In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship -- around participation in public life.
Rebecca SolnitFor me the insurrectionary possibilities of disaster are what make them really interesting and sometimes positive - Mexico City's big 1985 earthquake brought a lot of positive, populist, anti-institutional social change.
Rebecca SolnitLeave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. Thatโs where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
Rebecca SolnitSome things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.
Rebecca SolnitFor [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.
Rebecca Solnit