Triumph of the City

William Van Alen,

Restrictions on new construction have ensured that Paris—once famously hospitable to starving artists—is now affordable only to the wealthy.

. Cities don’t make people poor; they attract poor people. The flow of less advantaged people into cities from Rio to Rotterdam demonstrates urban strength, not weakness.

Why do so many smart people enact so many foolish urban policies?

For every Fifth Avenue, there’s a Mumbai slum; for every Sorbonne, there’s a D.C. high school guarded by metal detectors.

The city may win, but too often its citizens seem to lose.

The streets of Florence gave us the Renaissance, and the streets of Birmingham gave us the Industrial Revolution.

all of humanity could fit in Texas—each of us with a personal townhouse

In America and Europe, cities speed innovation by connecting their smart inhabitants to each other, but cities play an even more critical role in the developing world: They are gateways between markets and cultures. In the nineteenth century, Mumbai (then called Bombay) was a gateway for cotton. In the twenty-first century, Bangalore is a gateway for ideas.

There was no percentage in having these jumbo clipper ships traveling