It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things work but only the kind of quick, easy outer impression that they get.

Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.

Just the way in Europe, Paris, Copenhagen, and Stockholm, and Frankfurt, possibly and Berlin, certainly, all had important roles, because of independence. Because they were depending on themselves.

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

Modernism really started with people getting infatuated with the idea of "it's the twentieth century, is this suitable for the twentieth century." This happened before the First World War and it wasn't just the soldiers. You can see it happening if you read the Bloomsbury biographies. It was a reaction to a great extent against Victorianism. There was so much that was repressive and stuffy. Victorian buildings were associated with it, and they were regarded as very ugly. Even when they weren't ugly, people made them ugly. They were painted hideously.

Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effect of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building.

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.