But when you're 23, Madison born and bred, and engaged to the person you've been dating since you were 14, even the most habitable city can feel airless and becalmed.
It is a safe, habitable city in the Dutch delta and it is a pleasure for people to work and live there".
Nobody has wrecked the nature of New York as a habitable city for the middle class as much as Bloomberg has in the past eight years.
Now, with murder rates down and cities habitable again, both the on-screen violence and the sociopolitical references are as likely to be about the war in Iraq or the more generalized insecurity of a world on guard against terrorism.
The space was certified habitable under the city's artist-in-residence program.
Here, 67 acres of former railway lands are slowly being conjured into a newly habitable stretch of city that one day will boast a full complement of shops, flats, offices, cafes, restaurants and performance venues, with Central Saint Martins at its heart.
You see just the opposite with Mr. Bloomberg's PlaNYC, a set of strategies to make the city habitable and more efficient in 2030, complete with goals that must be met each year.
Moreover, the process of identifying and removing the remaining IEDs, estimated at between 5,000 and 10,000, and making the city habitable, will take many months.
In a letter to the city's mayor, Jacobs wrote: "It is very discouraging to do our best to make the city more habitable and then to learn that the city is thinking up schemes to make it uninhabitable".
Mullin says he wants "a return to that brief golden age when the bicycle was king, when every little town and many villages were connected to the railway network, and when our inner cities were habitable".
