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The People From The Suburbs Are Bringing Along Their Suburban Values: Cleanliness, Orderliness, Safety - Dullness, In Other Words. As A Result, Urban Areas Are Being Hollowed Out. Just Look At Times Square In New York. No More Sex Shops, No Drugs, No Homeless People. The Area Is Clinically Clean And Incredibly Dull.

-Rem Koolhaas

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The People From The

Rem Koolhaas

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The People From The Suburbs Are Bringing Along Their Suburban Values: Cleanliness, Orderliness, Safety - Dullness, In Other Words. As A Result, Urban Areas Are Being Hollowed Out. Just Look At Times Square In New York. No More Sex Shops, No Drugs, No Homeless People. The Area Is Clinically Clean And Incredibly Dull.

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Escape From The Architecture Ghetto Is One Of The Major Drivers And Has Been From The Very Beginning.

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Lagos Was A City That Had Been Turned Against Itself. There Was A Bridge That Became The Perfect Trap For Crimes, Which Began With Nails Being Scattered To Cause Flat Tyres. If The Driver Stopped, The Car Would Be Dismantled In 20 Minutes And The Parts Thrown Overboard [to People Waiting Below]. The System Had Turned Into A Kind Of Destructive Device That Could Be Used Against People. That Was The Narrative.

There's Something Really Interesting About Current Urbanism: The Only Model Is The Universal Model, And There Is Increasingly Incapacity To Consider The Virtues And The Qualities That Are There, And Then To Build On Them. The Only Thing Is Complete Transformation.

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As More And More Architecture Is Finally Unmasked As The Mere Organization Of Flow - Shopping Centers, Airports - It Is Evident That Circulation Is What Makes Or Breaks Public Architecture.

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There Is No Plateau Of Resting Or Stabilising. Once You Are Interested In How Things Evolve, You Have A Kind Of Never-ending Perspective, Because It Means You Are Interested In Articulating The Evolution, And Therefore The Potential Change, The Potential Redefinition.

Manhattan Is An Accumulation Of Possible Disasters That Never Happen.

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That Has Been My Entire Life Story. Running Against The Current And Running With The Current. Sometimes Running With The Current Is Underestimated. The Acceptance Of Certain Realities Doesn’t Preclude Idealism. It Can Lead To Certain Breakthroughs.

Most Old Cities Are Now Sclerotic Machines That Dispense Known Qualities In Ever-greater Quantities, Instead Of Laboratories Of The Uncertain. Only The Skyscraper Offers Business The Wide-open Spaces Of A Man-made Wild West, A Frontier In The Sky.

In Lagos There's A Really Strong Case To Resurrect Strong Parts. Embedded In All Of It Are Some Amazing Pieces Of Planning, Amazing Pieces Of Engineering And Interaction. For Instance, The Campus Of Lagos University Is Stunningly Beautiful, Efficient And Generous, And That Needs To Be Recognised And Preserved.

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The Good Is Not A Category That Interests Me.

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Discrepancies Between

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