Quotes & Sayings About Urban Planning

Neighborhoods built up all at once change little physically over the years as a rule ... [Residents] regret that the neighborhood has changed. Yet the fact is, physically it has changed remarkably little. People's feelings about it, rather, have changed. The neighborhood shows a strange inability to update itself, enliven itself, repair itself, or to be sought after, out of choice, by a new generation. It is dead. Actually it was dead from birth, but nobody noticed this much until the corpse began to smell. — Jane Jacobs

Right. You're Kali. Of course you're planning a rescue mission. Stupid self-sacrifice is kind of your thing. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

13 million Indians will join the workforce every year from now till 2030. They know their prospects aren't good. Here's why: in the years from 1972 to 1983 - not celebrated as a time of overwhelming prosperity - the total number of jobs in the economy nevertheless grew 2.3 per cent a year. In the years between liberalization in 1991 and today, jobs have grown at an average of only 1.6 per cent a year. But, if these young people have to be absorbed, then jobs must grow at least 3 per cent a year - almost twice the rate at which they have since liberalization. This is simply not happening. In other words, one out of every two youngsters who starts looking for a job next year won't find one. — Mihir S. Sharma

Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television. — William Gibson

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

Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves. — Jane Jacobs

Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts. — Rebecca Solnit

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges facing our cities or to the housing crisis, but the two issues need to be considered together. From an urban design and planning point of view, the well-connected open city is a powerful paradigm and an engine for integration and inclusivity. — Richard Rogers

A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims. — Leon Krier

It is not, of course, only the Japanese who find flat sterile surfaces attractive and kirei. Foreign observers, too, are seduced by the crisp borders, sharp corners, neat railings, and machine-polished textures that define the new Japanese landscape, because, consciously or unconsciously, most of us see such things as embodying the very essence of modernism. In short, foreigners very often fall in love with kirei even more than the Japanese do; for one thing, they can have no idea of the mysterious beauty of the old jungle, rice paddies, wood, and stone that was paved over. Smooth industrial finish everywhere, with detailed attention to each cement block and metal joint: it looks 'modern'; ergo, Japan is supremely modern. — Alex Kerr

A border
the perimeter of a single massive or stretched-out use of territory
forms the edge of an area of 'ordinary' city. Often borders are thought of as passive objects, or matter-of-factly just as edges. However, a border exerts an active influence. — Jane Jacobs

Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilderness brings the city within view, but not within reach, of most Brazilian subsistence farmers. The new expressway expands Chicago, but it sucks those who are well-wheeled away from a downtown that decays into a ghetto. — Ivan Illich

Probably the most important element in intricacy is centering. Good small parks typically have a place somewhere within them commonly understood to be the center - at the very least a main crossroads and pausing point, a climax. — Jane Jacobs

I'm completely taken and impressed by the planning authority of Singapore and its Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). It's the most cutting-edge agency in the world. They have very effective guidelines for development, and they review design as it evolves. — Moshe Safdie

I return my attention to the situation at hand and realize Reality - the impatient bitch - has made my decision for me. She does that a lot. You get busy planning your life, then it has the nerve to just go ahead and happen to you before you're ready. Before you even get the chance to aim yourself right! — Karen Marie Moning

There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time. — Jane Jacobs

Privacy, self-reliance, choice -- all these can and must remina core American values. Yet so too must we remember that other core American value, the value of community. And we must redefine community more broadly to include not just our street or our tract, but our town, our metropolis, our region. — William Fulton

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans. — Jane Jacobs

Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure. — Jane Jacobs

The 1948 war's diplomatic maneuvers and military campaigns are well engraved in Israeli Jewish historiography. What is missing is the chapter on the ethnic cleansing carried out by the Jews in 1948. As a result of that campaign, five hundred Palestinian villages and eleven urban neighborhoods were destroyed, seven hundred thousand Palestinians were expelled, and several thousand were massacred.2 Even today, it is hard to find a succinct summary of the planning, execution, and repercussions of these tragic results. — Noam Chomsky

A noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die. — Daniel Burnham

I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission ... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning. — Kenzo Tange

In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship
around participation in public life. — Rebecca Solnit

Terror is a form of urban planning. — Karan Mahajan

Do not try to make circumstances fit your plans. Make plans that fit the circumstances. — George S. Patton

If a city is designed in a way that makes a long drive to work necessary, we harm the social health of that city. If a lot of people cycle, it's probably an indication that you live in a healthy neighborhood. This is something that should be seriously considered in urban planning, if you want to ensure a neighborhood togetherness and trust among locals. — Meik Wiking

By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities. — Socrates

Those who plan do better than those who do not plan, even should they rarely stick to their plan. — Winston Churchill

Sustainability is now a big baggy sack in which people throw all kinds of old ideas, hot air and dodgy activities in order to be able to greenwash their products and feel good. — Kevin McCloud

Henceforth the crisis of urbanism is all the more concretely a social and political one, even though today no force born of traditional politics is any longer capable of dealing with it. Medico-sociological banalities on the 'pathology of housing projects,' the emotional isolation of people who must live in them, or the development of certain extreme reactions of rejection, chiefly among youth, simply betray the fact that modern capitalism, the bureaucratic society of consumption, is here and there beginning to shape its own setting. This society, with its new towns, is building the terrain that accurately represents it, combining the conditions most suitable for its proper functioning, while at the same time translating in space, in the clear language of organization of everyday life, its fundamental principle of alienation and constraint. It is likewise here that the new aspects of its crisis will be manifested with the greatest clarity. — Tom McDonough

I'm trying to discover - invent, I suppose - an architecture, and forms of urban planning, that do something of the same thing in a contemporary way. I started out trying to create buildings that would sparkle like isolated jewels; now I want them to connect, to form a new kind of landscape, to flow together with contemporary cities and the lives of their peoples. — Zaha Hadid

A thousand policemen directing traffic cannot tell you why you come or where you go. — T. S. Eliot

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

Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Ahhh, God's balls! The Horrible Halt!" Adoulla pronounced the Dhamsawaati term for the complete standstill of traffic with a familiar disgust. — Saladin Ahmed

The built environment is shaped not only by private sector development pratices, but also by the honored and fascinating field of planning. Planners in towns, counties, regional and state government, consulting firms and in economic development agencies translate ideas about human settlements into concrete designs. They can be generalists or specialize in transportation, urban centers, rural land use, economic development and more. At its best, the planning profession aims to mediate tensions between people, social groups, and the natural environment by creating an orderly process for determining common values, shared priorities and elegant principles for transcending conflicts. Therefore planners may find themselves caught in some of the most challenging political crossfire to be found. But they also have the opportunity to educate many sectors and communities. — Melissa Everett

The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models. — Rem Koolhaas

Like Free People, the Urban brand is planning to grow by expanding product assortments, expanding the brand reach and by improved marketing. — Richard Hayne

Great artists need great clients. — I.M. Pei

Frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighbouhood. — Jane Jacobs

When we are trying to come up with new health laws, you bring doctors, you bring experts in medicine. In urban planning, you bring the best architects. How it is possible that when we are talking about the way we are going to feed America, no chef shows up in the room? — Jose Andres

Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination. — Rebecca Solnit

Americans are in the habit of never walking if they can ride. — Louis-Philippe I Of France

the presence of buildings around a park is important in design. They enclose it. They make a definite shape out of the space, so that it appears as an important event in the city scene, a positive feature, rather than a no-account leftover. — Jane Jacobs

A young, beautiful mayor's with high-powered plans for the city of Compton must put them aside to become a sleuth to solve the assassination of her husband, the mayor. — Martha Tucker

As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense. — Jane Jacobs

If a policeman must know the Constitution, then why not a planner? — William J. Brennan