Quotes & Sayings About Urban Spaces

Urban retrofitting: creating different sorts of spaces and uses out of places that are already there. — Alex Steffen

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

Unlike the urban development that I see taking over and swallowing up our precious soil, when we interact with our environment in a way that allows for regeneration and natural spaces, the outcome can be beautiful. — Cory Trepanier

America's last pioneers, urban nomads in search of wide open interior spaces — Cathleen McGuigan

Ultimately we need to recognize that while humans continue to build urban landscapes, we share these spaces with others species. — David Suzuki

It (urban peacekeeping) was quite a task, requiring a permanent balancing act between communities, each with their own interests, festivals, traditions and historical rivalries imported from the wide-open spaces of the countryside into close quarters. — Charles Emmerson

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

I think a current understanding about urban behavior tells us that it's important that people get out and be able to get away from the concrete jungles and the dense environment where they live for their own mental well-being. If they don't do this, the costs in human loss and human sickness will be far greater than what we would be expending for these kinds of releases and open spaces. — Barry Goldwater

Two-thirds of all growth takes place in cities because, by simple fact of population density, our urban spaces are perfect innovation labs. The modern metropolis is jam-packed. People are living atop one another; their ideas are as well. — Peter Diamandis

I felt that there's an obligation when writing a piece about an urban expressway made in the 50s to acknowledge the context, and Robert Moses is sort of an iconic figure in New York, and he influenced the shape of the city more than anyone else before or after him. He was one of the most powerful and influential civic architects in the world, because of how much he transformed the city. He built multiple bridges and highways and parks and recreational spaces, beaches - in the course of a few decades, he completely changed the city — Sufjan Stevens

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place
an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City ... a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places. — Michel De Certeau

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

I envision a day when every city and town has front and back yards, community gardens and growing spaces, nurtured into life by neighbors who are no longer strangers, but friends who delight in the edible rewards offered from a garden they discovered together. Imagine small strips of land between apartment buildings that have been turned into vegetable gardens, and urban orchards planted at schools and churches to grow food for our communities. The seeds of the urban farming movement already are growing within our reality. — Greg Peterson

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