“It is worth reminding ourselves that we are at a point in time where more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and that number is increasing exponentially, particularly in the developing world.”
“Civility means that the diversity of urban life becomes a source of mutual strength rather than a source of estrangement and civic bitterness. In the past this issue has been framed in terms of ethnicity or culture and in the current period of inequality, I think it needs to be increasingly framed in terms of economics.”
“Architecture has a role in the manufacturing of identity in urban contexts and the unique ability to make something visible long before it has actually happened. Architecture creates a sense of what a city is like. It is what we use to identify a city. An apparently extremely primitive totem pole, and yet this ancient throwback has never been in demand more than it is now.”
“Governance is clearly more important than ever. The management of complexity in places where rights, knowledge and education now rightly have been allowed to give a voice to neighbourhoods and individuals means that the task of governing cities is more complex than ever before. Citywide interests conflict with the most local of interests and it clearly takes the legitimacy of city leaders to bring about change. Examples such as Bogotá’s cycle ways, Washington’s renaissance, New York’s control of its education system, or London’s congestion charge would not have come to fruition without the legitimacy of ballot boxes.”
“For researchers and policy makers, I think one of the critical strategies is to disaggregate the global economy into the multiple highly specialized circuits that compose it, from the upper many specialized financial systems to the small and semi-formal international real estate markets that immigrants set up. When you conduct this operation, two things happen. First, you can actually study this very slippery concept of the ‘global’. More importantly, for those of us concerned with cities, you can locate your city on many global circuits and detect the links and strategic geographies that connect it to a whole bunch of other cities.”
“The impact of broad demographic, market and cultural forces is also remaking the suburbs. With suburbs taking on a greater share of America’s population, they are beginning to look more and more like traditional cities, in population and in form. Low density sprawl still dominates by far the physical landscape, but it is clear that the market increasingly emphasizes the urban in suburban.”
“I get the sense that in the economic realm, we are essentially accepting the neo-liberal global economic agenda when we think of cities as reactive mechanisms. E.g. it goes without saying that there are no more manufacturing jobs in New York, but the implication of that goes unexplored, even when it has a series of important meanings for the environment. We talk easily about the availability to walk to your job, but on the other hand wider environmental issues are ignored. A small example but not a trivial one: to send one kiwi fruit from New Zealand to London requires the emission of five times the weight of the fruit in greenhouse gases. We will need to be more inclusive in our discussions of urban economic self-sufficiency and sustainability.”
“New York City does work, but it could work a lot better. For the money we invest in our health system, we don’t need the infant mortality rates that we see in Harlem and other parts of the city; for the amounts that we invest in transport, we don’t need to see our subway system lingering on the edge of collapse; for the money that we invest in housing, we don’t have to have housing that has twenty-year lives and thirty-year mortgages. We could do a lot for the people living in low-income housing. We don’t have to segregate our communities.”
