Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.

Reactions [on my 1979 Massey lectures] were from Anglophones. I'm one. But I'm terrible at French. In fact, there was practically no reaction.

The notion - and I tell you this one even worries me that it extends into New Urbanism - the notion of the shopping center [as] a valid kind of downtown. That's taken over. It's very hard for architects of this generation even to think in terms of a downtown or a center that is owned by all different people, with different ideas.

We expect too much of new #‎ buildings , and too little of ourselves.

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.

Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.

Americans have got it so dinged into them that they are the most fortunate people on Earth, and that the rest of the world - the sooner it copies what America is like, the better.