30 Quotes About Urbanism

I delve into the mysterious and counterintuitive world of helmets and high-visibility gear later in the book. But it's worth immediately noting this: while they're not inherently bad, they're less a safety device for cycling than a symptom of a road network where no cyclist can truly feel safe.

If modern environmentalism continue on the current path of wilding the city, future urban dwellers might as well live in tree houses, for all the difference it will make.

And the space created by capital is a very seductive space indeed— provided you have the money.

By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.

Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilderness brings the city within view, but not within reach, of most Brazilian subsistence farmers. The new expressway expands Chicago, but it sucks those who are well-wheeled away from a downtown that decays into a ghetto.

You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. 'Artist's conceptions' and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse surroundings have the practical power of inducing a natural, continuing flow of life and use.

I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.

No neighbourhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity.

Assim, a integração e a participação são a obsessão dos não-participantes, daqueles que sobrevivem entre os fragmentos da sociedade possível e das ruínas do passado: excluídos da cidade, às portas do urbano […]