Quotes & Sayings About Public Spaces

There is a movement happening, a quiet one.
A low-profile, low-resolution revolution.
Comprised of writers and dreamers, of guerrilla artists and thought-ninjas.
Those with something to say.
They communicate through text inscribed on true public spaces, rather than blogs and forums.
Choosing fewer words, even without being bound by 140 character limits.
Using ink instead of pixels.
Sending messages in living, breathing space.
Pens scream louder into the void.
Even if permanent ink is not aptly named. — Erin Morgenstern

There are many causes for the increasing concentration of wealth in a shrinking elite, but let us throw one more into the mix: the ever more aggressive appropriations of the attentional commons that we have allowed to take place.
I think we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed. This would apply not, of course, to those who address me face to face as individuals, but to those who never show their faces, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested. — Matthew B. Crawford

When it comes to female fan attention, I'm married, so obviously I avoid the places where you might get unwanted female attention - clubs and social environments, bars and public spaces. — Simon Bird

A greater focus on design in all new homes would make the best use of land, create homes and public spaces, and reinforce the structures of urban life. — Richard Rogers

The measure of any great civilization is its cities and a measure of a city's greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces, its parks and squares. — John Ruskin

Unless you're trying to make a movie on the sly, there's no way to get around this. If you want to use public spaces, film on the streets, have the cooperation of the police, you have to have a permit. — Asghar Farhadi

Portable designs have the power to transform unused public spaces into dynamic environments that build and invite communal experiences. — David Rockwell

Of all books printed, probably not more than half are ever read. Many are embalmed in public libraries; many go into private quarters to fill spaces; many are glanced at and put away ... scarcely opened until the fire needs kindling. The most ardent book-lovers are not always the greatest readers; indeed, the rabid bibliomaniac seldom reads at all. To him books are as ducats to the miser, something to be hoarded and not employed ... So pleasant it is to buy book; so tiresome to utilize them. — Flora Haines Loughead

All but universally, human architecture values front elevations over back entrances, public spaces over private. Danny Jessup says that this aspect of architecture is also a reflection of human nature, that most people care more about their appearance than they do about their souls. — Dean Koontz

spaces that at first may appear to reflect a simple condition are much more complex when the actions of individuals and groups are factored in. These unique patterns of movement through space can and should guide the architecture we build to serve them. For space only becomes truly public when people recognize it and utilize it as such. Great public space cannot be built as much as curated; it is architecture's responsibility to craft space in response to specific needs and unique practices. . . . it is not the space itself that is meaningful; it is the way space facilitates diversity, interaction, and new negotiations that makes it meaningful [David Adjaye, "Djemaa El-Fnaa, Marrakech: Engaging with Complexity and Diversity"]. — Catie Marron

Wormholes were first introduced to the public over a century ago in a book written by an Oxford mathematician. Perhaps realizing that adults might frown on the idea of multiply connected spaces, he wrote the book under a pseudonym and wrote it for children. His name was Charles Dodgson, his pseudonym was Lewis Carroll, and the book was Through The Looking Glass. — Michio Kaku

I think anything that gets people outside [is good] - I'm a big supporter of public parks and public spaces. — Anne Waldman

She would initiate three "races to the top" from the federal level - with prizes of $100 million, $75 million, and $50 million - to vastly accelerate innovations in social technologies: Which state can come up with the best platform for retraining workers? Which state can design a pilot city or community of the future where everything from self-driving vehicles and ubiquitous Wi-Fi to education, clean energy, affordable housing, health care, and green spaces is all integrated into a gigabit-enabled platform? Which city can come up with the best program for turning its public schools into sixteen-hour-a-day community centers, adult learning centers, and public health centers? We need to take advantage of the fact that we have fifty states and hundreds of cities able to experiment and hasten social innovation. In — Thomas L. Friedman

The government should, as a matter of policy, forbid the building of any more places of worship. We have more than enough of them. The government should never permit the use of public parks or open spaces for religious gathering, and if a place of worship becomes a bone of contention or happens to be misused by undesirable elements, it should simply take it over. — Khushwant Singh

Speech within the kingdom of Amazonia - run by its sovereign Jeff Bezos and his board of directors with help from the wise counsel and judgment of the company's executives - is not protected in the same way that speech is constitutionally protected in America's public spaces. — Rebecca MacKinnon

As the environmental writer and analyst David Roberts has observed, "the ingredients of resilience" are "overlapping social and civic circles, filled with people who, by virtue of living in close proximity and sharing common spaces, know and take care of each other. The greatest danger in times of stress or threat is isolation. Finding ways of expanding public spaces and nurturing civic involvement is not just some woolly-headed liberal project - it's a survival strategy."58 — Naomi Klein

For me her image, the triptych, became a study of the weight the black male figure carries, given the fact that they are targeted by the police, and are constantly in danger of being misread in public spaces. — Claudia Rankine

It's not about doing over the living room of someone who has bad taste in color. This is about restoring historic buildings and instilling pride in a community, which can be done through designing new public spaces and social gathering spots. — Genevieve Gorder

Air travel is the safest form of travel aside from walking; even then, the chances of being hit by a public bus at 30,000 feet are remarkably slim. I also have no problem with confined spaces. Or heights. What I am afraid of is speed. — Sloane Crosley

More often than not, what people put up online using social media is widely accessible because most systems are designed such that sharing with broader or more public audiences is the default. Many popular systems require users to take active steps to limit the visibility of any particular piece of shared content. This is quite different from physical spaces, where people must make a concerted effort to make content visible to sizable audiences.8 In networked publics, interactions are often public by default, private through effort. — Danah Boyd

I photograph in public and semi-public spaces that date from various epochs. These are spaces accessible to everyone. They are places where you can meet and communicate, where you can share or receive knowledge, where you can relax and recover. They are spas, hotels, waiting rooms, museums, libraries, universities, banks, churches and, as of a few years ago, zoos. All of the places have a purpose, as for the most part do the things within them. — Candida Hofer

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 Solnit

In this new war, our enemy's platoons infiltrate our borders, quietly blending in with visiting tourists, students, and workers. They move unnoticed through our cities, neighborhoods, and public spaces. They wear no uniforms. Their camouflage is not forest green, but rather it is the color of common street clothing. Their tactics rely on evading recognition at the border and escaping detection within the United States. Their terrorist mission is to defeat America, destroy our values and kill innocent people. — John Ashcroft

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life-raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen instead — Caitlin Moran

'Negative liberty' is a political science term meaning a liberty from government action. It is not a liberty to anything - like the liberty to meaningfully contribute to public debate or to have ample spaces for speech. — Marvin Ammori

There is no money in what is aptly called free association: we are instead encouraged by media and advertising to fear each other and regard public life as a danger and a nuisance, to live in secured spaces, communicate by electronic means, and acquire our information from media rather than each other. — Rebecca Solnit

It had never occurred to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabilities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it became harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus caused large numbers of people to simply abandon their official identities.. It was no longer any fun to be an American citizen. — Bruce Sterling

That's what is always fascinating about racism - how it is allowed, if not encouraged, to flourish freely in public spaces, the way racism and bigotry are so often unquestioned. — Roxane Gay

Through the appropriation of public spaces and resources into the logic of the marketplace, individuals are dispossessed of many collective forms of mutual support or sharing. A simple and pervasive cooperative practice like hitchhiking had to be inverted into a risk-filled act with fearful, even lethal consequences. Now it has reached the point of laws being enacted in parts of the United States that criminalize giving food to the homeless or to undocumented immigrants. — Jonathan Crary

People who live in private spaces contribute actively to the dilution and corrosion of the public space. In other words, they exacerbate the circumstances which drove them to retreat in the first place. — Tony Judt

Reconquer the streets, the markets - the public spaces, with the same message of opposition: We are devastated, but we will not give up. With torches and roses, we deliver this message to the world: We do not let fear break us. And we do not let the fear of fear silence us. — Jens Stoltenberg

Funny how nobody talks on the tubes, isn't it? I rarely catch the tube myself, or lifts. Confined spaces, everybody shuts down. Why is that? Perhaps we think everybody on the tube is a potential psychopath or a drunk,so we close down and pretend to read a book or something. — John Hannah

Benches and books have things in common beyond the fact that they're generally to do with sitting. Both are forms of public privacy, intimate spaces widely shared. — Mal Peet

With the rise of new technologies, media, and other cultural apparatuses as powerful forms of public pedagogy, students need to understand and address how these pedagogical cultural apparatuses work to diffuse learning from any vestige of critical thought. This is a form of public pedagogy that needs to be addressed both for how it deforms and for how it can create important new spaces for emancipatory forms of pedagogy. — Henry Giroux

In a Society becoming steadily more privatized with private homes, cars, computers, offices and shopping centers, the public component of our lives is disappearing. It is more and more important to make the cities inviting, so we can meet our fellow citizens face to face and experience directly through our senses. Public life in good quality public spaces is an important part of a democratic life and a full life. — Jan Gehl

Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation. — Aleksandar Hemon

Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world. — Will Self

We visit the Launch Control building, where on one wall of the seventies-style lobby are hung the mission patches of every human spaceflight that has ever been launched from here, 149 to date. Beneath each mission patch is a small plaque showing the launch and landing dates. Two of them - Challenger's STS-51L and Columbia's STS-107 - are missing landing dates, because both of these missions ended in disasters that destroyed the orbiters and killed their crews. The blank spaces on the wall where those landing dates should have been are discolored from the touch of people's hands. This would be unremarkable if this place were a tourist attraction, or regularly open to the public. But with the rare exception of Family Days, this building is open only to people who work here. In other words, it's launch controllers, managers, and engineers who have been touching these empty spaces with their hands, on their way to and from doing their jobs. After — Margaret Lazarus Dean

It will come to be seen as the persecution of a culture. This makes football akin to the Confederate flag, or Christmas decorations in public spaces, or taxpayer-supported art depicting Jesus in a tank of urine - something that becomes intractable precisely because so many people want to see it eliminated. The game's violence would save it, and it would never go away. — Chuck Klosterman

My generation is so used to having our public spaces look like the Starbucks, with the beautiful lighting and the little bit of Nina Simone and my coffee that's blended a certain way from Costa Rica. — Sandra Tsing Loh

The point is not that books, magazines, and DVDs are dead - far from it. At places such as the redesigned Boston Public Library, popular publications and media materials in physical form circulate rapidly from prominent spaces close to the building's entrance. The point is that people's information habits have undergone a sea change - a major shift toward the digital. Libraries are trying to serve a wide range of patrons at many different points along an "adoption curve," with all-print at one end and all-digital at the other. — John Palfrey

I like my surroundings to be pretty spare and severe. It helps me to concentrate on my work. All I ever do here is go from my studio to my bedroom. Everything else is extraneous. I never entertain, because to me, New York is about meeting people in public spaces, absorbing a little bit of their energy. — Ross Bleckner

A stab had clearly once been made at de-uglifying these public spaces by painting a corridor a jaunty yellow. This was because, it turned out, babies come here to have their brains tested and someone thought the yellow might calm them. But I couldn't see how. Such was the oppressive ugliness of this building it would have been like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald. — Jon Ronson

Throughout the world what remains of the vast public spaces are now only the stuff of legends: Robin Hood's forest, the Great Plains of the Amerindians, the steppes of the nomadic tribes, and so forth ... Rousseau said that the first person who wanted a piece of nature as his or her own exclusive possession and transformed it into the transcendent form of private property was the one who invented evil. Good, on the contrary, is what is common. — Antonio Negri

The importance of pedestrian public spaces cannot be measured, but most other important things in life cannot be measured either: Friendship, beauty, love and loyalty are examples. Parks and other pedestrian places are essential to a city's happiness. — Enrique Penalosa

On westminster Bridge, Arthur was struck by the brightness of the streetlamps running across like a formation of stars. They shone white against the black coats of the marching gentlefold and fuller than the moon against the fractal spires of Westminster. They were, Arthur quickly realized, the new electric lights, which the city government was installing, avenue by avenue, square by square, in place of the dirty gas lamps that had lit London's public spaces for a century. These new electric ones were brighter. They were cheaper. They required less maintenance. And they shone farther into the dime evening, exposing every crack in the pavement, every plump turtle sheel of stone underfoot. So long to the faint chiaroscuro of London, to the ladies and gentlemen in black-on-black relief. So long to the era of mist and carbonized Newcastle coal, to the stench of the Blackfriars foundry. Welcome to the cleasing glare of the twentieth century. — Graham Moore

When I went to India, I became absolutely obsessed with the idea of building a hotel in India. I've never done a hotel, and I'd love to do public spaces in that culture. — Hugh Hardy

Our public spaces are as profound as we allow them to be, — Candy Chang

I read what you leave in public spaces. The songs you reference. The quotes you quote. I know it's
about me. I can feel you thinking of me. I want to tell you that I know and admit that I feel the same.
But I can't. Not yet. — Pleasefindthis

If you look at the entrance halls of the skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s, they are very welcoming. They are public spaces with enormous amounts of display and marble and so on. They were havens off the street. — Joseph Rykwert

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. — John Updike

The thing I can't figure out is why I have an undeniable compulsion to clean public spaces, airplane bathrooms, restaurant flatware, hotel gyms and Chapstick containers ... yet I have no desire to make my own bed. Ever. Seriously, who made me, and where am I from? — Rachel Nichols

Should a woman keep her pants on in the streets or not? Shall she remove them, say, at the moment of going to church, for a more intimate reminder of her sexuality in relation to God? What difference does it make if that woman is a lemon vendor and sells you lemons in the streets without using underwear? Moreover, what difference would it make if she sits down to write theology without underwear? The Argentinian woman theologian and the lemon vendors may have some things in common and others not. In common, they have centuries of patriarchal oppression, in the Latin American mixture of clericalism, militarism and the authoritarianism of decency, that is, the sexual organisation of the public and private spaces of society. However, — Marcella Althaus-Reid

There can be no reasonable right to live on sidewalks. Society needs order, and hence has a right to a minimally civilized ambience in public spaces. Regarding the homeless, this is not merely for aesthetic reasons because the anesthetic is not merely unappealing. It presents a spectacle of disorder and decay that becomes a contagion. — George Will

The federal air marshal, the passengers, the flight crew, and the pilots are truly the last line of defense. American public spaces and schools need the same approach. Let's cut the feel-good politics and recognize that by the time someone with dangerous plans reaches your doorstep, it's too late to ponder root causes of antisocial behavior - it's time to act! All of the thinking should have been done beforehand. And the level of commitment to stop grotesque violence in its tracks - stone cold dead - has to exceed theirs if protecting the principal is going to succeed. — Gary J. Byrne

It is worth noting that the people today who so vehemently wish to sweep religion from all public spaces and institutions are also the same people who consistently oppose freedom. They want only one God &emdash; the state, which of course they intend to run. — Charley Reese

If I want religion, I know where to look for it - and if for example I don't want it, then why should it be forced on me in media and public spaces? — Christina Engela

Now that music is faithfully reproducible, musicians are not needed as once they were. And music itself has changed. Though small cadres of classicists keep the sacred and ineffable alive, they are under siege by coarse generations whose music is hardly as musical as a bus engine or a chain saw. Something must have occurred during their mothers' pregnancies. How else is it possible to explain that playing Bach keeps them away from public spaces the way iron spikes drive pigeons from cathedral ledges? — Mark Helprin

I remember my first date, aged fifteen, with a girl called Hilary Gidding. A coin fell down the back of the cinema seats and we both slipped our hands into the tight fuzzy gap of the chairs past popcorn kernels and sticky ticket stubs and our hands met, stroking the carpet feeling for the coin, and it was electric. The wrist being clamped by upholstery, the darkness, the accident, the lovely dirt of public spaces. — Max Porter

Everyone has the right to walk from one end of the city to the other in secure and beautiful spaces. Everybody has the right to go by public transport. Everybody has the right to an unhampered view down their street, not full of railings, signs and rubbish. — Richard Rogers

of oppressive state power. Gramsci's theory of hegemony as a form of cultural pedagogy is also invaluable as an element of critical educational thought. By emphasizing the pedagogical force of culture, Gramsci expands the sphere of the political by pointing to those diverse spaces and spheres in which cultural practices are deployed, lived, and mobilized in the service of knowledge, power and authority. For Gramsci, learning and politics were inextricably related and took place not merely in schools but in a vast array of public sites. — Henry A. Giroux

When public policy is directed toward urban spaces, it is directed toward people who sit at the margins. — Julianne Malveaux

What's interesting about art in public spaces is that the public really sort of takes over and uses it in ways that you didn't anticipate. — Teresita Fernandez

Which of them can see ahead, among the microclimates of binary, tracking earthwide everywhere through dark fiber and twisted pairs and nowadays wirelessly through spaces public and private, anywhere among cybersweatshop needles flashing and never still, in that unquiet vastly stitched and unstitched tapestry they have all at some time sat growing crippled in the service of-to the shape of the day imminent, a procedure waiting execution, about to be revealed, a search result with no instructions on how to look for it? — Thomas Pynchon

I find myself using Spanish words much more now that I'm older, and I guess I have the authority to do it in public spaces in ways that I felt I couldn't when I was teaching here fifteen years ago. — Sandra Cisneros