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Quote by Enrique Penalosa

“The importance of pedestrian public spaces cannot be measured, but most other important things in life cannot be measured either: Friendship, beauty, love and loyalty are examples. Parks and other pedestrian places are essential to a city's happiness.”

Quote by Enrique Penalosa

Author

Enrique Penalosa

Enrique Penalosa is a Colombian politician who served as the Mayor of Bogotá. During his tenure, he implemented significant reforms in urban transportation and infrastructure, and is recognized as a pioneer in urban planning and sustainable development. more

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“God made us walking animals - pedestrians. As a fish needs to swim, a bird to fly, a deer to run, we need to walk, not in order to survive, but to be happy.”

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“A premise of the new city is that we want a society to be as egalitarian as possible. For this purpose, quality-of-life distribution is more important than income distribution. [And quality of life includes] a living environment as free of motor vehicles as possible.”

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“Public space is for living, doing business, kissing, and playing. Its value can't be measured with economics or mathematics; it must be felt with the soul.”

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“We had to build a city not for businesses or automobiles, but for children and thus for people. Instead of building highways, we restricted car use. We invested in high-quality sidewalks, pedestrian streets, parks, bicycle paths, libraries; we got rid of thousands of cluttering commercial signs and planted trees. All our everyday efforts have one objective: Happiness.”

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“A bikeway is a symbol that shows that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally important as a citizen on a $30,000 car.”

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“Children are a kind of indicator species. If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people.”

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Author:Enrique Penalosa

“We need to walk, just as birds need to fly. We need to be around other people. We need beauty. We need contact with nature. And most of all, we need not to be excluded. We need to feel some sort of equality.”

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Author:Enrique Penalosa

“Urban transport is a political and not a technical issue. The technical aspects are very simple. The difficult decisions relate to who is going to benefit from the models adopted.”

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“In Bogotá, our goal was to make a city for all the children. The measure of a good city is one where a child on a tricycle or bicycle can safely go anywhere. If a city is good for children, it will be good for everybody else. Over the last 80 years we have been making cities much more for cars' mobility than for children’s happiness.”

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Author:Enrique Penalosa

“The essence of the conflict today, really, is cars versus people…We can have a city that is very friendly to cars, or a city that is very friendly to people. We cannot have both.”

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Author:Enrique Penalosa