Quotes About Urbanism

If you look at the entrance halls of the skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s, they are very welcoming. They are public spaces with enormous amounts of display and marble and so on. They were havens off the street.

I don't want to bring a European city or an east-coast city to the West Coast.

Design is people.

For architects, towns and cities are just big display cases for their work. The fact that the place matters so much more than the building is something else they don't want to know. Making good cities is the last thing on their mind. As the heroic urbanist Jane Jacobs was heard to say, "the most cunningly ignorant people I know are architects.

Does anyone suppose that, in real life, answers to any of the great questions that worry us today are going to come out of homogeneous settlements?

What draws us to a city like San Francisco is the same thing that draws entrepreneurs, startups, and freelancers to WeWork: it's the creative atmosphere, the technical sophistication, and the strong sense of community.

Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls —Robert Walser. A German-speaking Swiss writer, Walser is understood to be the missing link between Kleist and Kafka. Confined to a sanatorium in Herisau, Switzerland, he used to write 'micrograms', (undecipherable short texts handwritten in a nano text-size) and take long walks. On the 25th of December 1956 he was found, dead of a heart attack, in a field of snow.

Forget the damned motor car and built cities for lovers and friends .

The greatest responsibility of the planner and architect, I believe, is the protection and development of our habitat.

If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that's why they like him.

When Oscar Niemeyer died on December 5, 2012, ten days before his 105th birthday, he was universally regarded as the very last of the twentieth century's major architectural masters, an astonishing survivor whose most famous accomplishment, Brasilia, was the climactic episode of utopian High Modern urbanism.

What makes cities great, and what leads to their gradual demise? As this book will argue, three critical factors have determined the overall health of cities— the sacredness of place, the ability to provide security and project power, and last, the animating role of commerce.

The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

The ideology of New York City was, is, and probably always will be profit.

whether in London's ornate arcades or Rio's fractious favelas, whether in the high-rises of Hong Kong or the dusty workspaces of Dharavi, our culture, our prosperity, and our freedom are all ultimately gifts of people living, working, and thinking together—the ultimate triumph of the city.

The biggest thing growing cities need to do is minimize barriers to development so that as long as someone is doing good urbanism, they can get permitted quickly and get building quickly.

Before 2000, everything was about being contextual, and buildings were supposed to be good citizens.

A unitary urbanism — the synthesis of art and technology that we call for — must be constructed according to certain new values of life, values which now need to be distinguished and disseminated.

Architecture does not change anything. It's always on the side of the wealthy. The important thing is to believe that it can make life better.

Unlike Dyson, he [Phillipps] walked fast, with his eye on the pavement, absorbed in his thoughts, and oblivious of the life around him; and he could not have told by what streets he had passed, when he suddenly lifted up his eyes and found himself in Leicester Square.

One great building does not make a great city.

You cannot save wonderful towns. You can only save wonderful towns by building new ones.

Throughout history, cities have been associated with incredible bursts of creative energy - the Renaissance in Florence, or modernism in Paris. London is the cultural metropolis of the early 21st century.

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. 'Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!' we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should know and love her in her present fallen state (for she must fall without our vigilant love) is a species of betrayal.