I get absolutely ruthless in my own way about not doing anything else when I am trying to concentrate on writing a book. I have to stick to it and concentrate.

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design.

Cities never flourish alone. They have to be trading with other cities. My new hypothesis shows why. But also in trading with each other they can't be in too different stages of development, and they can't copy one another.

Expanding the Toronto Island Airport will undermine the downtown's economy and liveability and intensify pollution and smog from Oshawa to Oakville. I urge Torontonians to close down this dangerous Trojan horse and get on with planning constructive and delightful ways of using our magnificent lakeside assets.

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.

...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.

Nations are political and military entities, and so are blocs of nations. But it doesn't necessarily follow from this that they are also the basic, salient entities of economic life or that they are particularly useful for probing the mysteries of economic structure, the reasons for rise and decline of wealth. Indeed, the failure of national governments and blocs of nations to force economic life to do their bidding suggests some sort of essential irrelevance.