The materials of city planning are: sky, space, trees, steel and cement; in that order and that hierarchy. — Le Corbusier
By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities. — Socrates
You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit. — Norman Foster
Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design. — Jane Jacobs
Nothing in this world is more simple and more cheap than making cities that provide better for people. — Jan Gehl
One cannot make architecture without studying the condition of life in the city — Aldo Rossi
Architecture can't force people to connect, it can only plan the crossing points, remove barriers, and make the meeting places useful and attractive. — Denise Scott Brown
EMBRACING THE EXISTING Japanese perspective on urban history and context — Kengo Kuma
[Urbanization] is the inevitable outcome of the processes of growth and the processes of modernization. — Manmohan Singh
To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor. — Frank Lloyd Wright
An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport. — Enrique Penalosa
Infrastructure is much more important than architecture. — Rem Koolhaas
We all need the living green or we'll shrivel up inside. To make the modern city livable is the task of our times. — Jens Jensen
...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
London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design. — Renzo Piano
City Planning Quotes
The city of Chandigarh is planned to human scale. It puts us in touch with the infinite cosmos and nature. It provides us with places and buildings for all human activities by which the citizens can live a full and harmonious life. Here the radiance of nature and heart are within our reach. — Le Corbusier
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
It is difficult to design a space that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished. — William H. Whyte
You must be willing to leave the life that you planned in order to find the one waiting for you.
Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context -- a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan. — Eliel Saarinen
Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effect of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building. — Jane Jacobs
I have a bold plan to break from the Bloomberg years, and end the 'Tale of Two Cities' by providing real opportunity to all New Yorkers, no matter where they live. — Bill de Blasio
Rushing never saved the time that planning did.
In a city where you walk around, it's impossible to plan your day and your life as accidents will happen, you'll overhear things, bump into people, and take unexpected turns. — Jason Schwartzman
Ronda is the place where to go, if you are planning to travel to Spain for a honeymoon or for being with a girlfriend. The whole city and its surroundings are a romantic set. ... Nice promenades, good wine, excellent food, nothing to do. — Ernest Hemingway
We plan, we toil, we suffer - in the hope of what? A camel-load of idol's eyes? The title deeds of Radio City? The empire of Asia? A trip to the moon? No, no, no, no. Simply to wake just in time to smell coffee and bacon and eggs. — J. B. Priestley
You don't see no city when you look at me cause country's all I am. I love runnin' barefoot through the old cornfields and I love that country ham. Well you say I'm made just to fit your plans but there's a barnyard shovel pick your hands. If your eyes are on me you're lookin' at country. — Loretta Lynn
Urban Design Quotes
The fundamental failure of most graphic, product, architectural and even urban design is its insistence on serving the God of Looking-Good rather than the God of Being-Good. — Richard Saul Wurman
The design of the building addresses the public nature of both the urban context and the internal program. In order to reinforce the building's associative or mimetic qualities, the facades are organized in a classical three-part division of base, middle or body, and attic or head. — Michael Graves
Preventing global warming from becoming a planetary catastrophe may take something even more drastic than renewable energy, superefficient urban design, and global carbon taxes. — Jamais Cascio
If plan A fails, remember there are 25 more letters.
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. — Frank Gehry
Any town that doesn't have sidewalks doesn't love its children. — Margaret Mead
Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.
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
Urban design as a discipline barely exists in most American and Canadian cities. In Singapore, there are innovative transportation strategies at work. — Moshe Safdie
The only people, scientific or other, who never make mistakes are those who do nothing. — Thomas Huxley
The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation. — Albert Einstein
Urban Development Quotes
The key words of violent economics are urbanization, industrialization, centralization, efficiency, quantity, speed. . . . The problem of evolving a nonviolent way of economic life [in the West] and that of developing the underdeveloped countries may well turn out to be largely identical. — E. F. Schumacher
As Spengler observed, all urbanized societies seem to develop a subconscious death wish, making individuals indifferent to the survival of their families and their race. — Revilo P. Oliver
His [Donald Trump] urban policy is stop and frisk, law and order. And we need investment and development. — Jesse Jackson
A goal without a plan is just a wish.
The idea of the chickens with the multiple breasts and thighs came from an urban legend that some fast-food places had developed chickens with four thighs. It wasn't true, but it is a suggestive rumor. — Margaret Atwood
Unlike the urban development that I see taking over and swallowing up our precious soil, when we interact with our environment in a way that allows for regeneration and natural spaces, the outcome can be beautiful. — Cory Trepanier
Strengthening local airports in Iowa is important for economic development and improving the quality of life our rural areas and urban communities — Chuck Grassley
An idiot with a plan can beat a genius without a plan.
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 North America, hip-hop and urban music are much more developed than it could be in Europe, except for a couple of markets like France, for example, or Germany, they're a little bit more aware. — K-Maro
The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy. — Robert Smithson
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
Urban Landscape Quotes
The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque. — Susan Sontag
I don't think of myself as a rebellious artist, a lot of people have said that about me because I came from Cornwall and choose to paint people in what they considered to be an urban style instead of Cornish landscapes. I've never agreed with them. It's bullshit. — Danny Fox
What I wanted to try and figure out was, okay, in contemporary 21st century life the alienation between the self and the land around you or the self and even the urban landscape. You name it. — DJ Spooky
If something doesn't work change the plan, don't change your goal.
To truly make good public space, you have to erase the distinctions between architecture, urbanism, landscape, [and] media design. — Liz Diller
I enjoy places that have mystery and atmosphere, perhaps a patina of age, a suggestion rather than a description, a question or two. I look for memories, traces, evidence of the human interaction with the landscape. Sometimes I photograph pure nature, sometimes urban structures. — Michael Kenna
So he [Sigmund Freud] called this "the uncanny" and he also referred to cities as well, like the idea of walking through the city and the way the urban landscape could lead you to a sense of disorientation and to a kind of, you know, sense of repetition. And the way a city can unfold as you walk. — DJ Spooky
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
The mind left to itself creates monstrosities, and not only in art galleries. Look at our urban landscapes and industrial wastelands. No civilization has ever produced so much ugliness. — Eckhart Tolle
Walkman was the precursor to the cell phone, in terms of your strategy for getting through the urban landscape and the modern experience. Insulate yourself from it with your own soundscape. — Douglas Rushkoff
Ultimately we need to recognize that while humans continue to build urban landscapes, we share these spaces with others species. — David Suzuki
Urban Environment Quotes
Urbanization is not about simply increasing the number of urban residents or expanding the area of cities. More importantly, it's about a complete change from rural to urban style in terms of industry structure, employment, living environment and social security. — Li Keqiang
I find it striking that the quality of the urban habitat of homo sapieans is so weakly researched compared to the habitats of gorillas, elephants, and Bengal tigers and panda bears in China…you hardly see anything on the habitat of man in the urban environment. — Jan Gehl
Human civilization has been changing the Earths environment for millennia, often to our detriment. Dams, deforestation and urbanization can alter water cycles and wind patterns, occasionally triggering droughts or even creating deserts. — Jamais Cascio
Don't dig up in doubt what you planted in faith.
Unlike a child in a totally urban environment, my friends and peer group were not only other children, but also wild and domesticated animals, plants of every sort, brooks and waterfalls, rocks and sand. — Freeman Patterson
There's an aesthetic theme, which is cities at two o'clock in the morning. Not cities packed with people going out to clubs and dancing but desolate, empty streets. It's off-putting but there's a strange comfort to it as well, that desolate urban environment. — Moby
I wanted to improve the suburban office building; to create a great urban space in a suburban environment with all that implies about interaction, collaboration and creativity. — Helmut Jahn
Although you should respect venomous snakes and approach them with caution, most snakes you encounter in an urban environment are harmless and beneficial because they eat insects, mice and other rodents. — Robert Pierce
The dining room is a building; the bathroom is a building. If we scatter this single-program architecture inside of a domestic environment, we can link an interior urbanism in a way similar to a village or a township of tiny houses. — Jimenez Lai
The jarring change going from an urban environment to an extremely remote natural environment is extremely inspiring. It's constantly stimulating, it's like a slap in the face. — Carter Burwell
Urban Quotes
History shows that male homosexuality, which like prostitution flourishes with urbanization and soon becomes predictably ritualized, always tends toward decadence. — Camille Paglia
Do not try to make circumstances fit your plans. Make plans that fit the circumstances. — George S. Patton
The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. — David Harvey
You don't always need a plan. Sometimes you just need to breathe, trust, let go and see what happens.
All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization.... Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitantsdo not live in their city; they merely inhabit it. — Aldous Huxley
If the Chinese population were to be given a free vote, the unity of the Han might begin to crack, or, more likely, the countryside and urban areas would come into conflict. — Tim Marshall
I live a very quiet life, although I'm very urban and a diehard New Yorker — Armand Assante
San Francisco lags behind other communities in providing a vital, vibrant and ecologically sustainable urban canopy, as well as open space in the city. — Gavin Newsom
Gang violence in America is not a sudden problem. It has been a part of urban life for years, offering an aggressive definition and identity to those seeking a place to belong in the chaos of large metropolitan areas. — Dave Reichert
I am a person that believes in different emotions with music. Music can bring about different vibes on the field, off the field, urban life, going to church, leaving church. Everything the world may bring, there's a song for it to put you in the right frame of mind. — Cam Newton
People who live in SoHo want to be close to the energy, culture, and eccentricities of New York's most charming neighborhoods. — Jared Kushner
Urban Areas Quotes
Urban legend has it that Area 51 is connected by underground tunnels and trains to other secret facilities around the country. — Annie Jacobsen
Meth is a major problem not only in our urban areas, but in most of the rural areas of Colorado. No region has been immune from this scourge and it is getting larger. — Ken Salazar
Strengthen the rural areas and you will find less people migrating to urban areas. You give them opportunity, self respect & self confidence, they will never go to an urban slum. — Bunker Roy
However, don't let these statistics mislead you, gang violence is not limited to California and or big urban areas - that might have been true a while ago but it is no longer the case today. — Bob Filner
The premature migration of very large numbers of people from rural areas to urban areas can give rise to a lot of strains to the urban infrastructure, which can also create problems of crime - law-and-order problems. — Manmohan Singh
Because they [Americans] want to be thought of as a rich nation, they are very ashamed of this place [Appalachia] that has come to represent poverty, even though poverty exists all over the country, and exists as much in urban areas as it does in rural, if not more. — Silas House
Blade Runner appears regularly, two or three times a year in various shapes and forms of science fiction. It set the pace for what is essentially urban science fiction, urban future and it's why I've never re-visited that area because I feel I've done it. — Ridley Scott
I don't write police stories, per se, but I usually write about areas that are very panoramic, like Harlem, or the Lower East Side, or a small urban city like Jersey City. — Richard Price
Many health care providers, particularly physicians in rural and urban areas, are leaving the Government programs because of inadequate reimbursement rates. — Ron Wyden
The disadvantages of a decentralized, spread out urban area are tremendous, and the environmental damage of urban sprawl cannot be ignored. As a large city, Tokyo must be used more efficiently and the population density increased. — Minoru Mori
Urban Life Quotes
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. — James Howard Kunstler
Europe is a very different place from my native country of Colombia and my children are growing up in a very urban setting which is nothing like when I was growing up and would be able to play barefoot in the street. But we have a very good life. — Shakira
Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door. — Charles Lamb
I probably lead a very spoiled life, because I travel from people interested in permaculture to people interested in permaculture. Some of them are tribal, and some of them are urban, and so on. — Bill Mollison
Cities all over the world are getting bigger as more and more people move from rural to urban sites, but that has created enormous problems with respect to environmental pollution and the general quality of life. — Alan Dundes
In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion. — Jane Smiley
I'm a kid from New York, so urban life reflected into art and music was around me and accessible and tangible. — Zoe Saldana
the search for the ultimate skyscraper goes on. ... At worst, overbuilding will make urban life unbearable. At best, we will go out in a blaze of style. — Ada Louise Huxtable
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. — Gil J Wolman
And it would be a spare life he would be certain to lead as a schoolteacher in some urban location. But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by. — Michael Ondaatje
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. — John Prebble
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! — Richard Carson
Poor planning or poor execution of plans is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality. — Robert McNamara
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
Nothing's dangerous if you know what you're doing. — Johnny Unitas
A thousand policemen directing traffic cannot tell you why you come or where you go. — T. S. Eliot
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. — Frank Lloyd Wright
Those who plan do better than those who do not plan, even should they rarely stick to their plan. — Winston Churchill
If a policeman must know the Constitution, then why not a planner? — William J. Brennan
The suburb is a place where someone cuts down all the trees to build houses, and then names the streets after the trees. — Bill Vaughan
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
There's a simple solution to our traffic problems. We'll have business build the roads, and government build the cars. — Will Rogers
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
A noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die. — Daniel Burnham
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. — Francis Cornford
Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television. — William Gibson
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
This country is so urbanized we think low-fat milk comes from cows on Nutri/System weight-loss plans. — P. J. O'Rourke
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. — Don Kardong
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. — Bob Chiarelli
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. — Urie Bronfenbrenner
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
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
In Conclusion
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