Urban Studies Quotes

“In the urban environment literacy is almost as much a necessity as speech itself.”
― Robert Ezra Park, The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment

“Three requirements are needed to achieve a compassionate city: a realization of the seriousness of the problems that people face; an appreciation that these are not self-inflicted; and the ability to imagine ourselves in the lives of others. The problems of rising inequality are serious. And while cultures of poverty do occur, they are responses to poverty, not the cause. It is the third requirement that prompts an imaginative creativity, a moral economy not just a market economy and a more expansive and emphatetic consideration of the city. Above all a compassionate city requires a collective imagination to see the city as a shared community, to realize the shared nature of our fate and to embrace the liberating sense that we can remake the city and indeed the world.”
― John Rennie Short

“It was in the nature of those who had long dreamt of Pacific empire to stress the optimism with which George Berkeley opened his quatrain. Few pondered the line with which he closed it:

Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The first four acts already past.
A fifth shall close the drama with the day:
Time's noblest offspring is its last.”
― Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin