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Quote by Ben Aaronovitch

“Archway is where the post-war dream of the urban motorway died in the teeth of local opposition and the inability of the designers to answer basic traffic management questions.”

Book:The Hanging Tree

Work

The Hanging Tree

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Author

Ben Aaronovitch

Ben Aaronovitch, born in 1964, is a renowned British author known for his unique blend of fantasy and crime novels. His works have gained popularity among readers worldwide. more

“Public housing must not always represent the barest minimum of design consideration. Ask where the architect, contractor, administrator and legislator live? It will not be in public housing. Ask them if they would want to live in the complex they just created? The truthful answer will be “no way”. Until what is built is desirable and available to everyone, the future of of public housing will remain a marginal investment at best and an environmental crime at worst.”

Design Architecture Urban Planning

Book:Indianapolis Architecture

Source: Indianapolis Architecture

“Miserabilism leads to a mixture of indifference towards the past and hatred of it. This hatred is visible in the architecture and urban planning of Europe since the war. [...] This mania for destruction, often carried out in lesser degrees by the strategic placement of a terrible building that the eye cannot escape (the Tour Montparnasse in Paris is a particularly fine example of the genre), is a symptom of an impotent rage that Europe has been left behind, is not longer in the vanguard of anything. It is also a kind of magical thinking: that by adopting the externals of modernity somehow modernity itself will be achieved and mastered.”

Modernism Urban Planning Modern Architecture

Book:The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism

Source: The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism

“Cities are not only a place where we live but also a place where humanity evolves.”

Humanity And Society City Urban Planning Urbanism Cities Quotes

Author:Planners Realm

“When we aren’t aiming to be either precise or conclusive, it can be easy to agree on what a beautiful man-made place might look like. Attempts to name the world’s most attractive cities tend to settle on some familiar locations: Edinburgh, Paris, Rome, San Francisco. A case will occasionally be made for Siena or Sydney. Someone may bring up St Petersburg or Salamanca. Further evidence of our congruent tastes can be found in the patterns of our holiday migrations. Few people opt to spend the summer in Milton Keynes or Frankfurt. Nevertheless, our intuitions about attractive architecture have always proved of negligible use in generating satisfactory laws of beauty. We might expect that it would, by now, have grown as easy to reproduce a city with the appeal of Bath as it is to manufacture consistent quantities of blueberry jam. If humans were at some point adept at creating a masterwork of urban design, it should have come within the grasp of all succeeding generations to contrive an equally successful environment at will. There ought to be no need to pay homage to a city as to a rare creature; its virtues should be readily fitted to the development of any new piece of meadow or scrubland. There should be no need to focus our energies on preservation and restoration, disciplines which thrive on our fears of our own ineptitude. We should not have to feel alarmed by the waters that lap threateningly against Venice’s shoreline. We should have the confidence to surrender the aristocratic palaces to the sea, knowing that we could at any point create new edifices that would rival the old stones in beauty.”