30 Quotes About Urbanism

Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything--certainly not one with much downtown diversity.

Construction is the art of making a meaningful whole out of many parts. Buildings are witnesses to the human ability to construct concrete things. I believe that the real core of all architectural work lies in the act of construction. At the point in time concrete materials are assembled and erected, the architecture we have been looking for becomes part of the real world.

Brutalist architecture was Modernism's angry underside, and was never, much as some would rather it were, a mere aesthetic style. It was a political aesthetic, an attitude, a weapon, dedicated to the precept that nothing was too good for ordinary people. Now, after decades of neglect, it's devided between 'eyesores' and 'icons'; fine for the Barbican's stockbrokers but unacceptable for the ordinary people who were always its intended clients.

Architecture and urban design, both in their formal and spatial aspects, are seen as fundamentally configurational in that the way the parts are put together to form the whole is more important than any of the parts taken in isolation.

Plenty of people advocate for sustainability systems like bike infrastructure without considering the racism and wealth inequality embedded in how we plan and use urban space.

But ideal cities are very much the product of their own ages. Designed as complete urban statements, they bear the unmistakable imprint of their own culture and world view in every street and building. And yet to be successful a city has to be open to continuous development, free to evolve and grow with the demands of new times. Like science fiction accounts of the future, ideal cities quickly become outmoded.

The development of an informal public life depends people finding and enjoying one another outside the cash nexus.

Rendons la ville aux gens, ils sauront quoi en faire.

A walkable community has to have useful things for people to walk to.