City Planning Quotes

“Boulevards are like people: similar in their youth, they undergo gradual change according to what ferments in them.”
― M. Ageyev, Novel with Cocaine

“Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“When planners fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“The reporting rate is even lower in New York City, with an estimated 96% of sexual harassment and 86% of sexual assaults in the subway system going unreported, while in London, where a fifth of women have reportedly been physically assaulted while using public transport, a 2017 study found that 'around 90% of people who experience unwanted sexual behavior would not report it... Enough women have experienced the sharp shift from 'Smile, love, it might never happen,' to 'Fuck you bitch why are you ignoring me?'... But all too often the blame is out on the women themselves for feeling fearful, rather than on planners for designing urban spaces and transit environments that make them feel unsafe... Women are often scared in public spaces. In fact, they are around twice as likely to be scared as men. And, rather unusually, we have the data to prove it.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“That’s Manhattan today—all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis.”
― Andrew Vachss, Mask Market

“You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. (Robert Moses)”
― Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

“City Planning and zoning have huge impacts on a city’s ability to steward various kinds of capital wisely.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“When cities prioritize sustainability, the residents in that city are more inclined to embrace sustainability as well.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, Principles of a Permaculture Economy

“One of the great themes of nature is abundance. One of the great themes of every city should also be abundance. In every city, there should be an abundance of opportunities, an abundance of food, an abundance of available homes, an abundance of biodiversity, an abundance of spaces to play.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, Principles of a Permaculture Economy

“City Planners, collectively, play a huge role in societies’ ability to steward capital wisely. With most of humanity living in cities, their efficiency or lack there of has huge implications for how people interact with resources. And from an ESG perspective, the condition of civilization can be largely measured by the interactions between people and resources”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Lots of things define what it means to be a good city. But one thing all good cities have in common is lots of trees integrated into the design of the city. Trees are vital to a thriving city.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“Nobody strolled and laughed on the sidewalks as relaxing burghers would in sweet, mellow, rotting Europe.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: A city cannot be a work of art.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“Town-planning," Geddes once wrote, "is not mere place-planning, nor even work-planning. If it is to be successful it must be folk-planning. This means that its task is . . . to find the right places for each sort of people; places where they will really flourish." These places, of course, are not really to be found, but have to be made. From his earliest designs for a botanical school garden and urban renewal work in Edinburgh to his latest building initiatives in Montpelier in southern France, Geddes pursued the creation of such places. He perceived himself as a gardener ordering the environment for the benefit of life.”
― Volker M. Welter, Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life

“Divided up into squares and corralled by the multi-lane highways were groups of multi-storey car parks, office buildings and department stores with small shops, cinemas, petrol stations and gleaming chrome snack bars on the ground floors. Many years earlier, when this city plan was being implemented, critical voices had been raised to say that the system would make the city inhuman and uninhabitable. The experts had brushed off the criticism. They argued that a modern city should be built not for pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages but for cars. As on so many other issues, both sides had subsequently been proved right.”
― Per Wahlöö, The steel spring

“The most [...] literal proposal to solve the problem of congestion comes from Harvey Wiley Corbett [...] Ultimately, Corbett calculates, the entire surface of the city could be a single traffic plane, an ocean of cars, increasing the traffic potential 700 percent. "[...We see] a very modernized Venice, a city of arcades, plazas and bridges, with canals for streets, only the canals will not be filled with real water but with freely flowing motor traffic, the sun glistening on the black tops of the cars and the buildings reflecting in this waving flood of rapidly rolling vehicles. From an architectural viewpoint [...] the idea presents all the loveliness, and more, of Venice. There is nothing incongruous about it, nothing strange..." Corbett's "solution" for New York's traffic problem is the most blatant case of disingenuity in Manhattanism's history. Pragmatism so distorted becomes pure poetry. Not for the moment does the theorist intend to relieve congestion; his true ambition is to escalate it to such intensity that it generates -- as in a quantum leap -- a completely new condition, where congestion becomes mysteriously positive [... Corbett and the authors of the Regional Plan] have invented a method to deal rationally with the fundamentally irrational. [They know] that it would be suicide to solve Manhattan's problems, that they exist by the grace of these problems, that it is their duty to make its problems, if anything, forever insurmountable, that the only solution for Manhattan is the extrapolation of its freakish history, that Manhattan is the city of the perpetual flight forward.”
― Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan

“Another famous town planning concept, the Finger Plan for Copenhagen, was based on a metaphor sand shown by a diagram, of a great hand resting over that city. Since 1947, the great hand has guided Copenhagen’s development. The merchant’s harbour, after which the city was named, sits in the palm of the guiding hand. Fingers point ways to new development. Power lines, telecom lines, and rapid transit lines follow the bones, arteries, veins and nerves of the fingers. Between those fingers we find the green lands of Denmark. Copenhagen was made into a garden city but the hand itself, of urban development, was grey.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning

“El propio observador debe desempeñar un papel activo al percibir el mundo y tener una participación creadora en la elaboración de su imagen. Debe contar con el poder de cambiar esa imagen para adaptarse a necesidades cambiantes. Un medio ambiente que está ordenado en forma detallada y definitiva puede impedir que aparezcan nuevas pautas de actividad. Un paisaje en el que cada una de las rocas narra una historia puede hacer difícil la creación de nuevas historias. Aunque ésta pueda no parecer una cuestión decisiva en nuestro actual caos urbano, indica, con todo, que lo que buscamos no es un orden definitivo sino abierto a las posibilidades, capaz de un ininterrumpido desarrollo ulterior.”
― Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City

“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