Urbanism Quotes

“You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. 'Artist's conceptions' and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse surroundings have the practical power of inducing a natural, continuing flow of life and use.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts four conditions are indispensable:

1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two...

2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.

3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.

4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there...”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“No neighbourhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“There is a widespread belief that americans hate cities. I think it is probable that Americans hate city failure, but, from the evidence, we certainly do not hate successful and vital city areas. On the contrary, so many people want to make use of such places, so many people want to work in them or live in them or visit in them, that municipal self-destruction ensues. In killing successful diversity combinations with money, we are employing perhaps our nearest equivalent to killing with kindness.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything--certainly not one with much downtown diversity.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“The charm of a city, now we come to it, is not unlike the charm of flowers. It partly depends on seeing time creep across it. Charm needs to be fleeting. Nothing could be less palatable than a museum-city propped up by prosthetic devices of concrete.

Paris is not in danger of becoming a museum-city, thanks to the restlessness and greed of promoters. Yet their frenzy to demolish everything is less objectionable than their clumsy determination to raise housing projects that cannot function without the constant presence of an armed police force…

All these banks, all these glass buildings, all these mirrored facades are the mark of a reflected image. You can no longer see what’s happening inside, you become afraid of the shadows. The city becomes abstract, reflecting only itself. People almost seem out of place in this landscape. Before the war, there were nooks and crannies everywhere.

Now people are trying to eliminate shadows, straighten streets. You can’t even put up a shed without the personal authorization of the minister of culture.

When I was growing up, my grandpa built a small house. Next door the youth club had some sheds, down the street the local painter stored his equipment under some stretched-out tarpaulin. Everybody added on. It was telescopic. A game. Life wasn’t so expensive — ordinary people would live and work in Paris. You’d see masons in blue overalls, painters in white ones, carpenters in corduroys. Nowadays, just look at Faubourg Sainte-Antoine — traditional craftsmen are being pushed out by advertising agencies and design galleries. Land is so expensive that only huge companies can build, and they have to build ‘huge’ in order to make it profitable. Cubes, squares, rectangles. Everything straight, everything even. Clutter has been outlawed. But a little disorder is a good thing. That’s where poetry lurks. We never needed promoters to provide us, in their generosity, with ‘leisure spaces.’ We invented our own. Today there’s no question of putting your own space together, the planning commission will shut it down. Spontaneity has been outlawed. People are afraid of life.”
― Robert Doisneau, Paris

“The course of urban development in America is pushing the individual toward that line seperating proud independence from pitiable isolation.”
― Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community

“Urbanism is the most advanced, concrete fulfillment of a nightmare. Littre defines nightmare as 'a state that ends when one awakens with a start after extreme anxiety.' But a start against whom? Who has stuffed us to the point of somnolence?”
― Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader

“Planners, architects of city design, and those they have led along with them in their beliefs are not consciously disdainful of the importance of knowing how things work. On the contrary, they have gone to great pains to learn what saints and sages of modern orthodox planning have said about how cities ought to work and what ought to be good for people and business in them. They take this with such devotion that when contradictory reality intrudes, threatening tho shatter their dearly won learning, they must shrug reality aside.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“But ideal cities are very much the product of their own ages. Designed as complete urban statements, they bear the unmistakable imprint of their own culture and world view in every street and building. And yet to be successful a city has to be open to continuous development, free to evolve and grow with the demands of new times. Like science fiction accounts of the future, ideal cities quickly become outmoded.”
― P.D. Smith

“From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training racehorses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there for a year. Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“The development of an informal public life depends people finding and enjoying one another outside the cash nexus.”
― Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community

“The advantage of a big city, move on a few meters and you find solitude again.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“The pedestrian is an extremely fragile species, the canary in the coal mine of urban livability. Under the right conditions, this creature thrives and multiplies. But creating those conditions requires attention to a broad range of criteria, some more easily satisfied than others.”
― Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

“The underlying values of the transportation system are not the American public's values. They are not even human values. They are values unique to a profession that has been empowered with reshaping an entire continent around a new, experimental idea of how to build human habitat.”
― Charles Marohn

“O meu despacho no processo foi lacônico, mas decisivo: "à Secretaria de Obras, não fazer nada, com urgência". Às vezes, na vida de uma cidade ameaçada por decisões que podem prejudica-la, é necessário não fazer nada, com urgência.”
― Jaime Lerner, Urban Acupuncture

“תל אביב יפה, אני אוהבת אותה, העיר הזאת שוכחת הכול.”
― עילי ראונר

“Laissée à elle-même, la bagnole finit par se détruire. Le temps que sa rapidité nous donne, elle nous le prend aussitôt pour nous expédier ailleurs. Comme le téléphone ou l'avion, pour une corvée qu'elle nous supprime, elle nous en invente mille. Elle nous mène à la campagne, mais bientôt, l'auto aidant, nous ne trouverons plus à cent kilomètres de voiture la baignade ou la verdure qui nous attendaient à cinq minutes de marche.”
― Bernard Charbonneau, L'Hommauto

“Рацію завжди має життя, а не архітектор.
Ле Корбюзье (наприкінці життя)”
― Reinier de Graaf, Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession

“Розмір вимагає компетентності. Вона стає мірою успіху за замовчуванням, умовою, що надихає до наслідування. Приклад, навіть тріумф аеропорту Атланти в тому, що він просто найбільший. Як виявилося після закінчення Олімпіади в Атланті, якщо бути найбільшим, то можна й залишатися найбільшим — принаймні деякий час. Ніщо не сприяє успіху так, як сам успіх.”
― Reinier de Graaf, Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession

“When an American student did happen to dip into the work of a European theorist he tended to react to it as mere "ancient history." Once in a great while he was even willing to admit that it was interesting.”
― Max Weber, The City

“One thing is certain, we all translate our own ideas of happiness into form. It happens when you buy a car. It happens when a CEO contemplates the form of a new skyscraper headquarters, or when a master architect lays out a grand scheme for social housing. It happens when planners, politicians and community boards wrestle over roads, planning regulations and monuments. It is impossible to seperate the life and design of a city from the attempt to understand happiness, to experience it, and to build it for society. The search shapes cities, and cities shape the search in return.”
― Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

“Every neighborhood must be allowed to grow and change... The reality is that a place that is not changing is dying.”
― Charles Marohn

“Urban and untamed, Mexico City possesses a raw vitality; it is a city where the poetic is found in the most unexpected places.”
― Aleph Molinari, Mexico City - Assouline

“Railroad rights-of-way are weird zones that you can find almost anywhere in the American Landscape. Our urban spaces have worked to overwrite them in favor of motor vehicles in the era since World War II; often you can see the traces of tracks from old streetcar lines or intercity routes peeking through the asphalt of a public street. Sometimes the remains persist as actual ruins.”
― Christopher Brown

“Railroad rights-of-way are weird zones that you can find almost anywhere in the American Landscape. Our urban spaces have worked to overwrite them in favor of motor vehicles in the era since World War II; often you can see the traces of tracks from old streetcar lines or intercity routes peeking through the asphalt of a public street. Sometimes the remains persist as actual ruins.”
― Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

“The same term, "brown lands," is sometimes used to describe those parts of the modern urban landscape that have fallen to ruin, at least in the eyes of the planners who measure the city's health based on its contribution to the wealth and growth of the human community. Empty lots, abandoned buildings, trash woods—all the parcels whose former use for industry, residence, agriculture, or other productive purposes has been abandoned, often due to changing economic or technological conditions, and have not yet been replaced by or redeveloped for some more lucrative and vibrant contemporary use. They're zones of economic entropy that become almost invisible due to their removal from the dynamic commercial flows of metropolitan life. Since the postindustrial cleanup era began in the 1970s, the more common official term used to describe such zones is "brownfields," but that has a more specific meaning, describing areas polluted with environmental toxins. Brown lands are more inclusive, encompassing all the properties where human occupation has effectively ceased for many different reasons.”
― Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

“The idea of the frontier runs so deep in American culture that we internalize the idea that to find nature—real nature—you have to get in your car and drive out of town.”
― Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

“На противагу думки його невідгонної доброзичливиці «люба серцю мала батьківщина» насправді прибрала не такого вигляду, наче вона стоїть на порозі кінця світу, а радше що вже пережила його.”
― Ласло Краснагоркаї