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

“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

“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

“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

“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: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community

“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

“And the space created by capital is a very seductive space indeed— provided you have the money.”
― Alessandro Busà, The Creative Destruction of New York City: Engineering the City for the Elite

“The contempt of motorists for pedestrians is so ironic, because no matter how many cars they have, they are also pedestrians, biologically. Unless they fly to the doors of their cars.”
― Archimedes Muzenda, Dystopia: How The Tyranny of Specialists Fragment African Cities

“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: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community

“If modern environmentalism continue on the current path of wilding the city, future urban dwellers might as well live in tree houses, for all the difference it will make.”
― Archimedes Muzenda, Dystopia: How The Tyranny of Specialists Fragment African Cities

“Rendons la ville aux gens, ils sauront quoi en faire.”
― Camille Ammoun

“That Mrs. Munt should be the first to discover the misfortune was not remarkable, for she was so interested in the flats, that she watched their every mutation with unwearying care. In theory she despised them — they took away that old-world look — they cut off the sun — flats house a flashy type of person.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“Assim, a integração e a participação são a obsessão dos não-participantes, daqueles que sobrevivem entre os fragmentos da sociedade possível e das ruínas do passado: excluídos da cidade, às portas do urbano […]”
― Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit À La Ville

“Plenty of people advocate for sustainability systems like bike infrastructure without considering the racism and wealth inequality embedded in how we plan and use urban space.”
― Adonia E. Lugo, Bicycle/Race: Transportation, Culture, & Resistance

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

“A walkable community has to have useful things for people to walk to.”
― Philip Langdon, Within Walking Distance: Creating Livable Communities for All

“Electronic virtual communities represent flexible, lively, and practical adaptations to the real circumstances that confront persons seeking community ... They are part of a range of innovative solutions to the drive for sociality--a drive that can be frequently thwarted by the geographical and cultural realities of cities increasingly structured according to the needs of powerful economic interests rather than in ways that encourage and facilitate habitation and social interaction in the urban context. In this context, electronic virtual communities are complex and ingenious strategies for survival.”
― Allucquère Rosanne Stone

“Artmaking has been, at least since bohemia and modernism appeared in 19th century Paris, largely an urban enterprise: the closer to museums, publishers, audiences, patrons, politicians, other enemies, and each other, the better for artists and for art. For if cities have been essential to artists, artists have been essential to cities...Being an artist was one way of being a participant in the debate about meaning and value, and the closer to the center of things is the more one can participate. This is part of what makes urbanity worth celebrating, this braiding together of disparate lives, but the new gentrification threatens to yank out some strands together, diminishing urbanism itself. Perhaps the new urbanism will result in old cities that function like suburbs as those who were suburbia's blandly privileged take them over.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism

“A lição é clara: enquanto nós arquitetos rebeldes não conhecermos a coragem de nossa mente e estivermos preparados para dar um mergulho igualmente especulativo em algum desconhecido, também nós continuaremos a ser objetos da geografia histórica (como abelhas operárias) em vez de sujeitos ativos que levem conscientemente ao limite as possibilidades humanas.”
― David Harvey, Spaces of Hope

“Cities are not only a place where we live but also a place where humanity evolves.”
― Planners Realm

“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