Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 1955 (found on Upcycle, McDonough + Braungart):
Cities have often ben likened to symphonies and poems, and the comparison seems to me a perfectly natural one. They are, in fact, objects of the same kind. The city may even be rated higher since it stands at the point where nature and artifice meet. A city is a congestion of animals whose biological history is enclosed within its boundaries, and yet every conscious and rational act on the part of these creates helps to shape the city’s eventual character. By its form as by the manner of its birth, the city has elements at once of biological procreation, organic evolution, and aesthetic creation. It is both a natural object and a thing to be cultivated; individual and group; something lived and something dreamed. It is the human invention par excellence.