Do you remember the long orphanage of the train stationsWe crossed cities that turn-tabled all dayAnd vomited at night the sunshine of the day (“The Voyager”)

There is, of course, a deep irony in the fact that technology, which was supposed to cut the ties between people and places and allow people everywhere to work from almost anywhere, turns out to...

Play on lively, diversified sidewalks differs from virtually all other daily incidental play offered American children today: It is play not conducted in a matriarchy.Most city architectural designers and planners are men. Curiously, they design...

And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us.

If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model and the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister, then New York is their cousin. Her hair is dyed autumn red or aubergine or Egyptian henna,...

It is a duty of every citizen to pray for those who are authority and the nation; so that each one of us may live a peaceful and quiet lives in sacredness.

I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.

How can you measure progress if you don’t know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the “market” put a price on things – food, clothes, electricity, running water – when...

La città di Leonia rifà se stessa tutti i giorni: ogni mattina la popolazione si risveglia tra lenzuola fresche, si lava con saponette appena sgusciate dall’involucro, indossa vestaglie nuove fiammanti, estrae dal più perfezionato frigorifero...

There are more hidden spaces in a city, more hidden lives and hidden emptinesses, and more darkened windows where shadow people pass fleetingly in and out of sight.

I’ve always preferred the city at night. I believe that San Judas, or any city, belongs to the people who sleep there. Or maybe they don’t sleep – some don’t – but they live there....

Oh you dear companionsElectric bells of the stations song of the reapersButcher’s sleigh regiment of unnumbered streetsCavalry of bridges nights livid with alcoholThe cities I’ve seen lived like mad women(The Voyager)

I don’t like landscapes. I like cities. Lots of cities. I like buildings. I like streets.

As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity–say, while waiting to be called to eat–becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are...

Cities perform most functions in a very Industrial Age model.

Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me. I spent my life in small steamy delicatessens with slanted display cabinets full of trays that hold soft wet lumpy matter in pale...

Detroit is big enough to matter in the world and small enough for you to matter in it.

In cities it is useless to look at the stars or to describe them, worship them, or seek direction from them. When lost, one should follow the tracks of the camels.

Different cities visit us daily, they exist in the clouds.

We didn’t make the mistakes that many other cities did.

Cities have the capability to at any moment shift out of the familiar, even if you’ve lived in one all your life.

Working in Tokyo has convinced me that, contrary to what people think, it is actually one of the world’s most beautiful cities.

The second rat, of course, may have been the first rat farther uptown, in which case I am either being followed or the rat keeps the same rounds and hours I do. I think sanity,...

Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a...

[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,’ [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. ‘They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that...

…cities are murky places – hatching grounds for monsters…

Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This...

Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we...

In all these sights I achieve solace only in bringing forth trees, picturing them blooming like smoke from the roofs of gutted buildings, dreaming of what a fine and picturesque pile of rubble this city...

God gave us ground we created a city, God gave us time we need to create a future.

Sometimes work was just what you clocked into while you were falling in love. Sometimes sex was just something you did while you weren’t at work. Drugs were something you did sometimes when you couldn’t...

And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would...

The world’s major metropolitan cities are more or less the same.

In cities where peace and the arts flourish, men are more consumed by jealousy, worry, and anxiety than they are in cities under the blight of a besieging army. Private sorrows are more bitter than...

I am not interested in living in a city where there isn’t a production by Samuel Beckett running.

The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back...

It’s the place built out of Man’s ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man’s endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures. Making it the city of all cities...

The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn’t necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still...

…Why are corporations so fleeting?…Instead of imitating the freewheeling city, these businesses minimize the very interactions that lead to new ideas. They erect walls and establish hierarchies. They keep people from relaxing and having insights....

It was a cruel city, but it was a lovely one; a savage city, yet it had such tenderness; a bitter, harsh, and violent catacomb of stone an steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with...

What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.

Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a...

It was never built for the comfort and happiness of its citizens, but to astonish the world.

I woke up feeling alone, so lonely. The night before, I had cried myself to sleep. I lay there on the floor, listening to the tube trains passing beneath me. I thought, All those hundreds...

Or a ghost is a knot in the otherwise smooth flow of time, an electrical storm in a jewelry box, grief perfectly aligned. And sometimes a ghost is a shared thing; sometimes the entire population...

A city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, our of the presence of strangers, as the streets of successful city neighborhoods always do, must have three main qualities:First,...

Violent cities, people who live in violent cities, find a way – as New Yorkers did 30 or 40 years ago – they find a way to just carry on. But you’re stressed out. You’re...

There are cities that get by on their good looks, offer climate and scenery, views of mountains or oceans, rockbound or with palm trees; and there are cities like Detroit that have to work for...

C’est un plaisir que de supputer, subodorer, côtoyer le mystère qui se tramait dans les quartiers, villages et ruelles de Montréal, et de se demander comment tout ça allait finir. J’avais confiance. J’avais confiance en...