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The city is so repeatedly deemed to be bad that it is good to have, in the most important recent book on the city (Peter Hall's Cities in Civilization) as firm a declaration of the qualities of the city as places for people who can stand the heat of the kitchen, messy places, sordid places sometimes .…"

A poster in the Underground proposes:

"A car-free London. Imagine Central London without cars". And I do imagine it and I think, no, I don't want a London without cars. It would feel wrong. And we know all too well what happens to streets that are pedestrianised. They are cutely recobbled, "street furniture" appears, and real shops yield to Crabtree and Evelyn and the English Teddy Bear Shop.Car free London? No thanks. I love to see ribbons of traffic rippling to the horizon. I like the shunting and honking and expostulation of a slow moving line of traffic; I like the look of cars, the dazzle of sunlight on their windscreens, the sizzle of tyres in the rain at night as I lie awake in bed; I love to hunch in the back of a taxi (especially with a lover) with the pulse of music coming out of the rear loudspeaker in the thick of the traffic in the scary, unknown streets of one of the great cities of the world.

I love to stand (as I often did in Jakarta) on pedestrian overpasses overlooking twenty lanes of traffic, epic, moving, the mass complicity beautiful to behold. I loved to watch the advance guard of motorcyles that ease and nudge their way to the front of the cars at a red light…and to watch them released, way in advance of the cars, fifty, sixty, seventy bikes sweeping down the width of the avenue, like a mongol horde, maurauders with pennants, scarved faces, attitude, tearing across the steppe, an advance guard sweeping clean the path for the greater and slower juggernauts.

"The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears as the song of birds, or wind in the trees once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy" Frank Lloyd Wright The Living City 1958.

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