Under central planning neither planners, managers, nor workers had incentives to promote the social economic interest. Nor did impeding markets for final goods to the planning system enfranchise consumers in meaningful ways. But central planning would have been incompatible with economic democracy even if it had overcome its information and incentive liabilities. And the truth is that it survived as long as it did only because it was propped up by unprecedented totalitarian political power.

The men who build and design this park are transcendentalists. To them, Central Park is a place to become one with nature, to focus on trees, to scintillate with grass, to stare into one anothers' eyes. No sweating allowed in the original Central Park, no perspiration of any kind. Anyone you see congregating for the baseball game on the left, bicycling, rollerblading, jogging, they are not historically accurate. Anyone you see lounging in the sun, having a picnic, or kissing; They are historically accurate.

The overcrowding in inner cities, dilapidated, neglected and hijacked buildings as well as continued spread of informal settlements are as a direct result of the stubbornness of the inhumane heritage of the apartheid- era spatial planning.

For decades, local and national leaders have failed to make the necessary investments in our infrastructure to modernize it and keep it up, keep pace with economic growth and bring it into the 21st century, particularly in an aging city like New York

One of the big problems with the way we’ve laid out cities is that they’ve been laid out in such a way to serve the needs of this mythical male breadwinner who has a wife home in the suburbs…And it’s completely untrue to how women and people live their lives. They’ve got to take kids to the doctor, to school, get groceries, check in on a relative …all the things we are doing on a daily basis requires a lot of complicated logistics.

The contemporary urban area has man-made characteristics and problems that often override the specificity of site. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that the specific character of a site is now perhaps as much the result of human action and desires as of the original geological structure.

Hyde Park Corner is what happens when a bunch of urban planners take one look at the grinding circle of gridlock that surrounds the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and think—that’s what we want for our town.

(How has the city changed over the decades?) In the 70's we were so engaged - that's a hard one for me, to try not to discount the losses, to see what is hopeful. I feel a lot of times that we've lost leadership. There's no Cesar Chavez or Robert Kennedy. We've lost the great inspiring role models that gave us ideas about a bigger self. We started to value the celebrity, the person who got his. Television is continually about advancing the renovation of your house, about objects and material. Where do we learn the bigger values, a shared sense of community and activities? We repeatedly reduce the commons, the spaces where we meet across race and class and difference. I'm very concerned about loss of the commons. People need more and more to remember the nature of human beings. We are social beings. As humans we are tribal, we need to be in community, we thrive in that situation with one another and grow by virtue with that.

It is the city that is wrong, and its creations can never be right; they may be improved; they can never be what they should.... Until the whole atrocious system of herding working people in close-built cities, by way of making them serviceable cogwheels in the capitalistic machine for grinding out rent and profit, comes to an end, the physical education of children will remain at best a pathetic compromise.

When I asked my mom and grandma why Englewood looked like this, they told me about the government. About how the highway system had been built through Black neighborhoods, destroying communities that would never be rebuilt. About the city's housing authority razing public housing and scattering families in the name of "urban development," only for city officials to turn around and sell the prime real estate to developers on the cheap. About the city systematically underfunding Black schools and then shutting them down because of "underperformance." And that's just what happened to my neighborhood-not even what happened to my family.

Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States.

Here's the thing. I grew up in Fort Greene. I grew up here in New York. It's changed. And why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the south Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed-Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better?

The central problem of architecture is space. Space is essential for the individual and for the community. This is equally true for the small space (the capsule) as well as for the large space (the city).

Often time people are marginalized in the process, and we are now seeing the process of development in the cities being characterized with slums due to lack of planning.