Particular attention should be given to the opportunities which the environment presents or precludes for involvement of children with persons both older and younger than themselves.
— Urie Bronfenbrenner
Impressive Urban Planning quotations
Do not try to make circumstances fit your plans. Make plans that fit the circumstances.
It is difficult to design a space that will not attract people.
What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished.
Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of men since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money.
A plan that everyone dislikes for different reasons is a success.
A plan everyone dislikes for the same reason is a failure. A plan that everyone likes for the same reason is an act of God!
Poor planning or poor execution of plans is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality.
...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.
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.
Nothing's dangerous if you know what you're doing.
A land full of places that are not worth caring about may soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.
Americans are in the habit of never walking if they can ride.
By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.
When people condemn me for designing iconic buildings in cities and not having an idea what a city is, they haven't done their homework. I started in urban design and city planning. It's just that when I got out of school there wasn't much of a market for that. There still isn't.
A thousand policemen directing traffic cannot tell you why you come or where you go.
The outcome of the city will depend on the race between the automobile and the elevator, and anyone who bets on the elevator is crazy.
Those who plan do better than those who do not plan, even should they rarely stick to their plan.
If a policeman must know the Constitution, then why not a planner?
The suburb is a place where someone cuts down all the trees to build houses, and then names the streets after the trees.
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.
There's a simple solution to our traffic problems.
We'll have business build the roads, and government build the cars.
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.
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.
The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation.
A noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die.
Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.
I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission.
.. (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning.
Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.
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.
This country is so urbanized we think low-fat milk comes from cows on Nutri/System weight-loss plans.
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.
So here's my advice to city planners.
Make your city runnable. Runners are the first wave of troops bringing human activity back to the urban core of any city. Where we go, others will follow. The connection between runnability and livability is so clear (at least to me), that it's surprising that new developments consistently leave pathways out of the plans.
Building a smarter grid has long been a key part of our government's plan to modernize our energy infrastructure and provide clean, reliable affordable power to consumers. By supporting Ryerson's Centre for Urban Energy we are building a whole new landscape for innovations that will be the backbone for our energy system for future generations.
In the planning and designing of new communities, housing projects, and urban renewal, the planners both private and public, need to give explicit consideration to the kind of world that is being created for the children who will be growing up in these settings. Particular attention should be given to the opportunities which the environment presents or precludes for involvement of children both older and younger than themselves.
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.
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.