Quotes About Urbanism

When shopping was still connected to the street it was also an intensification and articulation of the street. Now it has become utterly independent - contained, controlled, surveyed.

Twitter has been my life's work in many senses. It started with a fascination with cities and how they work, and what's going on in them right now.

Each city has strengths. Cities should be developed with their own individuality and characteristics.

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?

Unitary urbanism's point of departure is the changeableness of our aspirations and our activities. We know that neither eternal truth nor absolute beauty exist and that, for this reason, ideal form does not exist. Form that is in constant modulation and in agreement with the unceasingly changing aspects of our existence, such as we will produce it. The environment in which we live influences our activity, but reciprocally this environment is a product of our creative activity.

Couples will no longer spend their nights in their houses dedicated to habitation and reception, the customary social reason for banalization. The chamber of love will be more remote from the center of the city: it will completely naturally re-create for the partners the notion of ex-centricity, in a place less open to the light, more hidden, in order to return to the atmosphere of the secret. The contrary move, the search for a center of thought, will proceed by the same technique.

Robert Louis Stevenson presents a character who, in London at night, is astonished 'to walk for such a long time in such a complex decor without encountering even the slightest shadow of an adventure.' The urbanists of the twentieth century will have to construct adventures. The simplest Situationist act would consist in abolishing all the memories of the employment of time of our epoch. It is an epoch that, up until now, has lived far below its means.

The earth is becoming intensely citified. "The megacity will be at the heart of twenty-first-century geography," Robert D. Kaplan writes in The Revenge of Geography.

Once you learn to look at architecture not merely as an art more or less well or more or less badly done, but as a social manifestation, the critical eye becomes clairvoyant.

A small house must depend on its grouping with other houses for its beauty, and for the preservation of light air and the maximum of surrounding open space.

Mies van der Rohe's architecture and modern architecture in general suffered from not only being repetitive, but not explaining to the populous what the different rooms were for.

For more than 40 years, I have advocated the creation of a 'round the clock' community. This would mean, at the least, housing, schools and shops of various kinds alongside the commercial buildings. That kind of community had appeared in lower Manhattan in nascent form before Sept. 11, 2001.

No street corner has any justification over another one. Custom dissolves into nothingness.

Whyte's work remains a living and usable handbook for improving our cities, our countryside, and our lives.

Public space is for living, doing business, kissing, and playing. Its value can't be measured with economics or mathematics; it must be felt with the soul.

A bikeway is a symbol that shows that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally important as a citizen on a $30,000 car.

In such paces — the Vancouvers, San Diegos, Portlands, Seattles, and, yes, San Franciscos and Los Angeleses — can we hope for anything more than jazzed-up melding of New York styles or self-conscious lampoons that aspire to kift the curse of provincialism?

The only thing that is truly Londonish about London is that it's all bits and pieces of everybody else.

One of the most persistent images in American urbanism is that of the proverbial city on a hill, as first envisioned on these shores by the Puritan John Winthrop, via the Gospel according to Saint Matthew.

Some bemoan the brutalism of socialist architecture, but was the blandness of capitalist architecture any better?

Businesses always have competitors nipping at their heels. Historically, cities have not viewed themselves as subject to that same type of competition. But that's wrong.

A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe and 50 times: It is a beautiful catastrophe.

I see my buildings as pieces of cities, and in my designs I try to make them into responsible and contributing citizens.

If we're going to make a city everybody can live in for a lifetime, we need to make sure we are building and growing for everybody.