Urban Design Quotes

“Many of the world's best-designed cities have been inspired by garden concepts.”
― Tom Turner, Garden History: Philosophy and Design 2000 BC – 2000 AD

“Planners and designers should encourage as much diversity in human habitats as they find in animal habitats. It is not possible to resolve all conflicts or to gain all ends. Choices have to be made. Different aspects of the public good should be stressed in different places. To achieve variety in land use patterns, there should also be a variety of relationships between the professions, not an institutionalized decision-making tree. Relationships between the constructive professions should, therefore, be deconstructed.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape

“As much as we complain about other people, there is nothing worse for mental health than a social desert.”
― Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

“Much as participatory design and placemaking was a reaction to the lack of citizen involvement in the planning process, the history of incremental city design was a reaction to the utopian master plan that dictated whole scale redevelopment in favor of an incremental approach that gradually affected the status quo. As a theory of policymaking, incrementalism was first introduced by Charles Lindblom in the 1950s.”
― Tania Allen, Solving Critical Design Problems: Theory and Practice

“Modern interest in environmentalism is driven by a yearning to protect what we haven't ruined already, to conserve what we haven't used up, to restore as much as possible of what we're destroyed, and to devise ways of reconfiguring our lives so that civilization as we know it can be sustained through our children's lifetimes and beyond.”
― David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability

“First life, then spaces, then buildings - the other way around never works.”
― Jan Gehl, Cities for People

“But when a plethora of stimuli begins to divert us from receptive consciousness, the city renders us insensible. Then, in our inability to order experience, we merely suffer the city and long for some adequate means to comprehend it as a product of human creation--a product of intelligent, ordering forces. Just as the scientist is frustrated when the order or pattern of phenomena is too fleeting to observe or too complex to recognize with existing tools, so is the city-dweller frustrated when human order cannot be found in the environment. At such moments, when one sees only the results of mechanical and economic processes controlling the form and feeling of the place, one feels estranged and excluded.”
― Fumihiko Maki, Nurturing Dreams: Collected Essays on Architecture and the City

“From 50 centuries, we can learn about the close relationship between garden design and urban design, because both arts involve the composition of buildings with paving, landform, water, vegetation and climate.”
― Tom Turner, British Gardens: History, philosophy and design

“Abstractionism exacerbated the problem but sustainability, if intelligently conceived, could heal the rift between garden, landscape and urban design. Absolute sustainability is not possible. But relative sustainability is a practical and desirable proposition.”
― Tom Turner, British Gardens: History, philosophy and design

“Today, one marvels at the conversions of old buildings that are now offices and and residences or both. Office buildings are apartment houses, mansions are office buildings, manufacturing lofts are apartments, tenement apartments are small factories, everything from a barge to a barn is a restaurant...These buildings were not designed with flexibility in mind, but their manageable scale provided inherent adjustability and their design and quality constriction provided inherent appeal.”
― roberta gratz

“There is a message for all city makers here. It is that with the right triangulation, even the ugliest of places can be infused with the warmth that turns strangers into familiars by giving us enough reason to slow down.”
― Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

“The greatest environmental gains from population density arise once destinations become so close to one another that people elect to get around all by themselves - the urban-transit equivalent of the point at which a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining.”
― David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability

“Stacking and concentrating dwellings and businesses is the easiest way to make communities truly efficient, and it is the only way to achieve deep reductions in per-capita energy use and carbon output in large, prosperous populations...”
― David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability

“Q: Why We Drive is a unique book, combining cartoons, text-form journalism, and photographs. How did it come about?

After I did the book CARtoons in 2001, I got invitations to speak at various venues including The Village Building Convergence, bookstores and a few universities. Being a visual artist, I gradually developed a slide talk about the social, environmental, economic and political problems of transportation design in America. I used a mixture of cartoons, photographs and maps because I found it was helpful to give people real-world examples of good and bad urban design. When I got positive feedback from the talk, I became interested in turning it into a book and an interactive website. I still have to build the interactive website but Microcosm helped me create, edit and publish the book. My goal was to explain transportation design issues and politics in a simple way to college students and the general public, as well as put forward a few ideas about why I believe we’re not making more political progress at reforming our transportation system.

(2015 interview with Microcosm Publishing)2015”
― Andy Singer

“True enough, we need an environment which is not simply well organized, but poetic and symbolic as well... By appearing as a remarkable and well-knit place, the city could provide a ground for the clustering and organization of these meanings and associations. Such a sense of place in itself enhances every human activity that occurs there, and encourages the deposit of a memory trace.”
― Kevin Lynch, The image of the city