principal ones, are very wide and straight; some of these, and all the inferior ones, are half land and half water, and are navigated by canoes.

After World War II the federal government figured out that Detroit could make 6 million cars a year and there were not enough roads to put them on.

You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit.

The city is not the problem; the city is the solution.

Tower'd cities please us then, And the busy hum of men.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Congress distributed more than $60 billion to cities to make sure that what goes into toilets, industrial drains and street grates would not endanger human health.

On Melbourne summer mornings the green trams go rolling in stately progress down tunnels thick with leaves: the bright air carries along the avenue their patient chime, the chattering of their wheels.

Although it was constructed in 1536, the New York subway system boasts an annual maintenance budget of nearly $8, currently stolen, and it does a remarkable job of getting New Yorkers from Point A to an indeterminate location somewhere in the tunnel leading to point B.

I believe building new subways must be a top priority.

It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible.

Cash-strapped cities in nations from Argentina to Albania have begun to turn over their municipal water systems to Big Water, often under lease arrangements that can continue in force for decades.

The streets of New York are entirely man-made and unmistakably that, so you feel as though you're on some sort of presentation platform whenever you're out on the streets.

We leave our presence in the pavement. We're walking over it, sitting on steps.

New York City subways are now getting high speed Internet. How about some high speed subway trains?

I had a mother who walked to the library with me, and you can't walk to a lot of libraries in San Antonio because - guess what? - there are no sidewalks, except in the neighborhoods. And they're across big boulevards, and it's so hot, you can't even walk to the corner. So things like that affect how children can get to libraries. So there are a lot of things involved.

New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you.

The city that has speed has success.