A Collection of Urban Design Quotes
It's not the beer cans I mind, it's the roads. - Edward
Abbey
Factors that are driving the popularity of large houses:
"First, with less of a sense of community and public life in our culture,
the home becomes a fortress which needs to contain everything we need,
including multiple forms of entertainment, rather than basic shelter…" -
designer-builder John Abrams of the South Mountain Company in West Tisbury,
Mass.
A common mistake people make when trying to design
something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete
fools. -Douglas Adams
...It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather
an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds. - Samuel
Adams (1722-1803)
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a
crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to
total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. - Woody
Allen
...each additional hour spent in a car per day was
associated with a 6% increase in the odds of being obese, while each additional
kilometer walked per day was associated with a 4.8% reduction in the odds of
being obese. - R.E.Andersen, 2003; U. S. Department of Health and Human
Services, 1996
A leader is one who influences. - Anonymous
As growth becomes denser, highway costs rise while
transit costs decline. - Anonymous
A street is a spatial entity and not the residue between
buildings. - Anonymous
Suburbia is a collection of private benefits and public
nuisances. - Anonymous
He who tells the truth must have one foot in the stirrup.
- Old Armenian proverb
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science
gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. - Isaac Asimov
A leader is someone who cares enough to tell the people
not merely what they want to hear, but what they need to know. - Reubin Askew
For any given criticism of new urbanism, there exists an equal
and corresponding criticism that makes exactly the opposite point. - Laurence
Aurbach
No urban area will prosper unless it attracts those who
can choose to live wherever they wish. - Jonathon Barnett
If car ownership is mandatory, [the place is] not urban.
- Donald Baxter
In the desire to be collaborative, don't forget
leadership. Don't be embarrassed to lead. There are too many efforts where it's
all about 'getting everyone to the table.' Everyone goes away feeling good, but
no one's doing anything.
- Frank H. Beal
Suburbanization is the biggest threat to cities in North
America. -Paul Bedford, Toronto Planning Director
In a quality city, a person should be able to live their
entire life without a car, and not feel deprived. - Paul Bedford
A good sustainability and quality of life indicator: The
average amount of time spend in a car. - Paul Bedford
Office development...pollutes land, air, and water as
surely as industrial development once did. Office buildings pollute by
generating vehicle traffic. A downtown office building well served by transit
pollutes far less than a suburban office building accessible only by car. -
Steve Belmont
Neighborhood activism is a path to political power in
American cities today, and city halls are filled with former activists more
sympathetic to the social agenda than to the physical agenda. - Steve Belmont
On ineffective planners: They often tend to write trivial
plans - lists of decisions that have already been taken. They defend their
professional turf by inventing esoteric languages. They spend their energy in
developing planning methodologies that are arcane and difficult to interpret.
They often avoid complex choices, preferring to list alternatives and to
provide large volumes of data without facing the need for choices...They invent
names and functions for planning and often protect themselves by routinizing
planning. Planning becomes bureaucratic, data are collected, analysis takes
place routinely, and no one seems to have much to say about the usefulness of
these planning efforts except those who carry them out...[T]hey overemphasize
the professional sanctity of their craft. - G. Beneveniste
What gets us into trouble isn't what we don't know; its
what we know for sure that just ain't so. - Yogi Berra
Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. - Yogi Berra
If they say it can't be done, it doesn't always work out
that way. - Yogi Berra
All cars are getaway cars. - Ross Best
The most destructive force I continue to see is the
grafting of suburban types - building-lot configurations, street types,
landscaping, public works, open space - onto urban settings. This has fueled
the destruction of the city as well as frustrated the construction of new urban
places. - Chuck Bohl
It is the
adaptable, not the well-adapted who survive. - Ken Boulding
Those who buy
into the suburbs because they want to be close to nature are going to keep
doing so. The point of parks in cities is not to satisfy that urge, but
to make better urbanism for those who want real urbanism. - David Brain
NIMBY
reactionaries don't stop change in the long run. They simply help to insure
that it happens in the worst possible way. - David Brain
Americans
are broad-minded people. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an
alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater, and even a newspaperman, but if a man
doesn't drive there's something wrong with him. - Art Buchwald
Automobiles need quantity and pedestrians need quality. -
Dan Burden
We must not build housing, we must build communities. -
Mike Burton
Cars are happiest when there are no other cars around.
People are happiest when there are other people around. - Dan Burden
The world is being forced - not in 10 years but today -
to choose between feeding people and feeding cars. - Ernest Callenbach
Freedom is not constituted primarily of privileges but of
responsibilities - Albert Camus:
Anyplace worth its salt has a 'parking problem'. - James
Castle
If the city is not well-designed, its impact on the
surrounding nature will be lethal. - Javier Cenicacelaya
Planning of the automobile city focuses on saving time.
Planning for the accessible city, on the other hand, focuses on time well
spent. - Robert Cervero
The food would have to be pretty horrible for this not to
be a perfect lunch. --Buff Chace sitting down in a Roman piazza
Bicyclists should expect and demand safe accommodation on
every public road, just as do all other users. Nothing more is expected.
Nothing less is acceptable. - Chainguard.com
Convivial towns can offer solace in disaster, solidarity
in protest, and a quiet everyday delight in urban life...Creating and
revitalizing places that foster conviviality is essential to the good life. -
Mark C. Childs
Vancouver killed the freeway because they didn't want the
freeways to kill their neighborhoods. The city flourished because making it
easier to drive does not reduce traffic; it increases it. That means if you
don't waste billions of dollars building freeways, you actually end up with
less traffic. - Rick Cole
When we build our landscape around places to go, we lose
places to be. -Rick Cole
Increasingly, we live in a world where cities compete for
people, and businesses follow. This trend has largely been ignored by many
cities, which are still focused on business climate and tax incentives. But I
think the big question businesses will ask in the years to come is going to be
'Can I hire talented people in this city?' Cities need to be able to answer
'yes' to succeed. - Carol Coletta, president and CEO of CEOs for Cities.
We have a military policy instead of an energy policy. -
Barry Commoner
Charrettes are what you do until sanity prevails again. -
Patrick Condon
Density and environmental protection are not
incompatible. If they are, we are in very deep trouble. - Patrick Condon
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than
knowledge. - Charles Darwin
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor
the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. - Charles Darwin
Progress in every age results only from the fact that
there are some men and women who refuse to believe that what they know to be
right cannot be done. - Russel W. Davenport
New Urbanism = Universal Principles calibrated locally. -
Bill Dennis
The greatest of all evils is a weak government. -
Benjamin Disraeli
People yearning for community are like people at a party
who crowd into the kitchen because they like it. - Bruce Donnelly
...if someone charges that the New Urbanism is about
hating cars, we can say no, that it is only when convenient walking and
convenient driving conflict that we place the pedestrian above the driver;
where they do not conflict, there is no dilemma. - Bruce Donnelly
Parking is a narcotic and ought to be a controlled
substance. It is addictive, and one can never have enough. - Victor Dover
To most Americans the cures for traffic congestion are
worse than the congestion itself. – Anthony Downs
[Democracies] have great difficulty solving the long-run
problems created by policies that provide short-term benefits. Once people
receive the benefits, they do not want to give them up. – Anthony Downs
…American communities require that new housing meet
quality requirements that are very high by world or even Western European and
Japanese standards. These requirements are designed by middle-class architects,
planners, and citizens in conformity with what they believe is decent housing.
But their concept of decency far surpasses what is necessary for human health
and safety. Consequently, all new American dwellings are too costly for
low-income people to occupy without direct subsidies. But subsidies are
provided for only a few of the many households with incomes low enough to be
eligible for them. So poor people live in unsubsidized older dwellings. –
Anthony Downs
In Houston, a person walking is someone on his way to his
car. - Anthony Downs
Climate has little to do with [how much people walk].
Toronto residents, New Orleanians and Manhattanites, with extremes of weather,
walk more than Atlantans. The variable is the quality of the urbanism. Not the
weather. People in Stockholm walk more than people in the suburbs of Seville.
People in Stockholm's center walk more that they do in Stockholm's 1950's new
towns. The variable is always the quality of the urbanism--not the weather. -
Andres Duany
It is NOT the inaugural condition that is the determinant
of a town that is decisive: it is the ability to molt that is important. -
Andres Duany
The problem is not the profit motive--profit has always
been the driver of building in this country--the issue is the pattern. So long
as the pattern was the compact, walkable and diverse neighborhood, we could
continue growing--and did so for 250 years. When the pattern changed after
WWII, it became unsustainable. - Andres Duany
In [the traditional New England town], one can live above
the store, next to the store, five minutes from the store or nowhere near the
store, and it is easy to imagine the different age groups and personalities
that would prefer each alternative. In this way and others, the traditional
neighborhood provides for an array of lifestyles. In conventional suburbia,
there is only one available lifestyle: to own a car and to need it for
everything. - Andres Duany, "Suburban Nation"
This should be clear: open space should be within walking
the pedestrian shed of every dwelling. The pedestrian shed is the measure of
urbanism. - Andres Duany
We are not running out of land. We are running out of
urban places. - Andres Duany
The Department of Transportation, in its single-minded
pursuit of traffic flow, has destroyed more American towns than General
Sherman. - Andres Duany
Anti-urban uses (large parking lots, large setbacks,
drive-thru's, wide and high-speed roads, etc.) are the new slaughterhouses -
the places that people fight against having as neighbors. - Andres Duany
With infill, start by providing for those who are not
risk-averse (singles, Bohemians, etc.). These people are the urban pioneers. -
Andres Duany
The 5 Bs - bricks, banners, balloons, benches and berms -
do NOT create streetlife. It is the available shopping that provides it. -
Andres Duany
If a number of persons are not in some way angry at the
planner, then no principles have been presented; the planner has been merely a
secretary to the mob, and the plan will be weak to the point of being useless.
-Andres Duany
The loss of a forest or a farm is justified only if it is
replaced by a village. To replace them with a subdivision or a shopping center
is not an even trade. - Andres Duany
Modern architects recognize 300 masterpieces but ignore
the other 30 million buildings that have ruined the world. - Andres Duany
Amateurs accustomed to emulation made great places. It is
the professionals of recent decades that have ruined our cities and our
landscapes with their inventions. - Andres Duany
On the failure of planning as process: when the job seems
too difficult, the tool is probably wrong. - Andres Duany
Higher density housing offers an inferior lifestyle only
when it is without a community as its setting. - Andres Duany
In the suburbs you have backyard decks; in towns you have
porches on the street. - Andres Duany
America's public spaces are sized by the biggest fire
engine the community can afford to buy. - Andres Duany
The street, which is the public realm of America, is now
a barrier to community life. - Andres Duany
NIMBYs disguised as environmentalists. -Andres Duany
The role of the street is social as well as utilitarian.
- Andres Duany
We have legislators who think it their duty only to
listen to the people instead of becoming expert on the subjects which they must
decide upon. - Andres Duany
There are components of modern life that are necessary
but which intrinsically create bad street frontage: They are the parking lot,
the drive-through, and the solid walls of certain businesses and institutions
that can't have windows. So there is a certain percentage of modern street
frontage that will not deliver pedestrian quality. The only questions are: what
percentage of your city must you give over to these uses and where do you
locate them.
What you need is a system of zoning based not on use, but on the quality of street frontage. Then develop your street grid with a rhythm of "A" streets and "B" streets. Designate those streets like your Walnut Street as "A" streets, where every building on these blocks must be high-grade, pedestrian-oriented and reinforce continuity - no parking lots, no curb cuts. Then assign all your anti-pedestrian frontages to your "B" streets, your service streets. There is absolutely nothing worse for a city than to make every street excellent. If you try to make every street excellent, every street will be mediocre. - Andres Duany
Anchorage is the most awful place. All people know is
that nature is beautiful; and they do not give a thought to the city they
inhabit. - Douglas Duany
The world will not evolve past its current state of
crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation. - Albert Einstein
The problem is not the automobile. There are plenty of
cars and traffic jams in European cities, but urban planning and design there
does not simply revolve around making space for the car. In American downtowns,
however, that has too often been the case. For years, downtowns have been
decimated as buildings have been cleared and streets widened in an effort to
get more cars into the city. Since most cars are driven only a few hours per
week, storage is a big problem. Parking lots often take up more space than any
other land use. - Larry Ford
Architects should favor the norm more often than the
exception. - Sergio Frau
When I'm working on a problem, I never think about
beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I am finished, it the
solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. - Buckminster Fuller
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they
fight you, then you win. - Mohandas Gandhi
Successful City Planning: Public action that generates a
desirable, widespread and sustained private market reaction. - Alexander Garvin
When there is a moment of grand unanimity, you can expect
great foolishness. - Paul Giacobbi
If you design communities for automobiles, you get more
automobiles. If you design them for people, you get walkable, livable
communities. - Parris Glendening and Christine Todd Whitman
Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be
beaten, but they may start a winning game. - Johan Wolfgang von Goethe
Tradition is the tending of the fire, not the worship of
the ashes. - Johan Wolfgang von Goethe
Urbanism works when it creates a journey as desirable as
the destination. - Paul Goldberger
If what you sell is the perception of privacy and
exclusivity, then every new house is a degradation of the amenity. However, if
what you sell is community, then every new house is an enhancement of the
asset. - Vince Graham
If buildings are beautiful, higher density compounds that
beauty. Conversely, if buildings are ugly, then higher density compounds that
ugliness. - Vince Graham
Neighborhood lobbyists have far too much influence and
this influence in the end almost always equals more sprawl. - Laura Hall
Mary Peters, the administrator of the Federal Highway
Administration, recently testified before a committee of the U.S. Senate that
"mobility is one of our greatest freedoms" and that "congestion
must be addressed with a long-term strategy to increase capacity" (FHWA
2002d). In its 2001 Report to the Nation, the Federal Highway Administration
declared that "our highway transportation system serves to unify America
and sustain the American way of life" (FHWA 2001). Implicit in such
statements is the belief that Americans have a right to drive and, more
specifically, that Americans have the right to drive anywhere they want at any
time of day they want at speeds unimpeded by congestion. Time and monetary
losses resulting from congestion are officially measured relative to free flow
conditions, thereby establishing free-flow conditions as the unquestioned
standard. - Susan Handy
I've always described Density in terms of dollars: The
more you have of it, the more you can "buy" with it -- referring to
amenities, of course (cultural, entertainment, dining, etc.). When I get asked
what's the single most important thing that can be added to a city to help
revitalize it (they are always waiting for the latest retail or entertainment
thing...), I always say "housing." - Seth Harry
Big boxes are symptomatic of sprawl, not the fundamental
producers of it. - Seth Harry
The "suburban conundrum": As density goes down
in a suburban setting, both arterial sizes and retail format sizes tend to go
up, while the frequency of both go down, resulting in longer trips, to fewer
boxes, of ever increasing scale.
- Seth Harry
Adding lanes to solve traffic congestion is like
loosening your belt to solve obesity. - Glen Hemistra
Setbacks, Height Limits, Open Space, Parking requirements
(S.H.O.P.). The four stooges of zoning have effectively outlawed compact,
affordable, walkable, mixed use (CAWMU) in the United States. - Fenno Hoffman
A hundred years after we are gone and forgotten, those
who never heard of us will be living with the results of our actions. - Oliver
Wendell Holmes
Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what
we know. - M.K. Hubbert
The only people, scientific or other, who never make
mistakes are those who do nothing. - Thomas Huxley
Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they appear, sidewalk
contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life must
grow. - Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Power
corrupts, but so does weakness, and absolute weakness corrupts
absolutely."- Josef Joffe
Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections
must first be overcome. - Samuel Johnson
Architecture without sensibility to its context is like
sex without love: entertaining perhaps, but not the source of lasting joy. -
Mark Wilson Jones
The more parking space, the less sense of place. - Jane
Holtz Kay
Any city planner who thinks that easing the traffic flow
will decrease the city’s congestion is simply living in a dream world.
Likewise, the addition of parking facilities will not, and never has,
eliminated parking problems. When you improve a small congested road, you wind
up with a big congested road. Likewise, the better the traffic pattern, the
more traffic on that pattern; the more parking lots, the more people looking
for a place to park. - John Keats
If you plan cities for cars and traffic, you get cars and
traffic. If you plan for people and places, you get people and places. - Fred
Kent
Whatever a traffic engineer tells you to do, do the
opposite and you'll improve your community. - Fred Kent
My interest is in the future, because I am going to spend
the rest of my life there. - Charles Kettering
It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong. -
John Maynard Keynes
Seductive congestion. It's what the best cities are all
about. - John King
It's true that Germans have always had a special love
affair with the car, but there's no reason you have to remain trapped in a bad
and unhealthy relationship. - Pit Klasen
Men do not love Rome because she is beautiful; Rome is
beautiful because men have loved her. - Leopold Kohr.
The majority of sprawl in this country is produced by
those who are fleeing from sprawl. -Alex Krieger
Containing this type of use of 50/50 [50 mph and 50,000
cars per day] streets is far beyond the will and ability of the typical local
government. The 50/50 arterial is a gift-wrapped, gold-plated, gift to strip
development. Once in place, almost no power on earth will stop its march toward
strip commercial. Time spent berating local governments (counties and cities)
for not doing better with these monstrosities (and I've done my share of this)
is satisfying to the critic, but is unproductive. Once in place, it is too late
to do much about the 50/50 arterial. - Walter Kulash
A road is a strip of ground over which one walks. A
highway differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for
vehicles, but also because it is merely a line which connects one point to
another. A highway has no meaning in itself. Its meaning derives entirely from
the two points which it connects. A road is attribute to space. Every stretch
of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A highway is the
triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere
obstacle to human movement and a waste of time. - Milan Kundera
It matters that our cities are primarily auto storage
depots. It matters that our junior high schools look like insecticide
factories. It matters that our libraries look like beverage distribution
warehouses. It matters that the best hotel in town looks like a minimum
security prison. To live and work and walk among such surroundings is a form of
spiritual degradation. It's hard to feel good about yourself when so much of
what you see on a typical day is so unrelentingly drab. - Jim Kunstler
...there's a reason that Elm Street and Main Street resonate in
our cultural memory. It's not because we're sentimental saps. It's because this
pattern of human ecology produced places that worked wonderfully well, and
which people deeply loved. - Jim Kunstler
We are never going to save the rural places or the
agricultural places or the wild and scenic places (or the wild species that
dwell there) unless we identify the human habitat and then strive to make it so
good that humans will voluntarily inhabit it. - Jim Kunstler
What's bad about sprawl is not its uniformity, but that
it is so uniformly bad. - Jim Kunstler
The 20th Century was about getting around. The 21st
Century will be about staying in a place worth staying in. - Jim Kunstler
It actually took more effort, and a deeper background in
principle and technique, on the part of the 19th century architect to contrive
proportioning schemes that would nourish the heart and soul of a normal human
being. Today it is the common citizen, forced to live among the baleful
monstrosities of 20th century architecture, who must expend extreme mental
effort to keep from shrieking in agony at every turn. - Jim Kunstler
Finding ways to intervene positively rather than
destructively in the old city is a lot of what pro-urbanist planning--new or
old--is all about. -- Nathan Landau
Density is necessary but not sufficient for walkable,
transit-friendly urban(e) communities...without adequate baseline densities, communities
can wind up building a lot of sidewalks that hardly anybody walks on. - Nathan
Landau
As we all know, architecture and urbanism, unlike other
specialties, such as surgery and biology, are susceptible to being valued,
criticized and even vetoed by persons without the most minimal knowledge of
their most elemental principles." - Mario Lanza (Havana 2003)
I have never seen a fact that would stand up to a myth at
a public hearing. - J. Gary Lawrence
…the state of Detroit today (1/3 of the city's land is
vacant, decrease in population by 1/2, etc.) is exactly what the automobile
industry intended to have happen to formerly pedestrian-oriented cities.
Detroit probably has more freeway miles than most U.S. cities, and it sure
hasn't benefited Detroit. (Reflecting upon this is the source of my
challenge to freeway proponents -- name one freeway construction project that
has benefited the traditional center city more than the suburbs, or benefited
the city at all. The reality is that freeways are for suburbanites.) -
Richard Layman
When you're making a housing decision, you're also making
a decision on transportation. - Barbara Lipman
You say what you think needs to be said. If it needs to
be said, there are going to be a lot of people who will disagree with it, or it
wouldn't need to be said. - Herb Lock
...in general we call these sorts of claims [about why a road
cannot be narrowed], by conventional thinkers (usually conventional,
old-school, traffic engineers), "technical brush-offs." The idea is
that, through the misuse of their position, they simply blow off your
legitimate design proposal with a technical brush-off. You are supposed to go
away and not come back. The benefit to them is that they waste very little time
on you and your proposal. However, you research the technical brush-off, find
out that it is baloney, come back, and confront them. They then will say,
"Oh, good job, you're right. However, your idea won't work because .....
and they will give you another technical brush-off. This pattern can continue
until either you give up or it is too late. Plus, a lot of damage can be done
in the meantime by stirring up the neighbors, the fire chief, and/or the
police. You have been given two technical brush-offs so far...The next
brush-offs will likely have to do with the classification of the street and
that they can't do what you propose. It might also be that they cannot use
certain types of funding to reduce car-carrying capacity. By the time you get
right down to the real issue, it will likely be that they simply do not want to
do the road diet. It violates their paradigm. In these situations, you'll have
to decide, at some point, if you will be able to convince the traffic dinosaurs
of the overall benefits to society of you proposal. - Ian Lockwood
Youth is not a period of life, it is a condition of the
spirit, a result of the will, a quality of the imagination, an intensity of
emotion, a victory of courage over timidity, a taste for adventure over
comfort. One becomes old when one abandons one's ideals. - Douglas Mac Arthur
1945
LEED architecture without good urban design is like
cutting down the rainforest using hybrid-powered bulldozers. - Dan Malouff
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for
mankind - Horace Mann
[American] Planners fight against good urbanism every day
of the week, and have for fifty years. - John Massengale
Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and
broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But
small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find
it. - Matthew 7:13-14
One of the interesting features of much of [the recent
research regarding walking] is that taken as a whole it shows that mixed use
and walkable destinations have a bigger impact on walking than the quality of
the pedestrian environment itself. Beautiful sidewalks with nowhere to go
don't really cut it. - Barbara McCann
Growth is inevitable and desirable, but destruction of
community character is not. The question is not whether your part of the world
is going to change. The question is how. - Edward T. McMahon
Any town that doesn't have sidewalks doesn't love its
children. - Margaret Mead
For every complex and difficult problem, there is an
answer that is simple, easy, and wrong. - H.L. Mencken
...Rather than design a transportation system to get the
most out of America's cities, America redesigned the cities to get the most out
of the automobile. - Richard Moe
The most important task of the urbanist is controlling
size. - David Mohney
Isn't
it paradoxical that the old factories are now the place of efficient and
desirable urban living, while the suburban escape from them have become
consumptive, environmentally unsustainable, noxious places. - Michael Morrissey
The most serious obstacles in our road building program
are not money, nor engineering problems, nor cruel terrain-but PEOPLE. - James
J. Morton
The car is not the enemy, nor is the elimination of cars
the solution. It is our societal bias toward cars that must be questioned. -
Anne Vernez Moudon
To allow for future street widening, traffic engineers
promoted the big front setback and tried to eliminate the sidewalk. - Anne
Vernez Moudon
The vernacular process is based on things that resonates
enough with the average citizen that they want to repeat it on their house or
in their town. Repeated enough over time, it becomes a pattern, and then a
tradition. The Most-Loved Places are therefore all by definition traditional
places. - Steve Mouzon
A historicist is a person who generally believes that old
things are always better than new things. A modernist is a
person who generally believes that new things are always better than old
things. A neo-traditionalist is a person who generally
chooses whatever works best in the long run. - Steve Mouzon &
Andres Duany
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf. - Lewis
Mumford
Trend is not destiny. - Lewis Mumford
Democracy, in any active sense, begins and ends in
communities small enough for their members to meet face to face. - Lewis
Mumford
The right to have access to every building in the city by
private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle, is actually
the right to destroy the city. - Lewis Mumford
We cannot continue to believe that the landscape is
sacred and the city profane. They must both be considered sacred. - Paul
Murrain
What kills a city are people who want only low taxes,
only want a good deal and only want cities to be about . . . pipes, pavement
and policing. - Glen Murray, mayor of Winnipeg, Manitoba
We are making great progress, but we are going in the
wrong direction. - Ogden Nash
Each on-street parking spot that is lost costs an
adjacent business about $10,000 a year in sales. - National Main Street Program
The land use and urban form of cities are...fundamentally
shaped by priorities in transportation...the essential character of a city's
land use comes down to how it manages its transport. -Peter Newman &
Jeffrey Kenworthy
All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking. -
Friedrich Nietzsche
Infill development is publicly cheap but privately
expensive, while sprawl is publicly expensive but privately cheap. - James
Nicholas
Cities are for people. A city is where people come to
work and raise their families and to spend their money and to walk in the
evening. It is not a traffic corridor. -John Norquist
There is no greater form of subsidized social engineering
than the interstate highway, which hastens the flight out of the city without
doing much to ease traffic congestion. -John Norquist
This used to be Main Street USA. It's now a code violation
all over America. - John Norquist
Benefits [of a home in a new urbanist neighborhood]
should be framed in the same manner as other products are sold in our culture
(by emphasizing aspects such as value, convenience, choice, safety, healthy
living, or beauty). - Nathan Norris
Suburban planning is all about separation and segregation
of uses. Buffers, enormous setbacks, masking. Urban planning, by stark
contrast, strives for mixed and shared use, permeability, and compact
dimensions. – Dom Nozzi
Smart Growth defined: Making the car an option, not a
necessity. – Dom Nozzi
Places don't become strip commercial because all the
trees were cut down. They become strip commercial because the place has been
scaled for cars. The road is too wide. The parking lot is too big. The building
setbacks are too large. Ironically, saving a tree often promotes such an
over-allocation of space. - Dom Nozzi
With modest roads, Big Box retail is impossible. With
large roads, Big Box retail is inevitable. - Dom Nozzi
This nation is drowning in a sea of free and abundant
parking. - Dom Nozzi
The pedestrian is the design imperative. - Dom Nozzi
If you are an elected official lacking in courage and
leadership, and you face even a peep of opposition to a project, fall back on
perfectionism to find a flaws so that you can shoot down the project.
Perfectionism leads to paralysis. - Dom Nozzi
NIMBYs on steriods. -Dom Nozzi
In part, public planning agencies have no vision because
they are drowning in minutiae. - Dom Nozzi
We need to design our cities so that one feels
embarrassed, inconvenienced, and like one who is missing out on all the fun
when driving a car. - Dom Nozzi
In 1999, Gainesville had a population of approximately
100,000. That same year, San Francisco had a population of approximately
777,000. The Paris inner area had a population of approximately 2.1 million.
The eye-opener is that Gainesville's land area, at just over 50 square miles,
is larger than both San Francisco (46.7 sq mi) and Inner Area Paris (41
sq mi). - Dom Nozzi & Michael Hoge
Working adults formerly enjoyed an hour of
"community time" after the workday was over and before they were
expected home. It has been replaced by an hour of "commuting time."
The former warmed us to our fellow human beings, the latter conditions us to
hate them. – Ray Oldenburg, Celebrating the Third Place
A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.
- George S. Patton
A
city can be friendly to people or it can be friendly to cars, but it can't be
both. – Enrique Penalosa
Over the last 30 years, we've been able to magnify
environmental consciousness all over the world. As a result, we know a lot
about the ideal environment for a happy whale or a happy mountain gorilla.
We're far less clear about what constitutes an ideal environment for a happy
human being. One common measure for how clean a mountain stream is, is to look
for trout. If you find the trout, the habitat is healthy. It's the same way
with children in a city. Children are a kind of indicator species. If we can
build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all
people. - Enrique Penalosa
God made us walking animals—pedestrians. As a fish needs
to swim, a bird to fly, a deer to run, we need to walk, not in order to
survive, but to be happy. - Enrique Penalosa
A
premise of the new city is that we want a society to be as egalitarian as
possible. For this purpose, quality-of-life distribution is more important than
income distribution. [And quality of life includes] a living environment as
free of motor vehicles as possible. - Enrique Penalosa
Anything you do to make a city more friendly to cars
makes it less friendly to people. - Enrique Penalosa
Americans are in the habit of never walking if they can
ride. - Louis Philippe (1798)
American families own such a surfeit of consumer goods
that they have turned self-storage into a $17 billion a year industry. - Daniel
Pink (June 2005)
Some collective practices have enormous inertia because
they impose a high cost on the individual who would try to change them. -
Steven Pinker
When you're on the street [as a pedestrian], all cars are
monsters. When you're in a car, all pedestrians are idiots. - Alan E. Pisarski
The desire for community is a constant of human nature. -
Stephen Price
Nothing looks so dated as yesterday's vision of the
future. - Christian De Quincey
Well planned cities can compensate for declining incomes
by decreasing the cost of living. - Henry Richmond
To achieve excellence should be a struggle. - Charleston
Mayor Joseph Riley
We live in a country made of spare parts where the master
plan has been lost. - Jaquelyn Robertson
Every freedom has a corresponding responsibility. - John
D. Rockefeller
There is no lack of space [in cities]. It is just that
most of it is in the form of vacant parking lots and extra wide roads. -Michael
Ronkin
From time to time, little men will find fault with what
you have done...but they will go down the stream like bubbles, they will
vanish. But the work you have done will remain for the ages. - Theodore
Roosevelt
The measure of any great civilization is in its cities,
and the measure of a city's greatness is to be found in the quality of its
public spaces, its parks and squares. - John Ruskin
The only way you run into someone else in LA is in a car
crash. - Susan Sarandon, on why she moved to NY.
When a new truth enters the world, the first stage of
reaction to it is ridicule, the second stage is violent opposition, and in the
third stage, that truth comes to be regarded as self-evident - Arthur
Schopenhauer
A culture of inertia has set in. Criticism predominates
over construction; critics are given more weight than those trying to build. It
doesn't matter how small a constituency or flawed an argument the critic
possesses. He or she always seems to predominate in political circles, in the
news media, and in the public debate. - Senator Charles E. Schumer
Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It
is the only thing. - Albert Schweitzer
Although the American scarcely thought of his car as an
instrument for reshaping the city, it was to prove the most potent means of
crippling Central Business Districts and upbuilding outlying shopping areas
that had ever been invented. It was the most effective device for spreading the
city over a vast territory that history had ever seen. Its potential for
destruction and for construction was, in short, awesome. - Mel Scott
Off-street parking requirements [imposed by a city for
new developments] and cars...present a symbiotic relationship: the requirements
lead to free parking, the free parking leads to more cars and more cars then
lead to even higher parking requirements. When 3 spaces per 1,000 square feet
[of new building] no longer satisfy the peak demand for free parking, a
stronger dose of 4 spaces per 1,000 square feet can alleviate the problem, but
not for long because cars increase in numbers to fill the new parking spaces.
Every jab of the parking needle relieves the local symptoms, but ultimately
worsens the real disease -- too much land and capital devoted to parking and
cars. Parking requirements are good for motorists in the short run but bad for
cities in the long run. - Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking
For a concert hall, Los Angeles requires, at a minimum,
50 times more parking spaces than San Francisco allows as the maximum. This
difference in planning helps explain why downtown San Francisco is much more
exciting and livable than downtown Los Angeles. - Donald Shoup, The High Cost
of Free Parking
American cities put a floor under the parking supply to
satisfy the peak demand for free parking, and then cap development density to
limit vehicle trips. European cities, in contrast, often cap the number of
parking spaces to avoid congesting the roads and combine this strategy with a
floor on allowed development density to encourage walking, cycling, and public
transport. That is, Americans require parking and limit density, while
Europeans require density and limit parking. When combined with complaints
about traffic congestion and calls for smart growth, the American policy looks
exceptionally foolish. - Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking
Minimum parking standards are fertility drugs for cars. -
Donald Shoup
Staunch conservatives often become ardent communists when
it comes to parking, and rational people quickly turn emotional. - Donald Shoup
If we continue to do what we've always done with curb
parking, we will continue to get what we now have -- the "parking
problem," with all its ramifications. Fortunately, we can resolve this
problem if we: (1) charge market prices for curb parking; (2) return the
revenue to finance neighborhood public improvements; and (3) remove off-street
parking requirements. No other source of public revenue can so easily bring in
so much money and simultaneously improve transportation, land use, and the
environment. - Donald Shoup
If the earth was an apartment, we wouldn't be getting our
security deposit back. - Jim Shubert
A suburban through street is similar to a New Urbanist
through street in the same way that a concrete flood channel is similar to a
babbling brook. - Patrick Siegman
Preserving natural habitat by creating better human
habitat. - Smart Growth America's web site
People move to the suburbs for the illusion of greater
freedom, but it is where there is density - more people & more kinds of
people, more buildings & more kinds of buildings - that there are more
choices. - Sandy Sorlien
The house itself is of minor importance. Its relation to
the community is the thing that really counts. A small house must depend on its
grouping with other houses for its beauty... - Clarence Stein
The opposite to bad development is good development, not
no development. - Padriac Steinschneider
The great thing about urbanism…is that the more you
build, generally the better. The opposite is true of sprawl. - Robert
Steuteville
There are three rules of urban design [for the
establishment and preservation of walkable commercial areas]. Build [buildings]
to the sidewalk (i.e., property line), make the front of the building
'permeable' (i.e., no blank walls), and prohibit parking lots in front of the
building. - David Sucher, City Comforts (2003)
Environmentalists should make good urbanists, since they
understand systems, diversity, connectivity and interdependence. - Caryl
Terrell
Environmentalists fail to understand that human beings
are a life form. - Dhiru Thadani
Consensus is the absence of leadership. - Margaret
Thatcher
It is not enough to be busy. The question is: What are we
busy about? - Henry David Thoreau
The paradox of transportation in the late 20th Century is
that while it became possible to travel to the moon, it also became impossible,
in many cases, to walk across the street. - Joell Vanderwagen
50 years ago, city planning practices and codes moved
from being community unifiers to suburban dividers. - Tom Walsh
For
the first time in human history, people are systematically building meaningless
places. - E.V. Walter
Generica: Fast food joints, strip malls, and
subdivisions, as in "we were so lost in Generica, I didn't know what city
it was." - Steve Weigand
It is difficult to design a place that will not attract
people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished. - William
H. Whyte
When did the poor acquire the right to permanently dominate the
life of the inner city? - Lloyd Zuckerberg as amended by Larry Felton Johnson
Placing surface parking lots in your downtowns is like
placing a toilet in your living room - Unknown
A community has to have the capacity to envision a future
they want, and not just the one they are likely to get. - Unknown
The suburb fails to be a countryside because it is too
dense. It fails to be a city because it is not dense enough. - Unknown
We don't want slow growth. We want slow land consumption.
- Unknown
When you have too much of something, you tax it. When you
have too little of something, you subsidize it. - Unknown
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