In merging nature and culture the most successful cities combine such universal needs as maintaining or restoring contact with the cycles of nature, with specific, local characteristics.

For when man is faced with a curse he answers, “I’ll take care of my problems.” And he puts everything to work to become powerful, to keep the curse from having its effects. He creates...

Public transit situates us so that we are given license to accept what’s right in front of us, but will likely arouse our desire to compare our narrative to someone else’s, to give ourselves permission...

Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will...

A History of the World In 6 Glasses.

Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.And so we readers walk, and dream,...

what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller’s past...

(2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter...

She’d first seen Covent Garden after a heavy snow, walking with her hand in Win’s, and she remembers the secret silence of London then, the amazing hush of it, slush crunching beneath her feet and...

Go ahead and laugh at Detroit. Because you are laughing at yourself.

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.

Nature made the fields and man the cities.

Mind you, Thunder Bay has a lot of outskirts. It’s actually two cities melded together, so in a sense it has twice as many outskirts as other places. It’s understandable that we got lost….

I’m so glad cities have personalities, just like people have personalities. That’s something that makes me smile.

For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit’s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit’s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by...

A girl without braidsis like a city without bridges.

If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.

Journeys to relive your past?’ was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: ‘Journeys to recover your future?’And Marco’s answer was: ‘Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller...

The grandeur of the thieving falsity is larceny, the fall of cities.

I, sometimes, fear that probably I’ll just keep changing cities, and may be someday I’ll also travel the world, but never find another soul who thinks exactly the way I do.