Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in the end.

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

Backward cities, or younger cities, or newly forming cities in supply regions, have to develop to a great extent on one another's shoulders. This is one of the terrible things about empires.

People who think of themselves as exiles, I find, can never really put their lives together, really.

Neighborhoods built up all at once change little physically over the years as a rule...[Residents] regret that the neighborhood has changed. Yet the fact is, physically it has changed remarkably little. People's feelings about it, rather, have changed. The neighborhood shows a strange inability to update itself, enliven itself, repair itself, or to be sought after, out of choice, by a new generation. It is dead. Actually it was dead from birth, but nobody noticed this much until the corpse began to smell.

In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity.

People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.